This post is advanced as a preliminary argument on the larger question of who won the American Civil War. As such, it emanates from quite specific concerns about the relationship between the armed conflict that took place, largely in the U.S. South, between 1861 and 1865 and the underlying political issues that instigated the conflict. On the other hand, it invariably advances arguments relevant to a generalized discussion of the relationship between politics and armed struggle. Emphatically, it is an effort to posit that armed force, resulting in the total disarmament of one party to an armed conflict, need not necessarily result in achievement of the objectives of the victorious party. If warfare is a struggle of wills between two parties to armed conflict, then armed violence against persons and property, as the means by which one party seeks to compel the other to submit to its will, is only imperfectly suited to achieving such ends.
What will follow in this post should not be construed as a general theory of warfare or even a component within a general theory of warfare insofar as such a general theory is itself impossible. Nor will I attempt to rehash axioms on warfare by Clausewitz, Jomini, or Sun Tzu, all of which have their place as contributions to our knowledge of armed conflict but need to be situated in relation to their time and the particular problems to which each contribution was offered as an effort to address. Rather, this post is an effort to argue that we need to disaggregate the military conflict that constituted, in part, the American Civil War from the political struggles from which it was likewise constituted. The latter struggles continue to this day in diverse forms within the broader frameworks of race relations, Constitutional law/federalism, electoral politics/voting rights, and interpretations/recitations of American history. Without such a disaggregation, we are apt to forge an arbitrary rupture in U.S. history and, in particular, the history of the U.S. South, between Antebellum and Postbellum times, a bifurcation that I would regard, at least in part, as erroneous. A longer history of geopolitical divergence within the American polity needs to be analyzed as a totality, from the ratifications of the U.S. Constitution of 1787 to the present day, through which the Civil War appears as a brief if not inconsequential aberration. Such a perspective would, in turn, inevitably reframe the terms through which we interpret the Civil War itself, marginalizing certain rationale for the conflict while accentuating others. More pointedly, for the purposes of this post, disaggregating the military aspects of the Civil War from its underlying political instigations enables us to realize one particularly relevant conclusion: notwithstanding the overwhelming victory of U.S. federal military forces against the Confederate States, the victors were incapable of imposing their will in order to fundamentally transform social structures, race relations, and the balance of power between federal and state governments within the Southern states.
Proceeding from the limited objectives of this account, I intend to argue, first, that the military victory of federal forces in the period from 1861 to 1865 was less than total, but, on the other hand, it was sufficient to fatally incapacitate the armed forces of the Confederate States to such a degree that further major organized conflict would have been futile. Second, I will argue that, in certain respects, the conclusion of major organized armed conflict in 1865 constitutes an arbitrary boundary in defining the time span of the Civil War. Rather, we need to include the span of federal military occupation of the Southern states through Reconstruction as a concluding stage of the military conflict, both to assess the effectiveness of federal military forces in compelling the submission of the Southern states to the will of the federal government and to place the Civil War in a comparative framework through which we can draw analogies to other, more recent American military conflicts. Third, I will posit the existence of a vacuum between the military policies of Reconstruction and the diverse political agendas of Reconstruction-era Southern governments, Congressional and administrative policy makers, and Antebellum (aristocratic, ex-Confederate) Southern political elites. I will argue that the existence of such a vacuum constituted a space for practical reinterpretation of the consequences of the federal victory, ultimately enabling un-Reconstructed Southern political elites to truncate the transformative capacity of the federal government on Southern social formations. Concluding, I will argue that, on the one hand, the loss in major organized conflict by Confederate military forces demonstrates the capacity of militaries to lose wars, in the sense that the Confederate States could not retrieve the broader objectives that compelled their secession and formation of a political bloc (i.e. retention of slave class structures as a major organization of surplus labor production; supremacy of individual state political prerogatives against federal Constitutional authority including, in the last instance, the capacity to vacate participation in the U.S. Constitutional structure). On the other hand, I will argue that the failure of certain federal constituencies to impose their will in transforming Southern social formations through military occupation demonstrates the incapacity of militaries to actually win wars - enduring political, economic, and cultural change cannot be foisted onto a social formation at the end of a bayonet.
