I didn't catch all of it, but I found it to be an interesting exercise in which two fictional presidential candidates have the gloves-off debate we all long for, but which never happens because of safety rules the campaigns always insist on. It was a debate essentially between liberalism (Jimmy Smits) and libertarian conservatism (Alan Alda)--in other words between two kinds of liberals. Traditionalist conservatism wasn't represented; neither really was neoconservatism, and those are the two forces driving policy in the current conservative administration. So in effect the whole thing was rather an abstract exercise.
This meant a debate between a candidate in the New Deal liberal tradition who thinks government can have a positive impact in people's lives and a liberartian, which is not really conservatism. Libertarianism is the political philosophy of the market, and there is no greater destructive force in history than the market, whose capital-driven market has no interest conserving traditional values and the traditional way of life. Libertarianism is the opposite of conservatism, and it's one of the ironies of our current political discourse that this group, which worships the market, should be thought of as conservative.
Nevertheless, I think the Alan Alda character came across very well in the debate, at least in the part I saw, and I would give him the debate on points. Smits had his moments, but I found his arguments weak. The argument that Smits should have made and didn't is that the market runs according to the laws of the jungle. And the eat-or-be-eaten rules of the jungle always lead to the powerful dominating the weak. And when government does not prevent them, the powerful always look to increase their hold on power and control of the system. Tha'ts the way of the world. The whole spirit of American democracy was to create a system in which that would not happen. It is at a critical point in its history now in which that project is very much in danger of collapsing. Some argue that it already has.
Smits should have argued that we need big government not as a paternalistic institution to keep us as children, but as the only instrument powerful enough to counter the enormous power of capital. The American creed holds that those who work for their wealth deserve it, but that's a myth that has little to do with the realities of capitalism since the Civil War. Groups that have power hold onto it and they don't give it up unless forced to. And since the Reagan administration the powerful have been using to reinforce their hold on power. They have an interest in reducing taxes, but not on reducing the power of government to shore up their own power.
The argument that Smits and Alda should have had last night should not be about whether government is good or bad, but about how power in this country should be distributed and the role government plays in serving the needs of power--the power of the few or the power of the many.
West