The Potemkin Debate

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, September 28, 2023

 

The Republican debates increasingly feel like a Potemkin village built to impress conservatives who might otherwise be prepared to leave the party.

 

Do you despair that there’s no room for you on the American right as it becomes more Orbánist and less Reaganite? Well, here’s Nikki Haley to prove you wrong. And Mike Pence. And Tim Scott! And Chris Christie!

 

Even the most hopeless no-hoper, Doug Whatsisname, sounded like an old-school Republican on Wednesday night.

 

The right’s huge populist, postliberal bloc was reduced to two representatives onstage, neither of whom is terribly likable or speaks for them with real authority. Vivek Ramaswamy took the opportunity to try to rebrand as a humble novice who respects his opponents after his arrogance at the first debate alienated everyone. 

 

But it didn’t go well. “Every time I hear you, I feel a little bit dumber,” Nikki Haley told him at one point, an enjoyable burn that obscures the fact that Ramaswamy is far more in tune with the zeitgeist of the American right than Haley is.

 

The other populist onstage, Ron DeSantis, was … fine, although he was prone to leveling conservative critiques alongside populist ones. At one point he scolded the frontrunner for declining to show up and defend the $7.8 trillion in new debt that accrued during his presidency. He also challenged him on abortion, daring him to attend the next debate and look pro-life viewers in the eye when he stoops to calling Florida’s six-week ban a “terrible thing.”

 

If his goal was to avoid major mistakes and cling to his tenuous second-place status as anti-Trump voters search for a champion before Iowa, I suppose he succeeded. The Bulwark’s Sonny Bunch put it well: “DeSantis is doing a great job of protecting his 30-point deficit.”

 

Logistically the debate was a fiasco due to endless cross-talk among the candidates and moderators who couldn’t or wouldn’t assert control. But substantively it was a good night for conservatives—on Earth 2, where the right still believes in classical liberalism and will select its presidential nominee from a pool of candidates who believe in it too. Even the setting, the Reagan Presidential Library, seemed apropos.

 

Here on Earth 1, though, where the absent authoritarian leads in national polling by more than 40 points, it was “a mass delusion,” writes Jonathan Last, “a large group of people simultaneously subscribing to an imaginary version of reality,”

 

That’s the point of a Potemkin village, isn’t it? It’s a subterfuge designed to convince an audience that things are better than they really are.

 

***

 

There was a way this debate could have been interesting-ish.

 

Fox Business, which hosted it, could have zeroed in on the differences between the GOP as it is and the GOP as it would like traditional conservatives and swing voters to perceive it.

 

How do “law and order” Republicans reconcile themselves to a nominee who’s under four indictments and has vowed to pardon people who attacked the Capitol? How do pro-life Republicans move forward if the party nominates someone eager to make a deal with the left that would assuredly leave the vast majority of abortions legal? What should right-wing hawks do if that nominee ends up vowing to withdraw from NATO?

 

Are there any red lines for conservatives which, if crossed, would cause their uneasy coalition with populists to rupture? If suggesting that the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff should be executed doesn’t cut it, what would?

 

How about the pointless government shutdown that the presumptive nominee has been cheering on in the corrupt hope that it’ll defund the Justice Department’s multiple cases against him? Any thoughts on that?

 

When one candidate is 40 points ahead, the only relevant questions for the rest of the field are how they disagree with him and whether he’s fit for office. If, as is true in this case, the frontrunner differs meaningfully with most of his opponents on ideology as well, a thoughtful debate would focus laser-like on exploring those differences.

 

We didn’t get much of that on Wednesday night. What we got was something that felt ripped from 2015, drilling down on predictable policy disagreements with a Democratic president and marginal policy disagreements among most of the candidates. In many cases the consensus onstage diverged sharply from the consensus among grassroots Republican voters, an incongruity that led former DeSantis staffer (and former Dispatch intern) Nate Hochman to marvel: 

Imagine wasting time at a Republican debate in 2023 on two old-school conservatives squabbling over spending while the guy who’s 40 points ahead is off vowing to use executive power to exact “retribution” on his political enemies. Somehow, we don’t need to imagine it.