The Defeat of Confederate Military Forces in Major Organized Conflict (1861-1865)
The point in this section is not to provide an exhaustive account of the evolution of the larger military conflict between 1861 and 1865. Rather, the account that I will advance seeks to convey a sense of the complexities involved in geographically dispersed military conflict over a space as large as the U.S. South. It will emphasize unevenness in the measure federal military control and Confederate resistance across the space of the U.S. South. The defeat of Confederate forces will reflect a methodical if uncertain piecing together of various components over time, rendering Confederate forces relatively incapacitated, rather than a punctuated, conclusive defeat of particular armies on particular battlefields.
The generations that prosecuted major armed conflict in the American Civil War were infected by an intellectual bias favoring conclusive confrontations between large, organized military forces as the primary signature of victory in military conflict. It was a bias constituted through the strategic, logistical, and organizational development of large conscripted armies, from the beginnings of the levée en masse in the French revolutionary period through the heights of Napoleonic warfare. In certain respects, professional military specialists and at least some military historians remain infected by a similar bias today, notwithstanding a long history of low intensity conflict, guerrilla warfare, and lingering political insurgencies, waged by non-professional military contingents. Even the Napoleonic period had its paradigmatic development of guerrilla warfare on the Iberian peninsula and partisan tactics waged by defiant Russian forces against French invasion, but, for noteworthy reasons, history remembers Austerlitz, Leipzig, and Waterloo, conclusive engagements that yielded conclusive subsequent political effects.
The American Civil War had numerous significant military confrontations (e.g. Gettysburg, Antietam, Chancellorsville, etc.), but no single major confrontation was adequate to permanently incapacitate one or the other party. If the series of confrontations resulting in the federal seizure of Petersburg, Virginia and subsequent seizure of the Confederate capital at Richmond in the spring of 1865 might be regarded as conclusive, then they further need to be definitively situated against the background of a nine-month siege, the progressive assemblage of diverse components in federal military efforts to break down or seize control over logistical infrastructure systems across the Confederate States including seaboard transportation avenues (i.e. the federal coastal blockade and seizure of control of navigation on the Mississippi River and its major Southern tributaries), and the reaching of critical thresholds in a war of attrition between the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia and diverse components of federal forces besieging Petersburg, controlling the Shenandoah Valley, and traversing northward through the Carolinas against a steadily battered and dwindling Confederate Army of the West. In other words, the larger story of armed conflict in the American Civil War, as in every war, is a story of networks/assemblages in which no individual confrontational piece in the broader process of military conflict can be arbitrarily abstracted from the totality of the conflict to achieve explanatory priority.
Dispensing with the notion that we need to look for conclusive confrontations, we can characterize the evolving strategies of the federal military as efforts to articulate multifarious components in countervailing geographically and temporally dispersed networks. Federal military forces initially conceive of their strategy as oriented toward the limited goal of seizing and holding key contested ground - Richmond (the Confederate capital), Norfolk, Charleston, New Orleans, etc. Such a strategy operates, minimally, under the conception that by seizing and occupying key land spaces the federal government can disrupt the political will of the Confederate states and compel their re-entry into the union. Such a calculus, in turn, relies on the idea that the Confederacy is constituted, organizationally, as a fragile and electorally shallow conspiracy among elites in the legislatures of the Confederate states, capable of being fatally undermined by a well-organized effort by federal military forces to disrupt the capacity of diverse state governments to hold key geographic locations. That is to say, federal policy makers in the Lincoln administration, Congress, and the federal military establishment (e.g. Generals Scott and Hallock) misconstrue the democratization of anti-federal ideologies in the Confederate states beyond the ranks of Southern elites. As the scale of popular support for the Confederacy across the broader electorate of the Southern states becomes apparent by virtue of the threshold of military mobilization within the White Southern population, the federal strategy of holding key landspaces gives way to a range of divergent ideas that might be crudely consolidated into two separate but integrally linked goals: the need to control or otherwise disrupt logistical infrastructures facilitating free flow of materiale and military forces across the space of the Southern states, and the need to inflict persistent losses against spatially dispersed and logistically isolated field armies of the Confederate states.
