Debating Brazenness

If Trump can brazen is way through all of his various scandals why can't Biden brazen his way through this?

DALL·E 3 showing a young conflict theorist trying to snap a bunch of old mistake theorists out of their torpor.

I.

Many years ago, at the recommendation of my libertarian socialist son, I read The Chapo Guide to Revolution: A Manifesto Against Logic, Facts, and Reason. Chapo Trap House is a political podcast and the book is a distillation of the hosts’ political philosophy. (See my review here.) e Familiarity with the podcast is unnecessary, I only bring them up by way of attribution. Something they said in that book seems very relevant to the situation the Democrats now find themselves in. It’s an angle that hasn’t been touched on very much in all of the gloating and hand wringing that has taken place since the debate took place. 

What is Chapo’s pertinent observation? 

Their piercing insight? 

Their counsel during these troubled times?

They hate the TV show The West Wing (TWW).

The problem, as they tell it, is that TWW gave millions of Democrats a false impression of how politics works. It led them to believe that it’s a realm of reasonable debate and compromise between well-meaning individuals. Instead, they argue, this is not how politics works, particularly in the era of Trump. Politics is a brutal battle to the death against the forces of ignorance and villainy. And it should be waged in whatever fashion you can get away with. The biggest mistake you can make is to respond to the brazenness of Trump with an appeal to norms, the rule of law, or even reason. You have to match brazenness with brazenness. In their mind, Trump is going to do anything and everything he can get away with and you need to do the same. 

Chapo claims that, instead of doing this, Democrats keep imagining that they’re in an episode of TWW, where compromise can happen, intelligent discussion can occur, and reasonable people can calmly consider a change in direction. Therefore Biden’s current problems come from the fact that he, and Democrats more broadly, are following a script from TWW rather than meeting the brazeness of Trump with their own audacity.

Readers of Slate Star Codex/Astral Codex Ten might recognize this as the difference between conflict theory and mistake theory. Translating the above into this framework, the hosts of Chapo Trap House claim that we are in a conflict theory world, while the world of TWW is the world of mistake theory. 

In the former, disagreements represent sides in a battle between good and evil (or at least our team vs. their team) as old as time itself. 

In the latter, disagreements just represent mistaken beliefs which can be rectified with enough time and patience. 

So, how does this apply to the debate?

II.

Many months ago, long before all of this happened, one of my friends confidently predicted that Biden was going to win in November. Every time I checked in with him, regardless of what the polls said, he continued to believe Biden would emerge victorious. I expected that in the wake of the debate his response would be different. Certainly Biden’s debate performance must have shaken him, even if nothing had previously. Furthermore I expected that, like so many other people, he would now be hoping for Biden to get replaced. I was right that he was shaken. I was wrong that he wanted a replacement. This surprised me, and I had a hard time understanding how, as someone who HATES Trump, he could not be looking for the best possible chance to defeat him? Biden’s chances were looking bad before the debate, now they’re looking abysmal. 

He disagrees that there is anyone who could emerge from the chaos—which would necessarily accompany a last-minute replacement—who is guaranteed to outperform Biden. Fair enough I suppose, but that’s not his biggest issue. His primary complaint about things is that the Democrats (and those in the media who are anti-Trump) are behaving as mistake theorists when they should be behaving as conflict theorists. Apparently he had the same criticism as the Chapo guys. As you can imagine, my curiosity was piqued. 

In my friend’s estimation, if someone really wants to beat Trump, then they shouldn’t be talking about replacing Biden, they should be pretending that nothing is wrong. They should treat this as a temporary, isolated anomaly, and assert?/pretend?/demand? that everything is fine. Better than fine in fact. In short they should brazen their way past this incident. Pretend it never happened. And certainly they should not make excuses for it. This sounds completely implausible as a course of action to me, and he admitted as much, given what has happened. Nevertheless, he finds it very frustrating that Trump does this very thing all the time, and it always works.

I think there is a degree to which he overstates Trump’s shamelessness (and understates the complexity of what’s going on) but his point about the Democrats’ incoherent approach to things does have something to it. Trump’s various scandals have barely slowed him down, and arguably increased his appeal. Meanwhile, Biden’s missteps have cast the entire Democratic campaign for presidency into confusion and second guessing. Is this because Trump and his supporters are fully on board with conflict theory, while Team Biden (broadly constructed) is still living in the world of TWW and mistake theory? 

III.

While it may not be possible to brazen things out now, it could be argued that this was what was happening previous to the debate. Clearly there was some degree of brazenness (bullshit?) when you reflect on all of the people who said that Joe Biden was sharp as a tack, or that they could barely keep up with him. I’ve also heard reports that the White House was calling up any journalists who were reporting on worries about Biden’s mental acuity and letting them have it. So it’s not like there wasn’t some amount of brazenness going on. So why didn’t they just continue on that course? Why change tactics now? To be very pointed, why did the Biden team agree to the debate? 

This seems to have been the big misstep—it’s tough to bluster when you’re befuddled. By accepting the debate, they declined the opportunity to go full “conflict theory”.¹ A debate imagines that there are mistaken beliefs and that a debate can correct those beliefs. Sure, Trump and his allies would have made a lot of the fact that Biden refused to debate him. But I’m sure the Biden camp could have said something about how Trump is a convicted felon, or that to debate him is to give him a platform to lie, or something similar. If your only goal was to win, I think this would have worked better, particularly based on all of the things I just mentioned. The media did seem to be hewing pretty close to the “party line” that Biden was fine. I think they would have backed a “Trump doesn’t deserve to be debated” narrative.

