Do politics still mean something? I suppose they mean something, but what exactly, is dubious. We’re a long, long way from what Aristotle meant by politics in his eponymous book. Far less do modern political debates mean anything – kabuki theatre, at the best of times, which these are not. What happens when the two debaters are both past the average life span of a human, and one of them seemingly past life?
I didn’t watch the Biden-Trump spectacle – we won’t call in a debate – and it was hardly theatre, but apparently a disaster, at least for the barely-functional Biden. Just as we’re millennia away from the Philosopher, we’re centuries away from the Lincoln-Douglas fair and reasoned dialogue in their own presidential debates of 1858. Reason? Dialogue? How quaint and nostalgic. But as Pope Benedict warned in his 2006 Regensburg Address, without reason, and faith to support and purify reason, the only recourse left is force and violence.
The question is: Was this deliberate? A taunt, of sorts? How could anyone, even without medical expertise, not realize mumbling incoherency would unfold?
For one take on what this might mean, see Mark Steyn’s prescient take. The plot thickens, indeed.