If History Is Over, What's To Debate?

Ellen Willis writes:

A subset of the media-critical commonplace that news and entertainment have merged is the idea that presidential debates are show business, that their format inherently precludes their being a source of useful information about the candidates. I've never agreed with this idea. To begin with, the debates are hardly guaranteed to be fun. Surely even the most die-hard advocate of the news- (especially TV news) equals-entertainment analysis has to admit that if show business were really like the Gore-Bush debates the industry would be in deep doo-doo. Nothing but a grim sense of professional duty could have induced me to stick around for what felt like eight hours or so of Debate #2 between Tweedledum and Tweedledumber. For politics as entertainment, give me Abbie Hoffman any day.

I also think candidates' rhetoric, facial expressions, body language, mistakes, blurts, silences and so on convey a good deal of information: the Kennedy-Nixon debate, for example, displayed Kennedy's most important strength, which had nothing to do with policy and everything to do with a youthful energy and dynamism that contributed to the changing the cultural climate in the early '60s. Nowadays, the information the debates reveal is more likely to be "useful" in the sense that the Chinese curse wishes on us times that are "interesting." In the case of Gore vs. Bush, the debates presented an accurate picture of what elections are about when the whole realm of the political has been reduced to a historical footnote in a text about the end of history and the ineluctable triumph of global capital. The exclusion of Nader and Buchanan mirrored the ongoing exclusion from the national conversation of any ideas that deviate from the corporate common sense: that it is not our political will that governs our lives but the supposedly apolitical (and fundamentally benign) workings of the market. Even our deep cultural conflicts have now apparently given way to consensus: family and religion good, crime bad; American people good, their popular culture bad.

I don't mean that there is literally no difference between the parties. There are significant programmatic differences. But because of the shared framework of assumptions and narrow boundaries of permissible thought that constrain the candidates — or rather, restrict the range of candidates eligible to make it to the podium in the first place — the differences cannot be debated in any meaningful way. In opposing the privatization of Social Security, Gore can't say that depending on the vagaries of the stock market to provide reliable retirement income is insane; in opposing huge tax cuts for the wealthy one per cent he can't say that there is something wrong with a social system that allows such huge disparities of wealth in the first place; on abortion he can't say that women have a right to sexual freedom. (Nor, of course, would he even want to say such things; but neither would it do to come out with the real reasons that vestiges of economic and social liberalism remain on the Democrats' agenda: they have to offer something to a large part of the party's constituency; they believe that social stability requires corporatism with a human face; and they recognize that a modern market-oriented society is incompatible with heavy-handed state imposition of patriarchal morality.) Bush, for his part, can't say that he basically agrees with the Christian right's social program, or that untrammeled corporate power and economic inequality are good for the country.

If we want real debate, with real stakes, we have to have real opposition. It is insurgent social movements that give vitality to electoral politics, not, as so many people seem to think, vice versa. Similarly, it is not Supreme Court decisions like Roe v. Wade or laws regulating labor relations that give us rights, but militant freedom movements that influence the thinking of courts and legislatures — and demand that favorable decisions and laws be enforced. When a critical mass of people catches on that the end of history is a corporate shuck, that it's our own collective action, not "the laws of the market," that determines whether and how history is made, American politics will come alive again; and with any luck it will be entertaining, too.

- Ellen Willis is a cultural critic whose latest book is "Don't Think, Smile! Notes on a Decade of Denial." She directs the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at New York University.