The political landscape has been chalked full of absurdity and division. This has seemingly increased in the past decade and felt like a new standard.
However, on Oct. 1, roughly 43.15 million viewers and I were reminded that perhaps the political environment we’ve been witnessing isn’t standard. This was when Ohio Sen. JD Vance and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz faced off in the quadrennially occurring vice presidential debate.
Instead of wild lines regarding immigrants eating pets or enormous amounts of bickering between moderator and candidate, the debate was boring.
Now, it’s a given that the vice presidential debate isn’t as important as the presidential or as watched. It’s also true there are smaller memes that have come out of the vice presidential debate like Walz staring into the camera.
But that’s not very comparable to the debates we’ve witnessed in the past eight years. Love him or hate him, Donald Trump’s ability to say sensational and outrageous things has always been a crucial piece to his debating and campaigning since 2016.
It’s no surprise that Trump’s strategy has changed the playbook for how Republicans campaign. This change is what I believe to have upended the “normalcy” in politics. Often adopted by Trump allies and “MAGA Republicans,” this has become widespread.
While viewing the debate, a comment from the New York Times’s coverage struck me.
“What’s striking about this debate is how relatively normal it feels, just as the Pence-Harris debate did four years ago and the Pence-Tim Kaine debate did four years before that,” Maggie Haberman wrote. “The debates that Trump participates in are unlike anything in modern U.S. political history.”
What’s described as “Midwest Nice” dominated the debate, with Walz and Vance exchanging affirmations of each other’s beliefs and sympathies where appropriate.
On top of this, neither side made real attempts at “zinger” lines at the expense of their opponent. The debate focused on policy and why each of their running mates is not fit to run this country.
Post-debate conversations that I heard were based on how the vice presidential candidates felt and sounded like actual presidential candidates should.
Political gaffes and lunacy have always slithered their way into the world of politics, but those have come to a lesser degree. For a college student with no real hope for the political landscape or the country, this new world in politics has become exhausting.
Absurd claims after absurd claims, fruitless outrage after fruitless outrage. It feels hopeless. So where do we go from here?
It’d be worthless to wag my unimportant finger at multimillion-dollar political parties and cry about it being their fault. Would the nation be better if both parties embraced decorum? Sure. Would we learn and practice the same? Possibly.
We can choose to wait and wait for this to happen, or we can embrace it at the civilian level. The rhetoric only continues if it works on us.
Until we get to this point, we’ll be staring at an absurd landscape. Something we’ll only get an escape from with slivers of normalcy from a debate without massive consequence.