She Went Low
And That's the Best Thing Vice President Harris Could Have Done in the Debate
“When someone is cruel or acts like a bully, you don’t stoop to their level,” Michelle Obama said before her oft-repeated phrase. “When they go low, we go high.”
At its best, I suppose we could compare the statement to advice from Jesus: “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist one who is evil. But if any one strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also; and if any one would sue you and take your coat, let him have your cloak as well” (Matthew 5:38-40).
“An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind,” Gandhi is said to have added.
The Gandhi quote is insightful about what a world where revenge is endlessly sought might be like, but Jesus’s instruction only made sense to me when someone pointed out to me at some point in my life that it wasn’t actually an appeal for doormat behavior so much as it was for dignity, the strength of standing tall and making someone who is mistreating you look you in the eye after they have struck you.
The problem with the above framing as it relates to American politics is that in spite of their best efforts to always tell the story this way, the Democrats are not oppressed by the Republicans. And, in fact, we know that counties that went for Joe Biden in 2020 possess some 70% of the American economy. They’ve also held the presidency for 12 of the past 16 years (though Congress has been more split). To the extent that Americans now or in the past have oppressed certain groups of people (and they have), it has been a collective effort that Democrats have participated in. Oh, and if you really want to find out about the spirit and character of a Democrat, challenge one of their deeply-held convictions in public. Then experience how “nice” they often are.1
So what we have in 2024 is one party in particular that is 1) obsessed with its own self-righteousness and 2) in perpetual denial of its own part in the problems around us, which combines with a willingness to lie and exaggerate in the effort of placing the blame for those problems on Republicans. To be clear, some of those problems also exist in the Republican party as well, but they aren’t typically the ones going around saying things like “When they go low, we go high,” which implies that they’re somehow above all the political fighting. They aren’t, but sometimes the attitude I’m describing prevents them from entering arenas where they should get dirty like the rest of us.
Today I want to say at least one thing I admired about Vice President Kamala Harris’s approach to the debate last night. The words I kept seeing in this morning’s commentary were “bait” and “baiting.” For once, she did the country a favor by actually playing Former President Trump’s game. And well. This is a good thing in spite of our cliches: opting out and losing is no virtue most of the time. And no matter how many times contemporary Democrats try to convince us about how offended they are by vulgarity and coarse language about sexuality they are, we know they’re lying both because we’ve had drinks with them enough times and because we see the kinds of art they’ve been propping up for decades.
But Trump has an ego, and if you poke him enough, is a fragile person who’s prone to unloading in all all kinds directions. In a debate, if they lose their composure, you have often one. And good for the vice president for having a brain and enough brawn to zero in on this obvious aspect of the former president’s character make-up. She was up there with a smirk, not with feigned indignation. She went at his legal problems, she brought up the people who’ve worked with him who won’t be voting for him, she called him a liar, she called him “weak and wrong on matters of national security,” she said he wants to be a dictator, she pointed out his weird relationship with Kim Jong Un, she called him a “disgrace,” and “fired by 81 million people.” She said that people leave his rallies early out of “boredom.” (He fired back by saying the people who are go to her rallies are bussed in and paid to be there.) She questioned his temperament and suggested that he doesn’t have the ability not to get “confused about facts.”
Some of these prods and insults were pettier and/or less substantive than others, but the point was that she was poking at him in the say way that he does (he called her, for example, “a Marxist” and said that President Joe Biden “hates her”) with those he debates against. She didn’t cower, and she didn’t huff and puff that he was being “mean” or something. She just spit it back. Other times she laughed at him, which is what her party should have done instead of throw endless mass tantrums during his first term when he said something over the top.
For his part, Trump’s ‘tariffs will solve everything’ is a fantasy, but he’s not wrong about, and nor is he wrong to say it, how crippling inflation has been in the past four years, and of course it’s the Americans who have the least margin who feel those “percentage points” the most. My god, if I were running against the current administration, I would know the exact numbers of grocery-store price increases, and I would bring them up as open as possible. Same with housing. Harris at least acknowledges the problem with housing prices, but how in the world can she propose a solution to them without opening herself up to, “What about the last four years?” On the other hand, Harris made some strong statements about the employment numbers at the end of Trump’s term, but anyone with a brain and a shred of intellectual honesty knows Covid did that, not Trump, and in fact if anyone was a drag on the full-scale lockdown embrace, it was Trump (though he did it mostly passively, which was probably his only choice at the time).
Harris will surely continue trying to avoid the immigration issue, as ‘just keep letting people in’ isn’t and shouldn’t be a popular policy direction, though Democrats aren’t wrong (and they should remind the American people) that it was Republicans who killed Congress’s most recent attempt (earlier this year) at addressing the issue. Abortion seems mostly like a distraction issue in that 1) there isn’t likely to be much movement on it and 2) people are so entrenched about what they think about it that they aren’t likely to change soon. Trump can call Democrats baby killers or whatever, and his base will weirdly cheer, and Vice President Harris will keep stoking her party’s view that repealing the badly-decided Row V. Wade was more consequential than it was. Red states went a little farther than they might otherwise have in curtailing the practice, but far from America becoming some sort of Handmade’s Tale, birth rates continue to plummet. People who want to believe in the Handmade’s Tale version of America will keep doing it, but the only people buying it will be people who were going to vote for Harris anyway. Abortion remains
Meanwhile, neither of these candidates fighting over their preferred tax cuts are likely to say very much about, you know, the ample ways we need to start cutting our spending, which just just keeps ballooning and ballooning.
Some Democrats are, of course, perfectly able to be challenged. And can even engage in those situations with respect. But from my own experience, this is not a strength,, and their cultural tactics (i.e. censorship, usually) often reinforce the weakness. If you think this is just me, I recommend having a look around at some of Jonathon Haidt’s research. Haidt is a social psychologist, unquestionably a Democrat, who wrote The Righteous Mind and founded Heterodox Academy. One study he points to that always struck me as important is that Republicans are apparently significantly better at restating the position of a Democrat than a Democrat with a Republican. This probably speaks less to an inability and more an unwillingness to understand with some generosity across a difference.