By the end of major organized conflict, federal forces had largely realized both goals. The defeat of Confederate military forces, in this respect, reveals a dichotomy. The Confederate military proved incapable of defending dispersed networks of logistical infrastructures and strategically critical spaces. Rail lines were cut, riverine navigation impeded, and, especially following the federal Army of the Tennessee's campaigns in Georgia and the Carolinas (1864-1865), entire swaths of land rendered barren of logistically usable resources. As its control over logistical assets and networks dwindled, Confederate field armies became increasingly disconnected from each other and dis-articulated relative to governmental control and their domestic base of support. That is to say, the Lincoln administration never loses operational control over federal military forces in a way that might have impeded logistical operations or undermined overall government supervision of strategic goals. Lincoln may not have stood continuously over the shoulders of George McClellan on the York-James peninsula or that of Ulysses Grant at Vicksburg, but he absolutely maintained some degree of direction and discretion over the general formulation of operational planning at the level of designated armies/campaigns. The same could not be said regarding the Confederate Davis administration, especially in the latter stages of major organized conflict. Davis may have enjoyed some discretion regarding Robert E. Lee's decision to invade Pennsylvania in 1863, but he certainly lacked any meaningful control over the logistical details or the staffing levels for field units engaging in the operation, if only because the constitution of the Confederate states did not grant him adequate authority to exercise such close control of the military, which was, above all, a consolidation of separate state level militia forces consolidated under loose authority by a weak central administration. Finally, to the extent that the Confederate military continued to enjoy a strong degree of popular support in local jurisdictions of the South, the Confederate government lacked any capacity to leverage such support across space to bolster the logistical status of the military. By early 1865, the staffing and supply status of the Army of Northern Virginia was lost on populations in areas still under Confederate control in Alabama or Louisiana or Tennessee, and the Davis administration was incapable of procuring material assistance from such areas because it lacked any control over logistical networks capable of doing so.
Conversely, federal successes at disrupting logistical networks and winning a war of attrition against Confederate field armies did not simultaneously manifest success at undermining popular support for the political project of the Confederacy, even in areas where the federal government quickly regained military control (e.g. New Orleans, seized in early 1862). Rather, unevenly distributed patterns emerge in areas under direct federal military administration, areas loosely under Confederate control, and areas at the margins, where federal forces contended, in certain circumstances, with resistance from regular Confederate military units and civilian organized partisan or guerrilla units (see Samuel C. Hyde, Jr., "Bushwhacking and Barn Burning: Civil War Operations and the Florida Parishes' Tradition of Violence," in Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association (Spring 1995), 171-186, downloaded from JSTOR (21 Nov. 2015) at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4233176).
Saturday, November 21, 2015
Tuesday, November 3, 2015
The CNBC Republican Primary Debate and Liberal Media Bias
A few comments are in order on the CNBC Republican Presidential debate last week in Boulder, Colorado. To begin, from what I have heard about Boulder, I find it a little bit shocking that debate organizers could actually fill up an auditorium with an audience of prospective Republican primary voters! On the other hand, it probably stands to reason that in a profoundly libertarian state, a Republican slate that has become so self-absorbed in its litany of government loathing might be apt to draw a following, even in the bluest of collegy, artsy, liberal towns. On that note, I have neither watched this Republican debate nor any of the other debates, Republican or Democratic, so far in this primary season. Rather, I had to go about obtaining a transcript of the debate online to see what was asked of each candidate and how each replied (see "Transcript: Read the full text of the CNBC Republican Debate in Boulder," in Time (Updated: Oct. 28, 2015, 11:40PM), at: http://time.com/4091301/republican-debate-transcript-cnbc-boulder/). My only reason for doing so concerned the blustering over liberal media bias coming from certain candidates and, subsequently, the decision by the Republican National Committee to suspend its cooperation with NBC/Comcast in airing further debates. Being employed by a family business where support for conservative Republican politics is the norm, I am entirely accustomed to hearing complaints, repeatedly, about the liberal bias of the mainstream media, favoring Democratic politicians and their liberal causes against the unwavering faith of everyday Americans in God, the Constitution (as the Founders wrote it), the free market, and the simple morality of frugality, sobriety, and self-reliance. If the Republican Party since the 1960s has promulgated any unique, consistent, and pervasive mantra, then it would indisputably be “blame the liberal media for everything that has gone wrong with America.”
