Chris Christie to Vivek Ramaswamy:
"This is the fourth debate in which you would have been voted in the first twenty minutes the most obnoxious blowhard in America."
What would the Cree or Khoisan people do?
I didn't see this debate live. I taped it to watch this morning. I had dinner with high school classmates, one of whom became a well-respected anthropologist, a scholar of hunter-gatherer foraging societies. By odd coincidence, while the debate exchange was happening live, my classmate was answering my question about how small groups -- the Cree people in the Canadian arctic, the Khoisan people in the Kalahari desert in southwest Africa -- dealt with jerks in their midst.
My actual question was: "What would happen to a Trump-type person in those traditional societies?"
His response was that those cultures valued and rewarded sharing. Hunting for game was a group activity. They are rather egalitarian. Hunters divided the meat from successful hunts among the community somewhat equally. They discouraged bragging or credit-taking. I asked what would happen if someone thought to say things like, "I alone can save you," and made vainglorious attempts to seize leadership.
My classmate said people would harass and condemn him. They would mock him. They would put ants in his bed. They would make him miserable. And if that didn't work, the miscreant could be banished from the group. One cannot survive on one's own and he would die. Or maybe the village would wake up to find that the man had been stabbed to death from multiple spear wounds in the middle of the night.
Last night's debate was probably pointless as far as changing the arc of the 2024 GOP election nomination fight. DeSantis's decline is probably intact. Haley looked good, as she always has, but there was no knock-out incident that clears the field for her. Chris Christie continued with his message that the real election is not between the four of these people on stage but against the frontrunner, Trump. He called Trump
a dictator, a bully, who has taken shots at everybody, whether they have given him great service or not over time, who dares to disagree with him. . . . He is unfit. This is a guy who just said he wants to use the Department of Justice to go after his enemies when he gets in there. The fact of the matter is there is no bigger issue in this race, Megan, than Donald Trump.
Meanwhile, Ramaswamy. Ramaswamy remains a caricature of Trump, as scorched-earth as Trump, talking in a version of Trump's ALL CAP rants. Ramaswamy called Nikki Haley a "fascist" multiple times. He called her corrupt and held up this sign.
The audience cheered when Christie called Ramaswamy an obnoxious blowhard. Ramaswamy noticed and his face reacted. He knows he is irritating the vast majority of people. Yet he continued and ramped it up a notch. A niche of people like it.
I noticed that the audience was mostly silent when Christie criticized Trump. The mechanisms of social control that work against Ramaswamy don't work against Trump. Trump is a wartime-leader. In wartime against an internal enemy as Trump describes it -- communistic Democrats, their turncoat RINO allies, the fake news, and career employees in the federal government -- intemperance and a selfish drive to victory is acceptable. Trump's voters bonded to him and like him as he is.
The USA is a society, not a community. Self-interested economic behavior is supposed to be transformed into a social good by an invisible hand. The founders thought that the same would happen in government with a federal constitution dividing power among separate branches. Ambition would check ambition.
Voters developed a taste for angry intemperance in a politician-showman. Ramaswamy sees which way the wind is blowing. Those voters have Trump for now, but Ramaswamy is waiting his turn. Trump openly defies the mechanisms of social control, and about half of Americans either don't care or they like it. What works in bands of hunter-gatherers is not working in America.
Even Adam Smith knew the Invisible Hand would not take care of jerks. That's why a government based on agreed upon laws and social justice is needed...
It appears that the Cree and Khoisan understand better than we do the danger posed by bullies and blowhards. Too many of our fellow citizens thrive on transgression.
I think I'll re-watch The Gods Must Be Crazy.
More fun than the "debate"....