What Struck Me Watching the Final Presidential Debate

“Our public discourse must turn away from retrospective litigation and verbal crossfire and, instead, shift towards real politics…”

In a 1971 address at the London School of Economics, British philosopher Maurice Cranston suggested that politics is an argument about the future. In defining politics as such, Cranston provided a helpful criterion for judging the political content of any discussion or debate, including ones between presidential contenders. Although last night’s debate between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden was an improvement upon their initial clash of incoherence, it failed to meet the standard of real politics—i.e., arguments about the future direction of the polity.

One need not go full Schmittian to acknowledge that conflict—of interests, identities, and rights—constitutes the essence of politics. As the late political theorist Bernard Crick wrote in his 1992 book, In Defence of Politics (4th edition), “Politics arises from accepting the fact of the simultaneous existence of different groups, hence different interests and different traditions, within a territorial unit under a common rule.”

Only in the presence of conflict and difference must we make a choice: We can either resort to violence to resolve our differences, or we can talk through our differences and establish an agreed upon means of enforcing the resolutions we reach through deliberation (that is, a system of law). Option A is chaos; Option B is politics. Politics is the alternative to violence, which is why Crick rightly appreciated politics “as a pearl beyond price in the history of the human condition.”

If politics offers the optimal means of navigating differences within a society (I, for one, have yet to come across a better alternative), it is inherently forward-looking. When we engage in politics, we are acting as citizens forging a way forward for our common polity; we are not historians haggling over a particular past event or family members airing decades-old feuds and grievances. We are simply arguing about how precisely tomorrow ought to be different from today, if at all.