Democratic Vistas

Weeks before the first presidential debate of 2012, pundits were saying that debates rarely matter. Of course, they always mention a few exceptions—the Kennedy/Nixon debates of 1960 (Nixon blended into the background, he didn’t wear makeup, he had beads of sweat on his upper lip, etc.), the Carter/Ford debate of 1976 (Ford made one significant slip when he said that Eastern Europe wasn’t dominated by the Soviet Union), and the Reagan/Carter debates of 1980 (when Reagan came across as both presidential and fatherly).

Then, after Obama’s poor performance in Denver, debates seemed to matter again. Romney seemed surprisingly presidential, and the president seemed disappointingly like Romney. Or, at least, like we thought Romney would come across.

Maybe the debates don’t matter and do matter at the same time, in different ways. I am going to explain this with a little help from phenomenology.

Phenomenology began with Kant’s “Copernican revolution” in philosophy. Kant argued that we cannot know the “thing-in-itself,” that is, how the “thing” is apart from our perceptions. What we can know, and this is the basis of phenomenology, is how we perceive the “thing,” that is, we can understand consciousness. So, philosophy shifted from discussions of “the truth of physical reality” to the “truth of how we perceive reality.”

Please, forgive the four sentence summary of phenomenology. I needed to establish a ground for the point that I wish to make about debates: maybe debates don’t matter, maybe we are even at a point in the development of mass media and social networking that we cannot even know what actually happens in a “debate-in-itself.” All we can know is how the debates are treated in media (not just cable news shows but also Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and text messages from our friends), that is, our public—and publicly constructed—consciousness of the debate. Maybe our mass consciousness (a product of our over-abundance of media) does matter.

Weeks before the first presidential debates of 2012, pundits argued about who would win, who had the edge, what each candidate would say. Ten minutes into it, Twitter was awash of comments like “What’s wrong with Obama?” Within seconds of the debate’s conclusion, the pundits joined in.

It is possible to argue that this is participatory democracy—everyone is allowed to speak, everyone has a chance to influence the spin of a debate.  But nothing about this process feels right. Even spending a few minutes on Twitter before, during, or after a debate makes me want to take a shower.

In an era saturated with media, we have more information, not more knowledge.  We also have faster information, without time for reflection. Anything approaching an extended argument is obscured. Walter Benjamin predicted much of this in “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” an essay published in 1935.

In the second presidential debate of 2012, the town hall debate, Romney made his comment about “binders of women,” which went viral. The fact that it went viral might have, depending on your view, either obscured Romney’s good record of placing women into his cabinet when governor of Massachusetts or obscured other features of his answer, like his being proud of letting his female chief-of-staff off early to cook dinner for her family. The “binders of women” is much more suited to the mass media and social networking than the “debate-in-itself.”

In the same debate, Obama said that he called the attack on our embassy in Benghazi an act of terror. Romney thought he misspoke. Candy Crowley interrupted Romney to say that Obama was right. The entire issue of how the Obama administration handled the attack, an issue on which the president was vulnerable, was soon pushed aside by pro-Obama glee at Romney’s blunder and pro-Romney rage at Crowley’s apparent bias. The “debate-in-itself” disappeared.

So, here is how I would contextualize debates. The “debate-in-itself” is mattering less and less all the time. The phenomenology of debates is mattering more and more.