Both frontrunner GOP candidates spent much of last night’s debate being indefatigably disagreeable.
One of the more revealing exchanges in a debate that could have been far more illuminating than it was surrounded the claim that displays of empathy for George Floyd and the Americans who reacted with horror to his arrest-related killing are guilty of advantage-seeking insincerity.
That was the charge Ron DeSantis levied against Nikki Haley. He pivoted off a message she put out shortly after Floyd’s death, in which she called the traumatic footage of his slaying “personal and painful for every American,” to attack her hollow sanctimony.
Haley’s remarks lent credence to the framework that would later yield “the worst rioting in the modern history of this country,” the governor insisted. “People in Iowa had nothing to do with that or Florida or South Carolina,” DeSantis added, rejecting the notion that “every American” was obliged to feel anything at all in response to what a jury later determined was a murder. “She was virtue-signaling to the left. She was accepting the narrative, and she was trying to impress people who are never going to like us.”
If Haley was merely pandering to the Left, it was the sort of pandering to which DeSantis was equally inclined. Shortly after the debate, the Haley campaign resurfaced footage of the Florida governor relating how “appalled” he was to watch the “video of that cop murdering George Floyd.” The governor called for “accountability” for the offending officer and anyone else who applied the “intolerable” tactics that led to this incident. It’s an exercise in retroactive conditioning to contend that these sentiments or the sympathy Haley expressed at the time of Floyd’s murder were in any way remarkable. They weren’t.
This isn’t the first time the DeSantis campaign has tried to retroactively transform banal expressions of sympathy and commiseration into political liabilities. Both the Florida governor and Donald Trump’s campaign made hay of Haley’s suggestion that the tone of American political discourse would improve if advocates for the stricter enforcement of immigration law nevertheless acknowledged the heartrending motives that drive people to seek a new life in an unfamiliar country. “We don’t need to be disrespectful,” she once said. “We don’t need to talk about them as criminals.”
Of course, by definition, they are criminals, as Haley’s opponents are quick to note. But she is guilty of more than a mere category error. Her competitors imply — they can only imply — that Haley has exposed her soft underbelly with these comments. They suggest that her commitment to enforcing border security would be halfhearted, if only because she’s not going to be visibly angry while doing so.
In a time before Trump, neither of Haley’s cosmetic rhetorical flourishes would be considered especially newsworthy. They were once regarded as the kind of low-stakes table-setting that serves as the price of admission into a national conversation, in which its participants seek to establish the broadest terms of agreement before introducing more contentious claims. Post-Trump, however, treacly sentimentality is regarded by Republicans as weakness. They betray a suspicious desire in their proponents to be liked — heaven forbid — by the largest possible audience. They are conciliatory supplications before the Left’s self-appointed arbiters of American discourse, evidence that their expositors don’t “know what time it is.”
But gratuitous churlishness is only the most theatrical and cosmetic evidence of commitment to a cause. They reveal nothing much about those who adopt that posture save that they think theater and cosmetics are sufficient to satisfy their supporters. Basic decency of the sort that disarms one’s political opponents, even briefly, is a reliable way to get people who aren’t predisposed to agree with you to at least hear you out. Being combative for combativeness’s sake satisfies only the fraction of Americans for whom anger is life-giving, but those are hardened partisans immune to persuasion. Successful politicians persuade. Failures pound the table.
It costs a public figure nothing to be personable. It does not at all detract from a politician’s policy preferences if those preferences are packaged in superficial expressions of empathy. Striving to build the broadest possible coalition isn’t a mark of shame — it’s how political movements triumph. Calling George Floyd’s murder a tragedy does not translate into support for the violence that rocked American cities in the summer of 2020. If it did, much of the American political class — Trump included — would share some responsibility for that national spasm of demonic brutality. That is an insane proposition. Of course, the blame for that violence falls only on its executors and the municipal officials who allowed it to happen.
Both candidates spent much of last night’s debate being indefatigably disagreeable. They seem to have been operating on the assumption that exposing their capacity for human understanding would be regarded as a defect by the voters to whom they’re appealing. If Donald Trump’s presidency was any indication, that is how many Republican voters see it. And if the way in which Trump’s presidency ended is similarly indicative, most everyone else disagrees.