I don’t care about Bret Stephens. I don’t make a habit of reading him. I don’t see value in deconstructing his arguments in the Times’ op-ed pages. There’s only one thing about him that’s important to me right now – his ability to make being an undecided voter seem like a public virtue.
One of his latest is “What Harris Must Do to Win Over Skeptics (Like Me).” For most of it, he says the vice president has been too light on policy details. He wants to know more. “If Harris can answer the sorts of questions I posed above, she should be quick to do so, if only to dispel a widespread perception of unseriousness,” he wrote Tuesday. “If she can’t, then what was she doing over nearly eight years as a senator and vice president?”
He says there’s more that makes a voter like him “uneasy.” He agrees with President Joe Biden in that the free world is living through a “decisive decade.” “Does Harris have an overriding strategic concept for how to steer through it, or the instincts to respond to fast-moving crises?”
"Illiberal populism has taken root in response to well-founded perceptions of elite incompetence, highhandedness and self-dealing," he wrote. "Does Harris have anything to offer disaffected voters, or does she merely embody the elitist perspective that they despise?"
Stephens insists these are serious questions. He insists he’s being serious in asking them. He even implies that asking them is somehow a subversive act, as the alternative to Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, is “the all-purpose response for many voters to any doubts about Harris’s qualifications.”
Trump “may be much the worse sinner,” Stephens adds, but the argument that he’s “our Mussolini, scheming with ever-greater malevolence and cunning to end the Republic, is getting a little long in the tooth.” Anyway, he says, the Democrats are no saints. They interfere with democracy, too.
"For what my vote is worth — very little, considering I live in New York — I’d much rather cast a ballot for Harris than stay home," Stephens wrote. "But votes need to be earned."
OK, look.
Harris is the vice president. Before that, she was a United States senator. And before that, she was the attorney general of the state of California. Ergo, she’s experienced and she’s qualified. Period. She has vowed to build on the president’s accomplishments. If you say you want to know more about her policies, you’re admitting you don’t know much about his.
Concerns about her elitism are laughable. This administration has been conspicuous about standing on the side of people who work for a living and against people who own so much they don’t have to work. As for the Democrats “weaponizing the instruments of state power to interfere with the will of the voters,” sure, if you eat rightwing propaganda for breakfast.
The question isn’t whether Kamala Harris can win over an undecided voter like Bret Stephens. The question is, or should be: why can’t an undecided voter like Bret Stephens make up his own damn mind?
Think about it.
Undecided voters like Stephens always say they can’t decide who should be president until they see “the fine print,” meaning highly specific policy proposals about things that matter most. Saying this gives the impression that undecided voters are shrewd and high-minded, and even that they are concerned citizens who put the country’s interests above their own.
The truth?
The last thing an undecided voter wants to hear about is policy. If they cared about it to any degree, they would not be undecided. They would already know where each presidential candidate stands, where their political parties stand, even if that understanding is in the broadest of strokes, and they would have made up their minds a long time ago.
Policy requires undecided voters to pay attention and paying attention is hard work. Indeed, democratic politics itself requires labor. If you want to avoid such labor, but not appear to be avoiding it, it’s better to think about democratic politics as if it’s a bad thing. It’s better to think of it as something to be avoided, as if getting “down in the mud” taints you morally.
In this sense, policy isn’t what the high-minded do.
It’s what partisans do, and undecided voters are not partisans.
Just ask them.
What undecided voters care most about is social standing – about looking like concerned citizens, especially to peers. They want the status, but they don’t want to earn it. So they look for ways to seem thoughtful about things without doing the work of thinking things through. They shift that burden away from themselves, so that instead of taking responsibility for democracy, as they should, it’s up to the candidate to “earn my vote.”
And because policy is beside the point for undecided voters, there’s almost nothing a candidate can do policy-wise to earn their support.
This wouldn’t be so bad if the rest of us didn’t respect the idea that being an undecided voter is virtuous, thus giving them more incentive to keep going with their nonsense. But we respect them every time we argue about what candidates must do to win them over. We respect them every time we accept their excuses for not taking their democracy seriously.
And in respecting them, we do not put the onus of democracy where it properly belongs – on the shoulders of the people of the United States.
I don’t care about a dishonest hack like Bret Stephens.
Neither should you.
The only thing about him that matters right now is his ability to make a vice, like shirking democratic responsibilities, into a public virtue.
It’s not.
And we should say so.