In an electoral cycle where, despite a bewildering array of choices between moderately conservative, starkly conservative, harshly conservative, libertarian-conservative, Evangelical conservative, ostensibly business-savvy conservative, soft-spoken outsider conservative, and just plain “out in right field,” strangely bombastically conservative candidates, it seems likely that the broader American electorate in November 2016 will, short of Constitutionally funky rigging of electoral procedures in swing states, elect a Democrat to serve as President for the next four years, it probably should not be any surprise that it is now time to drag out the liberal media as whipping boy for a demographically shrinking Republican electorate, seemingly deprived of a good reason to feel excited (by which I, of course, really mean angry).
Acknowledging, in this regard, that it’s never the wrong time to start blaming the media during Republican primary season, it seemed to me, perhaps mistakenly, as though the reaction to the Boulder CNBC debate was taking Republican anti-media politics to a new level. After all, how much can a panel of personalities from a network that specializes in business reporting and casual investment advice really demonstrate a pervasive anti-conservative bias? It was not as if CNBC executives had invited in someone like Rachel Maddow to lambaste the more spiritually minded Republican candidates for their unwillingness to accept the theory of evolution! If Jim Cramer and Rick Santelli (a personality at least partly if erroneously associated with the beginnings of the Tea Party movement!) have to be counted among the worst perpetrators in the mainstream media’s efforts to tarnish traditional American values and undermine the capacity of political conservatism to restore American exceptionalism, then the cultural state of siege faced by Republican Party conservatives at the present time must be unimaginably grim indeed - even quarters where they could once rely on staunch supporters of the free market, limited government, and individual liberty now harbor treacherous enemies and closet defenders of the welfare state and the road to serfdom! I had to see just how these “more liberal than I could ever have imagined” moderators ambushed the unsuspecting top tier Republican candidates.
To be fair, John Harwood, a columnist with The New York Times, a quintessential liberal publication, was among the moderators for the debate. It would be impossible to write off Harwood’s participation in the debate as something less than an effort by CNBC to appear balanced in organizing a debate with journalists from different corners of the political spectrum. That said, Harwood’s first question, directed toward Donald Trump, showcased the very same condescending attitude that Republican Party conservatives have been quick to attribute to mainstream journalists. Following a short summary of some of Trump’s more eccentric campaign positions, Harwood literally characterized Trump’s candidacy as a “comic book version of a presidential campaign,” a characterization for which Trump scolded him in his reply. Trump was right to do so, and it was, in no way, shape, or form, an appropriate way to start off a debate of Presidential candidates, however outlandish certain of Trump’s positions have been to date. In effect, Harwood opened the door to claims of media bias by phrasing his question in a way that most viewers of the debate, either in the live audience or at home, would never expect to see in the context of a Democratic debate relative to, say, Bernie Sanders’ plan to guarantee universal free access to public higher education. Emphatically, I would have expected more professional journalistic behavior from Harwood and, at least, a greater degree of situational awareness in personally evaluating the appropriateness of his own questions relative to the possibility that he might be perceived as a manipulative liberal journalist, turning an opportunity to have serious policy debate into a three-ring circus in which the top tier Republican candidates could be painted as buffoons!
I want to emphasize Harwood’s unprofessional characterization of Trump’s policy recommendations in order, among other things, to argue that, having evaluated the rest of the debate, I cannot fathom how CNBC’s moderation of the debate could be accused of fostering a bias in its treatment of the slate of candidates to such an extent that the RNC would be justified in suspending further primary debates with NBC/Comcast. After Harwood’s mistreatment of Trump, CNBC’s Becky Quick undertook a stinging interrogation of Dr. Ben Carson’s 10-15 percent flat tax proposal, arguing that it would either cause the federal budget deficit to balloon or force a reduction of the entire federal budget by 40 percent. I would fully expect and demand the same rigorous sort of treatment with regard to tax proposals, domestic projects, or entitlement reform measures in the Democratic primary debates - if the math does not add up for Hillary Clinton’s recommendations on domestic energy policies, then such proposals should be called out for scrutiny in this sort of debate context.