 

Increasingly I think wasting time is the point of these events.

 

I won’t be so conspiratorial as to accuse Fox of deliberately trying to help Trump by steering the debates toward subjects that can’t hurt him. My guess is that the Potemkin village of normalcy they’ve built with these events is as much an attempt to reassure themselves that the balance of power within the GOP hasn’t shifted over time as it is to reassure normie voters. To watch Nikki Haley and Tim Scott argue over the national debt is to be transported to a golden pre-Trump era when Fox News wasn’t being outflanked on the right by lunatic populist mega-sites and top-tier Republican candidates weren’t competing to prove who’d be more aggressive in trying to overturn the liberal order. 

 

An era when, in Hochman’s words, the “non-neoconservative right” that appreciates a little Sonnenrad iconography in its campaign ads were still truly “outsiders.”

 

They’re not outsiders anymore. Donald Trump defines the de facto establishment in his party more comprehensively than any politician in modern American history. But it’s in everyone’s interest to pretend otherwise: Conservatives who are uncomfortable with his leadership get to pretend that figures like Haley and Scott still wield meaningful influence within the party while populists who are uncomfortable with their new establishment status get to pretend they’re still insurgents being suppressed by a cabal of Republican elites.

 

And all sides of the party get to pretend that it stands for something on policy more thoughtful and principled than “whatever best serves Donald Trump’s political needs at any given moment.”

 

Rachel Maddow captured the unreality of Wednesday’s spectacle efficiently:

 

The Republican electorate has effectively decided they don’t really want to do politics anymore. And they’re not all that interested in what politics is, and governing, and political campaigning, and policy competition, and all that stuff. They’re not interested in it. They would prefer to have a strongman, a particular strongman who they already know and like, and prefer to have that. And that is what they want instead of politics.

 

So you get all these other candidates up there and they’re having a political fight, they are talking about politics, and they are behaving like politicians whether or not they have been politicians before, but they are doing politics. And the Republican Party says no to all of them, almost in equal measure, because they prefer a strongman who is going to end politics, and do something that is not about democratic political competition.

 

That’s correct—with the caveat that it’s strongly in the GOP’s electoral interest to pretend that it’s still in the business of doing politics. “Let’s elect a strongman who’ll end all this democratic messiness” isn’t a winning message with swing voters even at this late stage of American civic decline, I suspect. Republicans need something they can point to as proof that they’re still a basically normal party doing democratic politics in basically normal ways, not a personality cult so far gone in its devotion that it believes the term “person of faith” better describes Donald Trump than Tim Scott or Mitt Romney.

 

So they’re holding debates. If you’re worried that the lunatics have taken over the asylum, tune in for two hours to watch Mike Pence and Chris Christie calmly debate non-discretionary spending and let your troubles melt away.

 

These pageants have been so useful to the GOP in communicating a phony sense of normalcy, in fact, that I am a little conspiratorial about the recently announced rules for the third debate on November 8. A serious party would be keen to winnow the field as fall turns to winter, knowing that the Iowa caucus isn’t far away. November should be a time for sending the no-hopers packing and putting the spotlight on the top tier (of, er, also-rans). A polling threshold of, say, 8 to 10 percent in multiple surveys would make sense.

 

Instead the threshold for the third debate will be a measly 4 percent, low enough that we might see the entire gang from Wednesday night back again in November (minus Doug Burgum, in all probability). That serves Trump’s needs, as a big divided field means the anti-Trump vote will remain splintered. But it also serves the institutional GOP’s needs: The more old-school conservatives there are onstage, the greater the false impression of normalcy left on undecided voters will be.

 

It’s a game. The final question posed to the candidates on Wednesday night—”So which one of you onstage tonight should be voted off the island?” a la Survivor— slyly acknowledged as much.

 

The question is how soon the game will be over.

 

***

 

I agree with Mark Antonio Wright that insofar as there was a “winner” on Wednesday, it was Haley. It’s not what she said so much as how she said it, a dynamic from which Trump himself famously benefits.

 

A conservative voter might prefer Pence or Scott or even DeSantis on particular policies, but Haley has proved repeatedly now that she’s the most effective debater of the bunch. She knows her stuff, she’s likably cool under pressure, and she’s willing (even eager!) to fight with opponents—at least those whose names don’t rhyme with “Ronald Grump.”

 

Populists aren’t the only ones who appreciate a “fighter” for their cause. Having twice watched Haley rhetorically pummel Ramaswamy, old-school Republicans desperate for an alternative to the frontrunner and disappointed for myriad reasons in DeSantis might logically gravitate toward her at this point. As Sarah Longwell once said, she’s the perfect candidate—for 2015.

 

Which might be enough to help her break from the pack and emerge as the clear second-place alternative to you-know-who, a mere 30-40 points behind.

 

So as much as Trump might be fine with more debates among a large field in which multiple candidates are stuck in the mud at around 10 percent, he would not want further debates if a breakout candidate might potentially exploit them to push herself higher in the polls.

 

Lo and behold, as of Thursday morning, he’s decided that the party has had enough of debating and that it’s time to unite behind the frontrunner.

 

“They have to stop the debates. Because it is just bad for the Republican Party. They are not going anywhere. There is not going to be a breakout candidate,” Trump said, before saying who he thought performed best in the second presidential debate.

 

“I am very concerned about the RNC not being able to do their job,” Trump added.

 

I’ve been expecting that. In fact, I thought Team Trump would demand an end to the debates after the first one last month, hoping to short-circuit whatever chance still remains for Ron DeSantis to regain some momentum.

 

Halting the democratic process prematurely while Trump is ahead is something of a trademark of his, you know.

 

Normally his lackeys at the RNC would do his bidding, but in this case I suspect they’ll resist and keep the debates going. Sure, Republican voters have lost interest. And sure, giving Haley more nationally televised soapboxes to try to consolidate the conservative vote risks polarizing the party’s two wings ahead of a general election.

 

But they’re getting value out of these Potemkin villages, as I’ve said. And Nikki Haley, for all her ideological virtues, plainly lacks the courage to lead a Reaganite revolt against Trump that would cause an abiding schism in the GOP. Her entire political project since 2015 has been carefully managed to put some distance between her and the authoritarian-in-chief but never too much.

 

I can imagine her throwing roundhouses at Trump if they end up on a debate stage together, just in case there’s some faint, hypothetical path to victory for her out there. Yet I can also imagine her reconciling with him effusively once she’s been vanquished and promptly calling on all wings of the party to come together to elect him to a second term.

 

The story of Nikki Haley’s surge in the polls (assuming it’s real and that it endures) doesn’t end with some Romney-esque crisis of conscience about whether she can remain in a party that no longer believes in classical liberalism. It ends with her excitedly accepting the vice presidential nomination and symbolically bestowing the Reaganite seal of approval on what the GOP has become. Just like Mike Pence did before her.

 

If the last eight years have taught us anything, it’s that institutional conservatism was itself a Potemkin village. Ideological conservatism is real; The Dispatch exists for a reason. But those like the GOP who adopted it as an institutional identity went from self-appointed sentinels of the Constitution in 2011 to cheerleaders for a coup plot 10 years later. It’s impossible to look back at the American right of the Tea Party era from the vantage point of 2023 and not think that most of what they claimed to believe was just a pleasant subterfuge obscuring something darker.

 

Nikki Haley is an ideological conservative and an institutional conservative. If she’s forced to choose between the two by an offer from Donald Trump to become his running mate, there’s little doubt what she’ll do. She’s a perfect Republican for this era.