An Election but No Debate

Donald Trump was nominated by the Republican Party on Monday. A few days later, the Democrats did the same with Joe Biden. The announced electoral confrontation will take place. However, the democratic model so long touted by our cousins in America is suffocating. The chronicle of these two nominating conventions, admittedly made special by the health crisis affecting the world, and in particular, the United States, diagnoses the faltering condition of this system inherited from the end of the 18th century. After a term spent shaking up most of the checks and balances in his country (political, judicial and the media) with erratic tweets, the president of the United States has once again chosen excess for his reelection campaign. Without advancing any shadow of an argument, he assures us that his opponents are “using Covid to steal the election.” How? It doesn’t matter. Similarly, Trump has denounced the use of mail-in voting because, according to him, it would facilitate massive fraud. Why? What is the point of explaining it? It is, above all, a question of minimizing its use, even during these pandemic times when remote voting is the way to reconcile the exercise of democracy and protecting the health of voters.

As usual, Trump vociferates, tweets, curses. Above all, he tramples on the facts, flouts the truths. He refuses to convince anyone, all the better to flatter the conspiratorial quirks of his base and the taste his supporters have for muscular, blind and divisive controversy.

“Polemics consists in considering the adversary as an enemy, and consequently, simplifying him and refusing to see him,” Albert Camus explained in 1948. By choosing perpetual polemic, it is clearly the election debate with Biden that Trump is avoiding.