The first mention by any of the candidates of liberal media bias came, interestingly, from Senator Marco Rubio, who, when questioned by Carl Quintanilla about his reported absence from multiple votes in the Senate and a call by one Florida paper for his resignation, countered that Senator Bob Graham, one of Rubio’s predecessors from Florida, never received calls for his resignation when his Presidential campaign resulted in a significant number of missed votes. Later, Senator Rubio returned to the theme of liberal media bias independent of any question offered by the panel of moderators, labeling the mainstream media as Hillary Clinton’s super PAC for, among other things, converting the latter’s recent grilling before House Republicans on the special committee investigating the 2013 Benghazi attack on the U.S. Consulate into a victory for Clinton.
Not wanting to ignore other efforts to blame the media, Senator Ted Cruz, in his first opportunity to answer a question from Carl Quintanilla on his opposition to the most recent federal budget compromise, chose to avoid discussing fiscal policy and instead blame the panel of moderators for converting the debate into a veritable “cage match” between the slate of candidates. Again, in all fairness, following Harwood’s initial treatment of Trump, Cruz had a point. On the other hand, in the context of debate that should have highlighted fiscal policy, regulation of businesses, and divergent approaches to entitlement reform, what does Cruz’s preference to avoid a fiscal policy discussion at the expense of missing an opportunity to attack the media tell us about the broader appeal of his position against fiscal policy compromises to avoid government shutdowns and/or debt default? In categorically refusing to engage in this discussion, maybe Cruz gave the most honest reply to Quintanilla’s suggestion that he was not the sort of problem-solver that the American people were looking for in Washington.
The larger point that I want to make in regard to the debate is that, in my view, the questions given to each candidate were largely appropriate and, to a great extent, it appeared that the moderators made a palpable effort to give each of the ten candidates on stage a decent share of time to both answer questions and respond to attacks from other candidates. If any of the candidates failed to command adequate attention in a way that could have boosted their campaign fortunes, then it was not for lack of an opportunity to convey their ideas on where the U.S. economy needed to go during the next Presidential administration and how the federal government could assist this process (if only by getting out of the way, a position supported by nearly every candidate on stage). Emphatically, it seemed that the format did not give Senator Paul, Governor Christie, or Governor Huckabee many opportunities to express their views, but, to a great extent, the onus for any apparent disadvantage experienced by these candidates remains not with CNBC but with the exuberance of their opponents in utilizing every opportunity to intervene in discussions even when not explicitly being called on by moderators to do so - such exuberance might at least partially explain why Trump, Carson, Fiorina, and, increasingly, Rubio have been doing as well as they have to date in the polls.
Fundamentally, if the debate formats have not been conducive to airing the views of the lower polling Republican candidates, to say nothing of Governors Pataki and Jindal and Senators Graham and Santorum (the “under card” candidates) who cannot even find their way back to the grown-ups table to debate the issues, then the fault rests with the larger primary process in the Republican Party and the plethora of candidates currently competing. It is simply impossible to accommodate fourteen candidates for an in-depth discussion of policies without having certain organizations left feeling that they have been accorded inadequate attention and, thus, that the larger Republican electorate has not been given enough of a chance to evaluate their candidate’s merit. It might be worth asking, in this respect, why, at this particular moment in its history, the GOP has presented so large and contentious a field of Presidential candidates.
