View: The Republicans' high school cafeteria debate

Policy was basically nowhere, except for the early round on immigration. The rest of the debate was a festival of interpersonal verbal aggression, in which what mattered was not how you would govern, or even what you believed, but who could most effectively interrupt, harass and sneer. I cheered, so that I would not weep for my country.

And yet, this is just a reflection of something I already knew: Policy just doesn't matter that much in presidential debates, or for that matter, in presidential elections. Elections that feature an incumbent may be some sort of broad referendum, thumbs up or thumbs down, on how the incumbent has done. Yet even this is just as likely to focus on something they can't really control (the state of the economy) as it is on decisions they made (like, I dunno, getting us into a massively destabilizing war in the Middle East).

Even things that are ostensibly about policy often really aren't. When Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton debate Wall Street regulation, neither of them puts forth the kind of detailed framework that you'd actually need to know who was going to be better on the issue. There's good reason for this: developing such a plan would take a lot of time and expensive expertise. Then no one would read it, including the candidates themselves. And the candidates wouldn't be able to explain it even if they did read it.

What they're really arguing about is not how these folks will regulate Wall Street, but who hates banks more, who is angrier at them, who will be meaner to them when the time comes to build that sort of framework. Such policies as they suggest are crafted less with an eye toward effectiveness than toward "sounding mean." For politicians, policy plans are the semaphore flag by which they send signals; they are rarely the message themselves.

This is the part where I am supposed to lament how terrible this is, how our widening deficit in Gross National Seriousness threatens to ruin the country. Part of me does think this. But then the other part — the part that is semi-firmly tethered to the real world — says "How could it be otherwise?"

For starters, you cannot say much of anything worth saying about policy in 90 seconds, or even five minutes. Policy is complicated. Explaining what problem it is supposed to fix, why this solution is preferable to other ideas, and what the major effects are expected to be — that takes time. This does not work on a debate stage, or in an ad, or in a campaign speech. There is no place for serious policy in a modern campaign.

Sure, you can put white papers up on your website, but most voters won't read them. And if they are good, serious white papers that grapple with some difficult problem, most voters wouldn't be able to understand them even if they did. They wouldn't have the background to assess whether your reading of the problem was fair, whether your solution was likely to work, or what kinds of objections might be made that your pet analyst has thoughtfully omitted from the discussion. Sure, an ordinary voter might be up on one or two of the issues. But no one is going to have enough expertise to assess a candidate's whole platform — unless we're talking about a single-issue candidate who probably shouldn't get anyone's vote, anyway.

I include myself in this. There are areas, like foreign policy, that I mostly stay away from because I don't know enough to form an opinion. The modern world is probably not really more complicated than the world was two centuries ago. But modern government certainly is. It has taken on too many tasks for anyone — even the candidate — to form a good opinion across the whole range.

Even when the candidate does have strong views, and you're qualified to assess them, there's a good chance that something will happen to change their mind. Remember when candidate George W. Bush was criticizing President Bill Clinton for his military interventions abroad?

So instead elections focus on things that average voters are qualified to assess. What is this candidate's character? What are their ideological commitments? Who are their political allies? What groups are they likely to listen to when in office? What are their instincts about responding to threats?

I might think that in an ideal world, everyone would be like me, spending their days marinating in policy panels and white papers and government reports. But then I remember that I'd be sitting in an unheated, unlit house, gnawing on one of the four cucumbers I managed to grow in my front yard last year, with no clothes, electronic devices, or … well, you get the idea. Modern policy is necessarily the obsession of a few. And this is necessarily upsetting to the many, who simultaneously resent the intrusions of self-appointed experts, and decline to put in the hours necessary to become expert themselves.

I still mourn the tone of last night's debate, and hope that my country will soon, once again, be capable of adult discourse. But that discourse is still not going to be aimed at me. It's going to be aimed at the millions of voters who spend their days doing the stuff that's necessary to keep the wonks fed, clothed and housed.

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