Biden: Dispelling the Delusion

It was predictable. In December of 2023 I described the dangers of the Democratic strategy like this:

There are so many ways [the Democratic strategy] could blow up in their face!
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Or maybe Biden dies, or the mental deterioration becomes just too obvious. By suppressing all intra-party opposition, no possible contender can arise, leaving them high and dry if he should falter.

The thing that strikes me about this is the level of delusion exhibited, not only by Biden, but by the people around him and his defenders in social media. It’s like a law of nature that if you diverge from the truth, eventually you will snap back to reality. That’s what’s happening now. Biden’s performance in that fateful debate, his position in the polls, the concerns about his health, his embarrassing gaffes at the NATO press conference, all were too much weighty reality for the delusion to bear.

Their strategy of scaring their base about Trump winning backfired when people started realizing that Biden’s nomination would ensure it. The more they emphasize the disaster of a Trump victory and Project 2025, the more they make the case for some other candidate being nominated.

It’s worth considering how we arrived at this point. In the Democratic primary of 2020, Joe Biden had come in fourth and fifth in the first two contests, and a distant second to Bernie Sanders in Nevada. When Biden won South Carolina, with an assist from James Clyburn, the party decided to circle the wagons in a coordinated effort to stymie Sanders’ surging campaign. Barrack Obama got on the phone with the other candidates, and persuaded them to withdraw en masse, clearing the way for Biden’s eventual win. But Biden wasn’t chosen because he was popular, or because he could beat Trump (as, of course, he eventually did). He was chosen by a Democratic cabal because he could beat Sanders.

This created the illusion of popularity. Biden’s accession was engineered by the party and the media, and then people voted for him in the general election because they feared and despised the other guy. Apparently lots of people, including Biden himself, believe his victory was proof of his popularity; but that wasn’t reality, it was a comforting fiction.

Biden was already skating on thin ice, in a sense. Americans were fed up with the Democrats’ neoliberal gerontocracy, ever subservient to corporate interests. That was the lesson they should have learned from Sanders’ 2016 insurgency, and Hillary Clinton’s loss. But when Biden won in 2020, they had even less reason to reassess their standing with the American people. Their lesser-of-two-evils strategy had worked, and that relieved the pressure to reform.

That massive denialism is thus prologue to the 2024 election, in which the party essentially anointed Biden the nominee, pressured potential primary candidates not to run or kept them off ballots, and even cancelled elections entirely in two states. That was incredibly reckless. They put all their eggs in the basket of one manifestly unpopular candidate who was already showing signs of cognitive decline, apparently believing that the lesser-of-two-evils strategy would work once more. But rather than being a repeat of 2020, even before Biden’s disastrous debate performance the election was looking much more like 2016—the hubris of an ageing establishment candidate banking on people disliking and fearing Donald Trump more than him. That was already a tenuous strategy, but then Biden’s abetting of Israel’s Palestinian massacre, earning him the moniker #genocidejoe, made him–at least for some voters–the greater evil.

Part of the strategy that ensured Biden would get the nomination was for the people around him, his advisors, Democratic politicians and of course the press, to lie about his cognitive decline—despite the fact that it’s been perfectly obvious for a year, if not since the last election. This is gaslighting on a massive scale.

If you’re a Democrat, or inclined to vote that way, they’ve been lying to you. That’s the thing about propaganda. It’s most effective when directed at your own side. Even after watching the debate, there are still people on social media maintaining that Biden merely had a bad night. It’s a testament to the power of propaganda, and the dogged credulity of the “vote blue no matter who” faction.

What was astounding was the reaction of the press. As if directed by some unconscious choreography, the same pundits and personalities who had been lying about Biden’s competency up to that point did a pirouette and pronounced Biden’s political demise. They pretended to be shocked. That wasn’t the result of any conspiracy, though, more of an “emperor has no clothes” moment. Over 51 million Americans watched the debate and saw Biden’s mental impairment with their own eyes. The lies simply became untenable, and the media were forced to yield to reality. Still, it’s impressive how quickly the class charged with manufacturing consent can flip from one narrative to another when it suits them.

Today, after Biden’s much trumpeted “Big Boy” press conference, it seems like the tide has turned, and Democratic politicians are talking about not whether, but how they will move him out of the way. This is in many ways a relief, since it’s an admission of reality: Biden’s cognitive decline all but guarantees his loss in November, and would potentially drag down other down-ballot candidates. Dispelling delusion and accepting reality is always a good thing.

However, as the Democrats go about choosing the candidate who will replace him, they remain mired in the delusion that an establishment candidate can prevail in an election that is essentially populist. Again, they’re banking on the lesser-of-two-evils strategy. They’re kicking the can down the road. That may work. I hope it does. But it’s not a viable long-term strategy.