What I’ve been learning from the great Fox debate

Given the hype before last week’s Republican
debate, some of us were prepared for two hours of entertainment, and the
event certainly offered plenty of that.

But I found substance, too, in short little bursts onstage
from the candidates and in some particularly perceptive media analysis of the
Trump phenomenon.

Let’s start with the short little bursts. The candidates
didn’t have much time to flesh out policy, but I heard enough during the main
debate to be deeply concerned. This is a scary group of people, and the thought
of any of them in the White House should keep us awake nights.

Every single one of the 10 men on stage for the main event
wants to restrict women’s abortion rights. Marco Rubio opposes abortion even in
cases of rape and incest. Scott Walker opposes all abortion – even if the
mother’s life is in danger. At one point, the 10 seemed to be competing for the
title of Planned Parenthood’s Fiercest Opponent. (Mike Huckabee won that
contest, I guess, with his accusation that Planned Parenthood staff members rip
up babies’ body parts and “sell them like they’re parts of a Buick.”)

And by the way: when Jeb Bush declares his commitment to
“the culture of life” from conception right through to the end, it should
remind us of one of his most troubling acts as Florida’s governor. It was Bush
who personally fought the courts to prolong the life of Terri Schiavo, over her husband’s protests and despite doctors’
judgment that she was brain dead.

On climate change, the Iran agreement, energy policy, the
Affordable Care Act: any of the Republicans on stage last week would bring a
strongly, often harshly, conservative approach to the presidency. And with few
exceptions, they are very angry people. For a group so vocal about their
devotion to the Prince of Peace, they’re stunningly trigger
happy and bellicose. Donald Trump will “bomb the hell” out of the oil fields in
Iraq. The seemingly mild-mannered Ben Carson embraces waterboarding (“What we
do in order to get the information that we need is our business”).

The
Republican candidates aren’t the only people who are angry. Voters are,
too – often mindlessly so – and that was certainly evident at the debate. But
it’s not just Republicans and conservatives who are angry. In
a post last week on the online newsletter Sabato’s
Crystal Ball, Emory University political science professor Alan Abramowitz and
PhD student Steven Webster highlighted what they called “negative
partisanship”: anger at everybody in the opposing political party. That anger,
they wrote, “has been on the rise since the 1980’s, and it is arguably the most
salient feature of the political scene in the United States.”

Significantly, Abramowitz and Webster said, the voters who
are angriest are the voters who are most engaged in the political process. And
that means that “candidates who can tap into that anger are likely to do well.”

“What we have seen in recent general elections in the US,”
Abramowitz and Webster wrote, “is that what matters to most voters is not whom
you love, but whom you loathe.”

Which brings us to Donald Trump.
It’s tempting to write him off – and many political analysts insist that he
stands no chance of being the Republican nominee, let alone being elected
president. But unless a lot of the people answering the polls are just kidding,
Trump has a good-sized following.

On yahoo.com recently, Matt
Bai dismissed concerns about Trump’s poll numbers. He has the lead, Bai
wrote, thanks to “a tiny subset of professed Republicans who will actually talk
to a telemarketer, who can’t keep any of these other droning candidates
straight, and who find politics in general to be a soul-sucking enterprise.”

Regardless of their numbers, when we dismiss Trump’s
candidacy, we dismiss his supporters and their concerns. And the New Yorker’s John
Cassidy cites recent Monmouth University poll numbers that suggest, he says, that Trump “is drawing support from across the
Republican spectrum.” He led among arch conservatives (with whom he was ahead
of his nearest competitor by 11 points) and non-conservatives (ahead by 8
points). He led among both older and younger voters, and among both women and
men.

There’s plenty wrong with Trump. But as Brookings senior
fellow William
Frey noted last month in the Washington Post, writing him off is dangerous.
Many voters like him and like what he is saying. “Pretending they don’t,” Frey
wrote, “allows Trump and other immigration firebrands,
such as Rick Santorum and Ted Cruz, to resuscitate a century-old nativism that
could stick around beyond this election.”

Voter
anger, then, could have an impact much broader than the 2016
presidential election. Some of that anger is blindly partisan.
But some is rooted in legitimate concerns about the problems this country
faces.

A feeling of disgust and helplessness seems to be growing,
on the left and the right. What candidates and elected leaders do about that matters. They can recognize its roots and build
bi-partisan coalitions and public support to deal with employment, health care,
education, wealth disparity, immigration, government actions favoring the rich
and powerful, scandals surrounding political leaders…. Or they can do something
much darker.

In his yahoo.com post, Matt Bai said he wasn’t worried about
the possibility of Trump winning. But he had a somber warning: “Somewhere out
there right now is some business magnate or TV celebrity, someone whose
resources and audacity may vastly exceed his intellect or compassion, whose
ambition may be more of the Napoleonic variety than the PT Barnum kind, who’s
better skilled than Trump at making demagoguery look like a half-palatable
governing vision.”

Watching the Fox debate last week, it wasn’t hard to imagine
such a person heading to the White House a few years from now.

This article appears in Aug 12-18, 2015.