OUR DEMOCRACY'S NEW CLOTHES: Is our culture draped in a new suit of clothes?

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 2024

Pepperidge Farm remembers: Long ago and far away, Hans Christian Andersen blew the whistle on an emperor who was wearing a new suit of clothes.

There was an obvious problem with the ruler's new ensemble. But as Andersen capably reported, citizens of the empire in question seemed unable to spot the problem with their emperor's new suit of clothes.

(Something we were withholding made us weak, Robert Frost once alleged.)

Is it possible that we the people, right here in this country, are having a similar problem today? Is our public discourse—"our democracy," our political culture—possibly draped in a new suit of clothes? 

Is it possible that we the people have been unable to identify the major societal problem encased in this new suit of clothes? If Pepperidge Farm is allowed to remember, it seems that the answer is yes.

To what extent is our public discourse—including our political journalism—now draped in a new suit of clothes? Let's start by considering something Bret Stephens has said.

He makes the statement in this morning's New York Times, in this week's version of The Conversation. As always, his interlocutor is Gail Collins. Thinking back, and squinting a little, the gentleman posits this:

We Cannot Go On Like This

[...]

Bret: Thanks to YouTube, you can now go back and watch politicians from two or three generations ago discuss the issues of the day: For instance, Ronald Reagan debating George H.W. Bush on the subject of immigration—which they both favored—during the 1980 G.O.P. primary campaign, or Richard Nixon debating John F. Kennedy on foreign policy, or listening to Robert F. Kennedy reciting Aeschylus from memory in his heartbreaking eulogy for Martin Luther King Jr. They’re all Gullivers compared to today’s Lilliputians.

He says the pols were smarter then. Is this simply an angry dream? Or could this distant memory possibly be true?

He mentions the Kennedy-Nixon debates from the dawn of the modern era. Bringing Pepperidge Farm center stage, let's take a look at the record.

In The Making of The President 1960, Theodore White describes those famous debates. At one point, he describes the way the second debate ended, and the way the third began.

The issue he cites is now lost to the world. Below, we'll call your attention to the way the issue was discussed by the pair of hopefuls:

WHITE (page 290): ...The second |debate concerned itself with foreign policy and ranged from Cuba’s Castro through the U-2 and espionage to the matter of America’s declining prestige, and closed on the first sharp clash of the series—the defense of Quemoy and Matsu. 

The third debate resumed, like a needle stuck in a phonograph groove, with the subject of Quemoy and Matsu, hung there almost indefinitely, then broke away with Nixon’s stern disapproval of President Truman’s bad language, and went on to other matters such as bigotry, labor unions and gold outflow. This, according to all sample surveys, was Nixon’s best performance in terms of its impact on the audience... 

The third debate was Nixon's best. But on and on the hopefuls had gone, debating Quemoy and Matsu!

Those tiny islands are rarely mentioned today. At issue was this nation's willingness to defend "Formosa" (today's Taiwan) against the menace of China. 

As we've noted, White claimed that television's role in this campaign had dumbed the political discourse way, way down from where it had been in the past:

"Rarely in American history has there been a political campaign that discussed issues less or clarified them less."

That's what the gentleman said. In White's view, the candidates could offer "only a snatch of naked thought and a spatter of raw facts" in the measly two-and-a-half minutes allotted to them when they answered the moderators' questions at their four televised debates.

With that in mind, we thought we'd show you what Candidate Kennedy said about Quemoy and Matsu during the second debate. 

Warning! We're going to show you his full statement, as recorded in this transcript of that second debate. To watch the candidate making this statement, you can click right here.

Full disclosure:

Theodore White was very bright. In his opinion at that time, these debates were part of the dumbest public discussion to which we the people had ever been exposed in one of our White House campaigns. 

Edward Morgan of ABC News presented the question that night. The less experienced Candidate Kennedy pretty much took it from there:

MORGAN (10/7/60): Senator, Saturday on television you said that you had always thought that Quemoy and Matsu were unwise places to draw our defense line in the Far East. Would you comment further on that, and also address to this question: 

Couldn’t a pullback from those islands be interpreted as appeasement?

CANDIDATE KENNEDY: Well, the United States has on occasion attempted, mostly in the middle fifties, to persuade Chiang Kai-shek to pull his troops back to Formosa. I believe strongly in the defense of Formosa. 

These islands are a few miles—five or six miles—off the coast of Red China, within a general harbor area and more than a hundred miles from Formosa. We have never said flatly that we will defend Quemoy and Matsu if it’s attacked. We say we will defend it if it’s part of a general attack on Formosa. But it’s extremely difficult to make that judgment. 

Now Mr. Herter, in 1958, when he was Under Secretary of State, said they were strategically undefensible. Admirals Spruance and Callins in 1955 said that we should not attempt to defend these islands, in their conference in the Far East. General Ridgway has said the same thing. 

