I watched, the other night, a clip titled with suitable alarm — "EMERGENCY DEBATE: The Death Of The Middle Class! The Pitch Forks Are Coming!" — and was rewarded, as one always is in such exercises, with the spectacle of two men arguing past each other at considerable volume while an audience waited, with the patience of Pavlov's dogs, for the signal to applaud. The specific occasion was a libertarian being told that if he dislikes government he should move to the Congo. The rejoinder landed with the crowd. It always lands with the crowd. It has been landing with crowds since approximately the Neolithic, when the first man who questioned the chief's grain distribution was invited to go live with the hyenas.
What interests me is not the crudeness of the argument — crude arguments are the lingua franca of democracy, and complaining about them is like complaining that a saloon smells of beer — but the specific intellectual laziness it conceals. The libertarian, even the variety so foolish he cannot tie his philosophical shoes without tripping over his own laces, is not arguing for the absence of order. He is arguing for a different source of it. He may be wrong. He is usually wrong. But he is not wrong in the way his opponent finds it convenient to pretend. The honest critique of libertarianism is that the libertarian cannot explain how his voluntary arrangements will prevent the strong from devouring the weak without reinventing, under a different letterhead and perhaps a more tasteful font, the very state he proposes to abolish. That argument, however, requires patience, a grasp of political philosophy, and the willingness to engage a position as it actually exists rather than as a caricature useful for applause lines. Whereas "move to the Congo" requires only a functioning larynx and the confidence of a man who has never had to examine his own premises.
The debater's parenthetical retreat was equally instructive. "I'm not an anarchist, I'm not an anarchist" — delivered with the haste of a man who has just realized his own logic, followed to its terminus, would deposit him in a position he finds socially untenable. This is the permanent condition of the political arguer: bold at the lectern, terrified at the implication.
But the deeper disease — the one the clip merely illustrated without diagnosing — is that the entire performance was labeled an emergency debate about the death of the middle class, and not one moment of it that I witnessed addressed the middle class as an economic phenomenon with identifiable causes of decline. The middle class was a prop, a stage curtain pulled across the proscenium so the actors could perform their usual routines behind it. The libertarian wanted to talk about the state. His opponent wanted to talk about the libertarian's naivety. The audience wanted to clap. The middle class — its stagnant wages, its evaporating pensions, its children priced out of the housing their grandparents bought on a single income — sat offstage like a patient whose doctors have become so engrossed in arguing about the hospital's billing system that they have forgotten anyone is sick. This is what political debate in the English-speaking world has been since approximately 1908: two men calling each other's position an extreme that neither actually holds, then collecting applause from partisans who were never listening in the first place.
The pitchforks in the title were, of course, purely decorative. No one in that audience was reaching for a pitchfork. They were reaching for their phones to clip the moment their man scored. The pitchfork is invoked the way a medieval priest invoked hellfire — not because anyone expects it to arrive on Tuesday, but because the rhetoric requires an eschatological horizon to justify the current excitement. The middle class is dying, the pitchforks are coming, and meanwhile the debate is about whether libertarians should emigrate to central Africa. The disconnect is not a failure of the format. It is the format.
I have covered, in my time, every variety of American public argument from presidential conventions to municipal hearings on the placement of sewers, and I can report that the sewer hearings were invariably more honest. At a sewer hearing, a man stands up and says the pipe should go under Elm Street rather than Oak Street because Elm Street floods in March and his basement fills with water. He is arguing from a specific grievance toward a specific remedy. He may be wrong about the hydrology, but he is not wrong about his basement. Political debate of the emergency variety, by contrast, begins with an abstraction — the death of the middle class — proceeds through a series of ideological set-pieces that have nothing to do with the abstraction, and concludes with both parties declaring victory to their respective newsletters. The middle class remains dead throughout, undisturbed by the noise above its grave.
What I have always admired — and what I saw no evidence of in the clip — is the arguer who follows his own logic to its terminus and remains there, blinking in the uncomfortable light, rather than retreating to the parenthetical. The man who says "I am not an anarchist" after arguing like one for ten minutes is not being precise; he is being polite to his own reputation. The honest version would be: "My argument leads here, and I must either accept the destination or abandon the vehicle." But that sentence has never once been uttered in a debate with an audience, because audiences do not reward honesty. They reward confidence. And confidence, in the Republic, is merely the sound a man makes when he has stopped thinking.
The pitchforks are not coming. The middle class will continue its long decline into the statistical footnotes, and the debates will continue to be about everything except the patient. This is not a failure of democracy. It is democracy functioning precisely as designed — which is to say, as a machine for generating the feeling of participation while the decisions are made elsewhere, by men who would never appear on such a stage, because they have work to do.