Given this, why on earth did they agree to the debate? Did they not know what would happen? I should have pre-registered this prediction, but you’ll just have to take it on faith: Biden’s performance is exactly what I expected. And it’s not like I made some exhaustive study of things. I mostly just saw a few clips on the internet, like Biden reading things he shouldn’t from the teleprompter, or wandering off the stage looking confused. I was also familiar with the Hur Report, and I didn’t feel like Robert Hur had any incentive to lie. From this small slice of things I remember thinking, “How is Biden going to handle the debates? It seems clear he’s lost a step mentally, and if so that’s going to definitely emerge in a heated, extemporaneous format.” 

He did pretty well when he delivered the State of the Union Address, but those closest to him can’t be basing their debate decision off that one performance? Particularly given the differences between the two formats that I just mentioned. Surely people who are with him day in and day out had to have a better sense than anyone of his true condition. If anyone was going to understand the risk to Biden from the debate, it had to be them, right? How could they have been surprised? And yet it appears that they were. 

Beyond the question of why Biden and his advisors agreed to a debate at all, there is also the question of why they agreed to such an early debate? The official explanation was that with Biden slipping in the polls they wanted to get ahead of things—reassure people that Biden really was up to the job, while also reminding them of Trump’s bad behavior. When the timing was announced, many people floated an alternative explanation, that they scheduled it early so that if Biden did poorly there was still time to replace him. This made a lot of sense to me, but given the chaos that has accompanied just such a poor performance, it would not appear that this was the plan. 

IV.

The fact that they appear to have never considered the eventuality that Biden would be unable to debate and therefore unable to campaign, and something would need to be done, actually argues against the idea that they are primarily mistake theorists. Given the examples I’ve already offered of their brazenness, perhaps they’re conflict theorists, they’re just bad at it?

To get back to my friend’s original question, Trump has faced many broadly similar crises, and has always managed to brazen his way through them. Why could Biden not do the same? I think it comes down to three things:

First, Trump is a savant when it comes to this sort of thing. Perhaps it’s a bad thing to be a savant at, but that doesn’t change the fact that Trump is a once in a generation talent when it comes to brazenness. And I get why this would bother people, but I also get why this would be appealing to a lot of people as well. Arguably McCain, and Romney were both mistake theorists, and they lost. In part because they weren’t up to the kind of conflict that was obviously required. Trump didn’t lose, at least not in 2016, and it looks like he’s on track to not lose again. And that counts for a lot.

Second, as Ross Douthat pointed out recently, this situation is different. Nobody wanted Trump to be the candidate in 2016, just as no one wants Biden to be the candidate in 2024, and as Douthat points out: “Trump proved that nothing they did mattered so long as he refused to yield.” In other words he was able to brazen his way to the nomination and victory. Why can’t Biden do the same? Douthat offers up a few reasons why. To begin with, while both parties are weak, the Democrats are a little bit stronger, and that made the difference when it came to torpedoing Bernie Sanders, and it might make the difference here as well. 

Next, Douthat mentions that Democrats and Democrat-leaning voters care more about what the media thinks. Republicans and their allies have been distrustful of the media for decades, but the opposite is true of the Democrats. Not only do they trust the media more, but the fact that most of the major media outlets agreed with them on most issues has become part of their identity. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Douthat points out that when you consider Trump’s weaknesses in 2016, they were all things that could conceivably get better.

…he could hire better advisers, lay off social media, learn to discipline himself, grow into the role of presidential candidate or ultimately president…

With Biden’s condition, though, even the most ardent partisans have to know in their hearts that things will not get any better, that they can only deteriorate from here. Hoping for a moral breakthrough or a sudden discovery of personal discipline from a public figure is generally naïve. But hoping for a reversal of the aging process is a different level of delusion, a higher bar to clear.

This takes us to my third point, even if you imagine that brazenness is the answer, it has to be tailored to the person and the party. Brazenness is going to play out differently for the Democrats than the Republicans. It’s going to look different when Biden tries it as opposed to Trump. Nor is it especially easy to pull off. Having a talent for it, as Trump clearly does, helps out a lot. 

To bring in one final example, and hopefully tie it all together, I think there’s a way in which Democrats and their allies tried to combine mistake theory and conflict theory in a way which ultimately gave them the worst of both worlds. Here I’m indebted to

Bentham's Bulldog

for his recent post Beware the Man of One Expert. He describes how mostly left-aligned individuals attempt to use a thin veneer of science (the “one expert” of the title) to make very brazen claims. He offers up several examples from the pandemic: Shutting down international travel is dumb. Masks don’t work. Masks do work. School closures will have no negative effects, etc. It’s almost as if they’re trying to merge the old method of communication (experts declaiming) with the new method (brazenness on the internet) and they took the worst aspects of both and combined them.

Insofar as my friend and the Chapo guys have a point, perhaps it’s this one. There are the lingering remnants of mistake theory in much of the way the Democrats attempt to communicate, and it’s possible that if they got rid of those they would be more effective at winning these stupid fights we’re continually having. Maybe they would win more. But I’m not sure that’s a good thing. I’m not sure that a race to see who can be more brazen gets us a better world. Perhaps their side would win a little more often, but I’m pretty sure that would end up being a loss for the rest of us. 

Maybe not, it’s a strange world we live in, and the rules are changing very fast. It’s hard to know what is going to “work” or not, or what will ultimately matter in the long run. The world has long been full of brazenness, befuddlement, bafflement, and bullshit. And these things will continue long after I am dead. As such, in the long arc of history something like Biden’s debate performance would normally matter not at all, but this time feels different. I think we’re going to be talking about this for a very long time.

---

I realize that there are approximately eight trillion takes on the debate (a thousand for every man, women and child on the planet) so if you got this far, I appreciate the fact that you read mine. Should you think it was even a tiny bit unique I’d appreciate a like or a comment.

1. Though these days I’m hearing a lot of people say that picking Kamala Harris as a running mate was the original misstep.