Cats and Dogs

I can't believe I watched the whole thing!

A boxing match is one of the most hackneyed clichés available to describe a political debate, but it fits last night’s pretty well. As the debate began last night, I thought I was going to have to write about how Trump demolished Harris and Democrats had to seriously face the possibility of a second Trump presidency. From the bell, Trump came out swinging, he rattled off jabs while Harris looked of herself, rehearsed, and stiff. She seemed a little stunned. Then Harris composed herself and started to land solid blows: she handled the abortion question masterfully; it’s a real weakness for him and she really let him have it. Trump’s face registered when the hits landed: he even seemed to wince sometimes. And Harris also did something that ought to be easy to do, but Trump’s opponents have struggled with managed: she baited him. The stuff about people leaving the rallies actually pissed him off and he started to rant and rave uncontrollably. He flipped out. After that, he never really looked good once, it was just him fulminating nonsense, including the stuff about people eatings and dogs in Springfield, Ohio.. It surprised me he brought that up even though it really shouldn’t have. Her prosecutor’s preparation, which seemed to fetter her at first, ultimately paid off. Trump is incapable of doing the same and tries to rely on sheer bluster.

Make no mistake: Trump still has considerable powers of self-expression, which are often underrated by liberals, but they should not be overrated either. He has a very limited vocabulary and it constrains the extent to which he can articulate responses on any issue. So, he falls back into hyperbole—everything is the worst, the best, the greatest. This can be effective, but often last night it sounded repetitive and, yes, kind of dull. If the American simply people tire of his antics, it will really be over for him. Harris’s message of “let’s turn the page” is a good one because it presents Trump as tiresome as much as fearsome.

So, she won. But does any of it really matter? It’s very hard to say. The electorate is so polarized that changing minds at this late date is difficult. But there are still undecided voters out there. Unfortunately, I believe they are more likely to respond to Trump’s style of rhetoric than Harris’s. The fact is they are really speaking to two different electorates: they aren’t often competing for the same voters. A recent poll showed that Trump was winning among almost everyone except those most likely to vote. He’s the candidate of alienation and anger, of people who may express their political will with a protest vote or may just sulk at home. He needs to rile up those people. It could be that last night’s performance still did a good enough job of that. On the other hand, Harris won by not totally depressing her people. By showing that she was serious about fighting to the end and staying on course. One more corny metaphor if you please. JD Vance recently compared the election to the civil war with the Democrats as Yankees and the Republicans as Southern Bourbons with hillbilly allies. Let’s grant this idiotic premise for a moment: in that case, Harris was like U.S. Grant, methodically keeping the pressure on, sticking to a plan until the enemy broke, Trump was like some Confederate general who attempts audacious sallies in the place of sound strategy. He may do some superficially spectacular things, but eventually the unrelenting machinery of the Union war effort will grind him down. One hopes.

I want to return to this business about Haitian migrants eating cats, a shocking canard that JD Vance rolled out and then encouraged his followers to disseminate even though it appears totally false. He wrote on Twitter, “…don’t let the crybabies in the media dissuade you, fellow patriots. Keep the cat memes flowing.” There is a terrible catchiness to this kind of libel that originates in the schoolyard: This is the litany of a schoolyard bully. I mean this quite literally: the earliest mentions in the news I can find of “Haitians eating cats” comes from stories about Haitian refugee children in the 1980s and 90s who were facing harassment from fellow students in school.

In general, Haitian asylum seekers as a political scapegoat comes straight out the era of When the Clock Broke. For most of the 1980s, the U.S. government treated Haitian “boat people” who attempted to reach the states as economic migrants—unlike Cubans who were treated as political refugees—and repatriated the vast majority of them. This is despite the fact that Haiti was also under the highly repressive rule of the Duvaliers. After the 1991 military coup that removed Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti’s first democratically elected president, produced a massive wave of refugees, the U.S. set up a camp in Guantanamo to process asylum claims. But this created political issues for the Bush administration going into an election year.

The Department of Defense complained about the use of their facility for immigration processing. Forces to Bush’s right were demagoguing on immigration: he was facing primary challenges from David Duke and Pat Buchanan, both of whom raised the issue of the Haitians for obvious reasons. Speaking about the Haitians on This Week with David Brinkley, Buchanan took an openly racial approach to the issue, opposing not just the admission of Haitians but blacks in general: “I think God made all people good," he said, "but if we had to take a million immigrants of, say, Zulus next year or Englishmen, and put them in Virginia, what group would be easier to assimilate and would cause less problems for the people of Virginia? There is nothing wrong with us sitting down and arguing that issue that we are a European country…” David Duke had made similar noises, telling a Miami radio station that while Cubans were of “European descent” and therefore should be welcomed, Haitians should not be allowed in. Writing about the boat people in late 1991, Sam Francis recommended Jean Raspail’s sci fi novel about brown hordes invading white Europe Camp of the Saints:

Today the future is now. The Haitian boat people who sought entry to the United States by the thousands in the last few months are only a small part of the wave. While the Haitians are not yet coming in the millions, other illegal immigrants from Third World cultures are moving across the U.S. border in human herds that defy enumeration. Not since Genghis Khan rode out of the Asian steppes has the West - Europe as well as the United States — encountered such an alien invasion.

Not for nothing, that sounds a lot like something JD Vance might say today.

Media reports of high incidents of HIV among Guantanamo internees also made the public panic. Haitian refugees were not without their advocates in the U.S. however, among them Jesse Jackson, Arthur Ashe and Magic Johnson. Beset with these pressures, in May ’92, the Bush White House changed the U.S. policy to one of sending back Haitians tout court and closing off the processing center in Guantanamo—there would be no question of political asylum. Buchanan hailed the administration’s decision. Bill Clinton hit Bush for “a cruel policy of returning Haitian refugees to a brutal dictatorship without an asylum hearing.” Of course, that didn’t stop him from maintaining the policy when he was inaugurated in January 1993.