The Democratic debate was heavy on vitriol and light on substance

For reasons that remain unclear, there was yet another Democratic primary debate on Tuesday night, the 10th such event of the presidential contest. The seven candidates who qualified convened in Charleston, South Carolina, ahead of the South Carolina primary on Saturday and the slew of Super Tuesday contests next week. It will not be the last debate that we are subjected to – yet another is scheduled for 15 March. Tuesday’s debate, hosted by CBS, was mercifully short compared to some others, wrapping up after just two hours. For my sins, I watched the whole thing.

Perhaps because there have been so many of these debates, the candidates seemed determined to make it dramatic television. At times, they seemed to be vying for ratings. Much of the evening was spent in shouting and cross talk. Biden pointed; Sanders threw his hands in the air in exasperation; Bloomberg delivered practiced jokes he had paid someone to write for him, exuding all the charisma of a rubber chicken. Everyone had grievances; everyone had accusations and recriminations to make against the others. Not that you could hear them: the shouting often made it hard to make out just quite what anyone was saying. The event was heavy on vitriol and light on substance.

Faint overtures toward civility were made. Joe Biden complained frequently that other candidates did not respect the response time limits, and used much of his own time to suggest that he might take extra time himself. The billionaire Michael Bloomberg, in an attempt to extoll the virtues of centrism, made an odd Freudian slip when referring to the wave of Democrats elected to the House in the 2018 midterms. “All those new Democrats who came in and put Nancy Pelosi in power, I bought – I got ‘em,” he said.

Others urged unity. “If we spend the next four months tearing our party apart,” warned Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, “We’re going to spend the next four years tearing our country apart.” This sentiment did not stop her from attacking her rivals, however: she quickly complained that Senators Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts had not been sufficiently productive in the Senate.

Perhaps the only person on stage who did not spend much of her speaking time yelling was Senator Warren, who remained composed and calm while the men around her screamed and grew petulant under pressure. But the chaos of Tuesday’s debate may have been partially a punishment for Senator Warren’s success in the previous debate last week, in Nevada, when she devastatingly attacked former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Warren’s attacks were a boon to her candidacy: she raised a tremendous amount of money during and just after the debate, and the polling numbers of Bloomberg, her ideological enemy and a significant Super Tuesday threat, dropped like a lead balloon after she was done with him. The event catapulted her to number two in a national poll, and demonstrated her ability to handily skewer an arrogant billionaire. But the events of last week’s debate seems to have cursed this week’s: every candidate wanted a Warren moment, but not every candidate is Elizabeth Warren. The result was a lot of attacks directed at Bloomberg and Sanders from other candidates that lacked the intelligence and moral certainty of Warren’s skewering of Bloomberg last week.

The moderators did not help. Some of the questions were phrased in what seemed like deliberate bad faith, such as when they suggested, absurdly, that Bernie Sanders was sympathetic to authoritarianism. Other questions were pointless softballs that elicited no meaningful information from the candidates, such as a concluding prompt directed at all the candidates, asking them to state their personal motto and to correct one misconception about themselves. To this, former vice-president Joe Biden replied, “I have more hair than I think I do.” It is quite possible that viewers who watched the debate ended it with less information than when they began.

The 10th Democratic debate, then, was less an informed discussion of the issues in the service of better informing the electorate than it was a bad-faith fiasco in the service of narcissism, dishonesty, and petty grievance. The event was so heavy on theatrics and so light on policy substance that it calls into question the usefulness of the broadcasts at all. The Tuesday debate did not benefit the republic, and may have actively hurt it. The events, repeated ad nauseam with few variations and little new information, seem to benefit no one except the networks that air them. They are designed less to facilitate meaningful debates on policy issues than to manufacture conflict and stoke voters’ contempt.

Perhaps the only moment of the night that seemed to have more to do with principle than pageantry was an exchange between Bloomberg and Warren, when Bloomberg objected to Warren’s characterization of the accusations of sexual harassment and pregnancy discrimination. Warren, speaking about her own experience of pregnancy discrimination when she was a public school teacher in her early twenties, brought up an accusation from a former employee of Bloomberg’s, who claims that when she told Bloomberg she was pregnant, he instructed her to “kill it”. Bloomberg denied that he ever said this; he asked Warren what evidence she had. Warren responded that her evidence was the woman’s own account. In fact, a third party witness also corroborated that Bloomberg did say this, but Warren’s answer that her evidence was the woman’s own words upheld an important principle: that in matters of sexism and sex discrimination claims, women’s testimony is evidence. It was that rarest of moments: a candidate on the debate stage saying something that mattered.

In response, Bloomberg threw up his hands. Later, after a similar exchange at the last debate, he said, he had already consented to release three women from their nondisclosure agreements, and his company would no longer use NDAs to silence sex discrimination claimants. What more did Warren want? It probably made the world a better place, Bloomberg conceded. And this, too, was a rare achievement for a Democratic debate: it achieved something positive for actual Americans.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist