The Democrats Must Collapse

“Collapsing” is a debate term that describes abandoning the vast majority of one’s argumentation in favor of hammering one point home as fiercely as possible. At first glance, it seems impractical. Why have one compelling argument at the end of a round rather than two or three? The answer is simple.

Consider a nail. It’s sharp and would probably hurt to step on. But stepping on 100 or 1000 nails is harmless. The force of each individual nail is applied over a large surface area, such that none of them can puncture the skin. This idea translates nicely to politics. While the flaws in a candidate or an economic plan might number in the thousands, the average voter has a short attention span. An adept politician knows which of their opponent’s flaws to present and which to ignore so as to convey a powerful message without overwhelming voters.

This strategy has been the modus operandi of the Conservative Party in Canada ever since they became the opposition party in 2015. Rather than attacking a large group of scandals all at once, they blow up one scandal after another, waiting for each one to play out before moving on. The latest and most jarring scandal to come out of Canadian politics reflects this: after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s attorney general, Jody Wilson-Raybould, alleged that he was being pressured by Trudeau to drop bribery charges against construction giant SNC Lavalin, it seemed like every Canadian news organization and every Conservative MP zeroed in on the growing scandal, magnifying its impact on the voter base. In fact, with approval ratings falling in Quebec and Ontario, Trudeau’s once massively popular Liberals stand a chance of losing their next election. If it had been treated like a Trump scandal, it would have spent a month on the news cycle. But not all scandals have to carry this kind of weight to be political winners. Two years ago, the Conservatives in Ontario chose to get angry at a duck for political gain: after Ontario’s Liberal government signed off on a $120,000, six-story high rubber duck for Canada’s 150th anniversary, the Conservatives used the arguably excessive grant to frame the ruling party as wasteful and irresponsible. Maybe they didn’t achieve that for every scandal—they certainly didn’t with the duck—but they did do what every opposition party wants to do: erode the ruling party’s credibility and push their own narrative, and they did so more effectively by presenting a unified, focused message.

The Democratic message is the antithesis of this coordinated attack on the party in power. Presented with a goldmine of issues to use to their advantage, the Democrats have opted to press on each one until the next one comes out the next day. The result is a scrambled, disjointed message, a bunch of responses to Trump’s scandals du jour rather than a coherent, whole response to the trainwreck that is his presidency. This peaked during the 2016 election, where the Clinton campaign spent so much time on Trump’s flaws as a candidate and a prospective president that it drowned out its own platform. It’s hard to pass up the latest scandal, especially since each one seems so damning, but to do that is to play into Trump’s hands. The tweets and the gaffes and the racist remarks are all bait, designed to provide bread and circuses to the base and targets for liberal outrage while more insidious policies pass under the radar, such as when the Environmental Protection Agency altered key Endangered Species Act language three days after the debacle in Helsinki.

The Democratic Party needs to choose its issues, and choose them wisely. A recent Yale survey brought hopeful news on a huge potential winner in this regard: climate change. Seventy percent of Americans believe that it’s happening, and that number seems to get bigger every day. But climate change doesn’t have to be the silver bullet. It could be healthcare, or voter suppression, or immigration (though I wouldn’t recommend that last one). We can’t afford to lose this needle in the haystack of lies and self-incrimination piling up on President Trump’s Twitter feed every day. The Democrats need to learn what the freshmen on Speech and Debate already know: that it never hurts to collapse.