A Debate Without Class
A Debate Without Class
The debate may have helped Hillary Clinton’s chances in November. But if she truly wants to set the United States on a path toward greater economic equality, Clinton will have to put class politics front and center.
The most important thing that occurred last night was that Donald Trump lived up, or down, to the image most people following the campaign in the United States or elsewhere already had of him: a blustering, self-aggrandizing rich man who beams with contempt for anyone who criticizes him.
Trump is the nominee of a party which prides itself on its conservatism. But most conservatives believe in a set of ideas about how society should work, even if those of us on the left think those ideas, when put into practice, end up making societies less equal and ethical. Trump exposed his true identity as a performer in his own theater of cruelty: he repeats mendacious assertions and insults at escalating volume instead of making arguments based on ideas, backed up by facts.
Hillary Clinton’s best moments came when she found ways to goad Trump into showing the biggest audience of the campaign season what a reprehensible rich man he is: the exchange on his refusal to release his tax returns, for example. The Republican who boasts about his wealth and his many golf courses called himself “smart” for paying either few taxes or none at all. And this is a candidate whose only chance to be elected is to win a huge majority among white working-class voters!
But Clinton failed to press her advantage on the issue of class, perhaps the most consequential one dividing the major parties this year. As Gail Collins wrote in today’s New York Times, “The night was totally about Trump. Clinton is not a very interesting speaker, and her failure to say anything stupid made her side of the debate all the more unexciting.” The Democrat’s remarks about the economy mostly kept to the predictable patter of the career politician: “I want to invest in your future we need new jobs, good jobs, with rising incomes. I want us to invest in you. I want us to invest in your future. That means jobs in infrastructure, in advanced manufacturing, innovation and technology, clean, renewable energy, and small business, because most of the new jobs will come from small business.”
Clinton did mention, in passing, the failure of “trickle-down” economics, the need for a higher minimum wage, equal pay for women’s work, and “debt-free college.” But all that took up no more than ten seconds of time and failed to make it into the next day’s punditry.
She—and her fellow Democrats—will have to do better than that if they want to gain not just the votes but the allegiance of most of the Americans who, as Bill Clinton put it back in 1992, “work hard and play by the rules” and have less to show for it than they deserve. The debate may have made it more likely that a Democrat will continue to occupy the White House next year. But if Hillary Clinton truly wants to set the United States on a path toward greater economic equality, she will have to learn how to spend as much time preparing how to talk about achieving that end as she does showing what a despicable human being she is running against.
Michael Kazin is editor of Dissent.