In my opinion, the size and combative nature of the present slate of candidates appears symptomatic a crisis within the Republican Party as it seeks to come to terms with the changing demographics of the broader American electorate and the likelihood that, if the party is to survive into the future as something more than a regional concern, it will have to undertake a deep reconsideration of its ideological principles. As in previous electoral cycles, the GOP is undergoing a struggle between extreme partisans of moral/religious and/or economic (libertarian) conservatism and moderate/establishment Republicans, open to pragmatic compromise with Democrats in Congress and/or the executive branch. As the more principled extreme conservatives see themselves increasingly marginalized across the broader American electorate, however, their politics have become steadily more extreme and their willingness to compromise with opponents has diminished. From this standpoint, ultra-conservative Republicans, frustrated with the array of establishment moderates (e.g. Governors Bush and Kasich), have enabled the growth of an unwieldy slate of candidates in a frantic search for the sort of principled conservative candidate who might be capable of articulating a new direction for the country that can appeal to constituencies outside the GOP, emphasizing rigorous fidelity to traditional Judeo-Christian morality, limited governmental regulation, lower taxes, reduction of the size of federal bureaucracies, appointment of conservative jurists, and a more muscular American diplomatic and military presence internationally. Effectively, the Republican libertarian and Evangelical ultra-conservative base (i.e. the folks who went out to form grassroots Tea Party groups in 2009) is scouring the party looking for a reincarnation of Ronald Reagan or, at least, what they believe Reagan stood for, embodied in a new candidate who will put their image of America first and put the liberals in their place. Sadly for these true believers, the America of 2016 is not the America of 1980. If Reagan ran today, he would have to veer well to the left of ideological imaginations of the Republican electorate to hold any hope of winning across the general electorate. The size of the current GOP primary slate is accentuating tendencies to undermine support for more moderate candidates while simultaneously bolstering candidates who stand very little chance of winning in a general election against the likely Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton.
With these considerations in mind, playing the media bias card is as much a tactic to appeal to the ideological predispositions of the Republican electoral base, which has been warned by GOP leadership not to trust the mainstream media since at least the 1960s, as it is an effort by individual candidates to curtail serious media inquiry on legitimate questions on personal behavior and/or qualifications. Thus, the questioning of personal spending habits and accumulation and default on personal debts by Senator Rubio becomes another issue of media bias in which matters of personal conduct that might demonstrate proclivities toward fiscal restraint and/or abandon would be admitted against a Republican candidate but never against a Democrat, because charges against the latter would tend to impugn his or her character in damaging ways. It makes little difference, in this respect, if such counterfactuals hold no basis in reality - the point is that the media is out to undermine the political projects of conservatives and, as such, any personal black mark that can be leveled at a Republican candidate will be exploited.
In an electoral cycle where, despite a bewildering array of choices between moderately conservative, starkly conservative, harshly conservative, libertarian-conservative, Evangelical conservative, ostensibly business-savvy conservative, soft-spoken outsider conservative, and just plain “out in right field,” strangely bombastically conservative candidates, it seems likely that the broader American electorate in November 2016 will, short of Constitutionally funky rigging of electoral procedures in swing states, elect a Democrat to serve as President for the next four years, it probably should not be any surprise that it is now time to drag out the liberal media as whipping boy for a demographically shrinking Republican electorate, seemingly deprived of a good reason to feel excited (by which I, of course, really mean angry).
Acknowledging, in this regard, that it’s never the wrong time to start blaming the media during Republican primary season, it seemed to me, perhaps mistakenly, as though the reaction to the Boulder CNBC debate was taking Republican anti-media politics to a new level. After all, how much can a panel of personalities from a network that specializes in business reporting and casual investment advice really demonstrate a pervasive anti-conservative bias? It was not as if CNBC executives had invited in someone like Rachel Maddow to lambaste the more spiritually minded Republican candidates for their unwillingness to accept the theory of evolution! If Jim Cramer and Rick Santelli (a personality at least partly if erroneously associated with the beginnings of the Tea Party movement!) have to be counted among the worst perpetrators in the mainstream media’s efforts to tarnish traditional American values and undermine the capacity of political conservatism to restore American exceptionalism, then the cultural state of siege faced by Republican Party conservatives at the present time must be unimaginably grim indeed - even quarters where they could once rely on staunch supporters of the free market, limited government, and individual liberty now harbor treacherous enemies and closet defenders of the welfare state and the road to serfdom! I had to see just how these “more liberal than I could ever have imagined” moderators ambushed the unsuspecting top tier Republican candidates.
