The Best Presidential Debate Ever?
Perhaps the recent Presidential debate was the best debate ever, because it was the worst Presidential debate ever.
President Trump & Vice President Biden with Fox News anchor Chris Wallace.
(Scott Olson / Getty Images). Photo from Los Angeles Times.
With decorum out the window, Americans watched the debate with disgust, and we saw ourselves reflected in it. It was the one thing that WE the people ultimately could agree on, red or blue, black or white, right or left:
This is not reflective of our best selves. This is not sustainable. This is not how we want our kids to grow up. This is not what we aspire to be known for as a country. This is not how we should treat our fellow travelers in this complex world. This is not what we want to be. Is this really who we have become?
It took a brawl with name-calling, dog-whistling, race-baiting, mudslinging, recriminations, and aspersions to remind us that our leaders should not be cage fighters, rather they should be statesmen.
The Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma tells of the steady but escalating march toward polarization that has turned the tech utopian vision of Silicon Valley on its head. Facebook's founding mission was to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. We’re now so close that we – and our leaders – are at each other's throats.
Certainly, Facebook and other social media platforms are not the only contributing factors to the increasing polarization and coarsening of our culture. Yet, we believe that we still have more in common than we disagree on. We believe that leadership matters.
However, we also believe that left to our own devices, we may not be able to agree on what we want to be.
Photo from Netflix Documentary: Social Dilemma
The American experiment has been remarkably resilient, adapting over time, staying true to its principles while growing into its aspirations. Built into the architecture of our constitutional republic were the self-correcting mechanisms of a representative democracy. Some wonder whether we are past the point of self-correction, and perhaps it is time to start it all over again. So where do we turn for guidance?
In the darkest moment of the Constitutional Congress, when it seemed impossible to forge a common vision for the governance of the colonies as a new nation, Benjamin Franklin stopped the proceedings, and implored to his colleagues:
"The small progress we have made after four or five weeks of close attendance and continual reasonings with each other -- our different sentiments on almost every question … is a melancholy proof of the imperfection of Human Understanding. We indeed seem to feel our own want of political wisdom, since we have been running about in search of it ... In this situation of this Assembly groping as it were in the dark to find political truth, and scarce able to distinguish it when presented to us, how has it happened, Sir, that we have not hitherto once thought of humbly applying to the Father of lights to illuminate our understandings? ...I therefore beg leave to move -- that henceforth prayers imploring the assistance of Heaven, and its blessings on our deliberations, be held in this Assembly every morning before we proceed to business, and that one or more of the Clergy of this City be requested to officiate in that service."
At a time of such upheaval and uncertainty, we believe that the final debate should begin with prayer. Although we, as authors, share the same faith convictions, Franklin's appeal was to people of ALL faiths, and so is ours. This is a trying time, one in which we must remember the call of Jesus to be peacemakers. So, let us pray for our leaders, and may they pray for our country so that, as Franklin pleaded, "kind providence" may be "the means of establishing our future national felicity."
If they do, perhaps we truly could have the best debate ever.
Mark Rodgers is a former director of the Senate Republican Conference and founder of The Clapham Group; Irvin Scott is a Senior Lecturer on Education and founder of the Institute for Faith and Education at Harvard University