Audiences 11th in the Eleventh Debate

In the eleventh Democratic National Debate we are presented with the final two candidates in the democratic party: Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. This debate took place within the first week of the CoronaVirus’ recognition as a national pandemic and would set a different tone for this debate than any that came before it.

            I will be looking at this debate from the perspective of Mast’s second element of cultural performances, audiences. Audiences are one of Mast’s more self explanatory components of cultural performances as he explains that, “Scripts and performers must communicate culturally familiar content, messages that audiences can interpret and understand. Audiences interpret performances in variable ways” (Mast 11). When it comes to political cultural performances in America, Mast explains that the audiences that exist reflect the two party system that our country operates under, and that a third audience of moderate or undecided voters sit in between these two audiences.

            In the eleventh Democratic Debate both Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden are speaking to this preexisting base of the Democratic party; however, in many ways Bernie Sanders represents Mast’s fourth audience though, which is composed of audience members that usually belong to a third party or ‘emerging’ party. Bernie Sanders represents the progressive left wing and democratic socialist movements in America and while these sections of the political spectrum technically exist under the umbrella of the Democratic party many people consider them to be an entity that are radical and exist unto themselves.

            Both Biden and Bernie attempt to appeal to this centerist/undecided audience of voters in America during the eleventh debate by using two culturally familiar scripts of existential danger. The fist threat they discuss is the coronavirus and Joe Biden compares the pandemic to a foreign attack on American soil explaining that we need to come together as a nation around a candidate that can properly lead us through this virus. The second existential threat that the candidates brought up was the presidency of Donald Trump. In both cases the candidates hope to get their audiences to agree with the message that they were putting out in spite of what people thought of the actual messengers (Bernie and Biden). Both candidates explicitly said that if the other were to win that they would throw their full support behind them and campaign on one another's behalf. It is clear that both candidates, while vying for the candidacy, want to make it clear that there are larger threats to our collective well being than either of their campaigns and that by putting out this message they could corral audience members with themes of unity and warning of the urgency of change in the upcoming 2020 election.

Citations

Mast, Jason L. 2012. The Performative Presidency Crisis and Resurrection during the Clinton

Years. Cambridge, Ma: Cambridge University Press.