To be fair, John Harwood, a columnist with The New York Times, a quintessential liberal publication, was among the moderators for the debate. It would be impossible to write off Harwood’s participation in the debate as something less than an effort by CNBC to appear balanced in organizing a debate with journalists from different corners of the political spectrum. That said, Harwood’s first question, directed toward Donald Trump, showcased the very same condescending attitude that Republican Party conservatives have been quick to attribute to mainstream journalists. Following a short summary of some of Trump’s more eccentric campaign positions, Harwood literally characterized Trump’s candidacy as a “comic book version of a presidential campaign,” a characterization for which Trump scolded him in his reply. Trump was right to do so, and it was, in no way, shape, or form, an appropriate way to start off a debate of Presidential candidates, however outlandish certain of Trump’s positions have been to date. In effect, Harwood opened the door to claims of media bias by phrasing his question in a way that most viewers of the debate, either in the live audience or at home, would never expect to see in the context of a Democratic debate relative to, say, Bernie Sanders’ plan to guarantee universal free access to public higher education. Emphatically, I would have expected more professional journalistic behavior from Harwood and, at least, a greater degree of situational awareness in personally evaluating the appropriateness of his own questions relative to the possibility that he might be perceived as a manipulative liberal journalist, turning an opportunity to have serious policy debate into a three-ring circus in which the top tier Republican candidates could be painted as buffoons!
I want to emphasize Harwood’s unprofessional characterization of Trump’s policy recommendations in order, among other things, to argue that, having evaluated the rest of the debate, I cannot fathom how CNBC’s moderation of the debate could be accused of fostering a bias in its treatment of the slate of candidates to such an extent that the RNC would be justified in suspending further primary debates with NBC/Comcast. After Harwood’s mistreatment of Trump, CNBC’s Becky Quick undertook a stinging interrogation of Dr. Ben Carson’s 10-15 percent flat tax proposal, arguing that it would either cause the federal budget deficit to balloon or force a reduction of the entire federal budget by 40 percent. I would fully expect and demand the same rigorous sort of treatment with regard to tax proposals, domestic projects, or entitlement reform measures in the Democratic primary debates - if the math does not add up for Hillary Clinton’s recommendations on domestic energy policies, then such proposals should be called out for scrutiny in this sort of debate context.
The first mention by any of the candidates of liberal media bias came, interestingly, from Senator Marco Rubio, who, when questioned by Carl Quintanilla about his reported absence from multiple votes in the Senate and a call by one Florida paper for his resignation, countered that Senator Bob Graham, one of Rubio’s predecessors from Florida, never received calls for his resignation when his Presidential campaign resulted in a significant number of missed votes. Later, Senator Rubio returned to the theme of liberal media bias independent of any question offered by the panel of moderators, labeling the mainstream media as Hillary Clinton’s super PAC for, among other things, converting the latter’s recent grilling before House Republicans on the special committee investigating the 2013 Benghazi attack on the U.S. Consulate into a victory for Clinton.
Not wanting to ignore other efforts to blame the media, Senator Ted Cruz, in his first opportunity to answer a question from Carl Quintanilla on his opposition to the most recent federal budget compromise, chose to avoid discussing fiscal policy and instead blame the panel of moderators for converting the debate into a veritable “cage match” between the slate of candidates. Again, in all fairness, following Harwood’s initial treatment of Trump, Cruz had a point. On the other hand, in the context of debate that should have highlighted fiscal policy, regulation of businesses, and divergent approaches to entitlement reform, what does Cruz’s preference to avoid a fiscal policy discussion at the expense of missing an opportunity to attack the media tell us about the broader appeal of his position against fiscal policy compromises to avoid government shutdowns and/or debt default? In categorically refusing to engage in this discussion, maybe Cruz gave the most honest reply to Quintanilla’s suggestion that he was not the sort of problem-solver that the American people were looking for in Washington.