I believe that when you get into a war—if you’re going to get into war for the defense of Formosa, it ought to be on a clearly defined line. One of the problems, I think, at the time of South Korea was the question of whether the United States would defend it if it were attacked. I believe that we should defend Formosa. We should come to its defense. To leave this rather in the air, that we will defend it under some conditions but not under other, I think is a mistake. 

Secondly, I would not suggest the withdrawal at the point of the Communist gun. It is a decision finally that the Nationalists should make and I believe that we should consult with them and attempt to work out a plan by which the line is drawn at the island of Formosa. It leaves a hundred miles between the sea. But with General Ridgway, Mr. Herter, General Collins, Admiral Spruance and many others, I think it’s unwise to take the chance of being dragged into a war which may lead to a world war over two islands which are not strategically defensible, which are not, according to their testimony, essential to the defense of Formosa. 

I think that we should protect our commitments. I believe strongly we should do so in Berlin. I believe strongly we should do so in Formosa, and I believe we should meet our commitments to every country whose security we’ve guaranteed. But I do not believe that that line, in case of a war, should be drawn on those islands, but instead on the island of Formosa. And as long as they are not essential to the defense of Formosa, it’s been my judgment ever since 1954, at the time of the Eisenhower Doctrine for the Far East, that our line should be drawn in the sea around the island itself.

That was "the snatch of naked thought" Candidate Kennedy managed to cram into his meager few minutes of time. 

Candidate Nixon's response was equally littered with facts and with what seems to have been a perfectly logical analysis.

"I disagree completely with Senator Kennedy on this point," the candidate quickly said. On this special occasion, we're going to go ahead and show you what Nixon said:

CANDIDATE NIXON: I disagree completely with Senator Kennedy on this point. I remember in the period immediately before the Korean War, South Korea was supposed to be indefensible as well. Generals testified to that. And Secretary Acheson made a very famous speech at the Press Club, early in the year that the Korean War started, indicating in effect that South Korea was beyond the defense zone of the United States. 

I suppose it was hoped when he made that speech that we wouldn’t get into a war. But it didn’t mean that. We had to go in when they came in. 

Now I think as far as Quemoy and Matsu are concerned, that the question is not these two little pieces of real estate—they are unimportant. It isn’t the few people who live on them—they are not too important. It’s the principle involved. These two islands are in the area of freedom. The Nationalists have these two islands. We should not force our Nationalist allies to get off of them and give them to the Communists. If we do that we start a chain reaction; because the Communists aren’t after Quemoy and Matsu, they’re—they’re after Formosa. 

In my opinion, this is the same kind of woolly thinking that led to disaster for America in Korea. I am against it. I would never tolerate it as president of the United States, and I will hope that Senator Kennedy will change his mind if he should be elected.

So it went in that second debate. As White notes, the discussion of Quemoy and Matsu spilled over into the third.

At the time, Theodore White thought that these statements were part of the dumbest public discussion to which we the people had ever been exposed in a presidential campaign. 

It wasn't the candidates' fault, he said. He said they couldn't present the full sweep of their thinking in the tiny few minutes they had.

As a point of courtesy, we aren't going to post those presentations side-by-side the wide array of mumble-mouthed foofaw on display at last Tuesday's debate. 

In our view, one candidate embarrassed himself, again and again, with a wide array of baldly ridiculous statements. When his statements were questioned on four occasions by the debate's moderators, Red America's pundit class rose in fury to denounce what the obvious hacks from ABC News had done.

Full disclosure! The other candidate seemed to avoid several direct questions at that same debate. We'd score her first post-debate interview as a bit underwhelming too, though we're inclined to cut her some slack because of the "accidental" nature of her late-starting campaign.

For such reasons, Pepperidge Farm offers dark, mordant chuckles as it remembers that exchange about Quemoy and Matsu—and as it lets its thoughts drift back to what Theodore White said, in a famous book, about the dumbness of that year's political discussion.

Staring the obvious, our modern discourse is a clown show compared to what happened back then. Incredibly, each of those four debates attracted a viewership of 65 to 70 million people—at a time when the nation's entire population stood at just under 180 million.

Time was slower then, Harper Lee suggested in her own famous book. There was much less to do. The American public was even willing to sit through the long, stupendously dull ballet which ends An American in Paris.

We the people—even the men!—sat through that endless ballet. In Tinseltown, An American in Paris was awarded the Oscar for Best Picture in 1952!

Today, our discourse is decked in a new suit of clothes. The clownishness has crept in slowly, on little cats' feet, during a time when the cats and the dogs were still feeling safe.

The clownishness of our public discourse—of our gong-show political culture—has crept in on little cats' feet. This has possibly made our predicament perhaps a bit hard to see. 

It was less Lilliputian then, Stephens has said. Could it be that the Timesman is right?

Tomorrow: Fact-checks and clarifications