The larger point that I want to make in regard to the debate is that, in my view, the questions given to each candidate were largely appropriate and, to a great extent, it appeared that the moderators made a palpable effort to give each of the ten candidates on stage a decent share of time to both answer questions and respond to attacks from other candidates. If any of the candidates failed to command adequate attention in a way that could have boosted their campaign fortunes, then it was not for lack of an opportunity to convey their ideas on where the U.S. economy needed to go during the next Presidential administration and how the federal government could assist this process (if only by getting out of the way, a position supported by nearly every candidate on stage). Emphatically, it seemed that the format did not give Senator Paul, Governor Christie, or Governor Huckabee many opportunities to express their views, but, to a great extent, the onus for any apparent disadvantage experienced by these candidates remains not with CNBC but with the exuberance of their opponents in utilizing every opportunity to intervene in discussions even when not explicitly being called on by moderators to do so - such exuberance might at least partially explain why Trump, Carson, Fiorina, and, increasingly, Rubio have been doing as well as they have to date in the polls.
Fundamentally, if the debate formats have not been conducive to airing the views of the lower polling Republican candidates, to say nothing of Governors Pataki and Jindal and Senators Graham and Santorum (the “under card” candidates) who cannot even find their way back to the grown-ups table to debate the issues, then the fault rests with the larger primary process in the Republican Party and the plethora of candidates currently competing. It is simply impossible to accommodate fourteen candidates for an in-depth discussion of policies without having certain organizations left feeling that they have been accorded inadequate attention and, thus, that the larger Republican electorate has not been given enough of a chance to evaluate their candidate’s merit. It might be worth asking, in this respect, why, at this particular moment in its history, the GOP has presented so large and contentious a field of Presidential candidates.
In my opinion, the size and combative nature of the present slate of candidates appears symptomatic a crisis within the Republican Party as it seeks to come to terms with the changing demographics of the broader American electorate and the likelihood that, if the party is to survive into the future as something more than a regional concern, it will have to undertake a deep reconsideration of its ideological principles. As in previous electoral cycles, the GOP is undergoing a struggle between extreme partisans of moral/religious and/or economic (libertarian) conservatism and moderate/establishment Republicans, open to pragmatic compromise with Democrats in Congress and/or the executive branch. As the more principled extreme conservatives see themselves increasingly marginalized across the broader American electorate, however, their politics have become steadily more extreme and their willingness to compromise with opponents has diminished. From this standpoint, ultra-conservative Republicans, frustrated with the array of establishment moderates (e.g. Governors Bush and Kasich), have enabled the growth of an unwieldy slate of candidates in a frantic search for the sort of principled conservative candidate who might be capable of articulating a new direction for the country that can appeal to constituencies outside the GOP, emphasizing rigorous fidelity to traditional Judeo-Christian morality, limited governmental regulation, lower taxes, reduction of the size of federal bureaucracies, appointment of conservative jurists, and a more muscular American diplomatic and military presence internationally. Effectively, the Republican libertarian and Evangelical ultra-conservative base (i.e. the folks who went out to form grassroots Tea Party groups in 2009) is scouring the party looking for a reincarnation of Ronald Reagan or, at least, what they believe Reagan stood for, embodied in a new candidate who will put their image of America first and put the liberals in their place. Sadly for these true believers, the America of 2016 is not the America of 1980. If Reagan ran today, he would have to veer well to the left of ideological imaginations of the Republican electorate to hold any hope of winning across the general electorate. The size of the current GOP primary slate is accentuating tendencies to undermine support for more moderate candidates while simultaneously bolstering candidates who stand very little chance of winning in a general election against the likely Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton.
With these considerations in mind, playing the media bias card is as much a tactic to appeal to the ideological predispositions of the Republican electoral base, which has been warned by GOP leadership not to trust the mainstream media since at least the 1960s, as it is an effort by individual candidates to curtail serious media inquiry on legitimate questions on personal behavior and/or qualifications. Thus, the questioning of personal spending habits and accumulation and default on personal debts by Senator Rubio becomes another issue of media bias in which matters of personal conduct that might demonstrate proclivities toward fiscal restraint and/or abandon would be admitted against a Republican candidate but never against a Democrat, because charges against the latter would tend to impugn his or her character in damaging ways. It makes little difference, in this respect, if such counterfactuals hold no basis in reality - the point is that the media is out to undermine the political projects of conservatives and, as such, any personal black mark that can be leveled at a Republican candidate will be exploited.
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