The Democrats’ biggest lie What if Biden is more dangerous than Trump?

Just about every commencement speech has a story illustrating a moral precept to live by at its centre. Here was his: years ago, he knew a woman in California who was making only $40,000 a year as a teacher. By Power Lunch standards, she was a loser. But then truth poured from the heavens and opened her eyes. She took up painting and mastered, not her art, but the art of marketing her art, and she began to sell her canvases, the speaker said, for $350,000. This was the moral of the story the graduates needed to absorb. If you “invest in yourself”, the speaker explained, you will be a success. You will, in other words, stop being a loser-teacher and you will become a winner who knows how to game the marketplace and other people. The speaker finished his inspiring peroration by declaring that a college degree was of little importance in a world where personal initiative could make one a fortune, and with a flurry of references to certain celebrities who live in town, the implication being that he knew these gigantic exemplars of American success personally.

By high school, most of Montclair’s wealthy liberal elites have sent their children to private school, so though there was still a meaningful group of rich people in the audience, most of the people in attendance were on some level of the American middle-class, with at least a third of the audience belonging to the black lower middle-class or working class, or the working poor. I can only imagine what effect the speech had on those black families for whom their child’s high-school degree was an occasion of joyful coming-through, and the possibility of college something like a miracle, let alone how the speech struck the many teachers who were there. No one, however, protested. The speaker left the podium to weak applause and a bewildered silence.

My thoughts turned to that graduation ceremony as I listened to Biden implode during last Thursday’s presidential debate. The chagrin returned. Here, after nearly eight years of progressive hectoring about systemic racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and general condemnation of anyone who dares question any component of the super-accelerated revolution in mores that American liberals have wrought — here was an 81-year-old straight white male leading the country into chaos. And not just any white male. A mentally deteriorating white male who, until that moment, had the full support of the rainbow coalition of Excluded Others who had staked their credibility and authority on their opposition to straight white-male dominance.

Was it all for naught then? The enormous effort to adapt to a world where you had to tolerate and endure mediocrity, incompetence and sometimes outright malevolence and venality all because the person embodying such qualities belonged to a protected group? Was the onslaught, begun in the universities in the Nineties, against any aspect of culture or society that bore the imprint of a dead-white male hand actually the greatest instance of collective gaslighting since Pravda? In fact, after a while, I had jovially gone along with the riotous shift in paradigm since, to be honest, many of the people I dislike most in the world happen to be unqualified, untalented, unintelligent, overbearingly powerful and super-privileged white males. And here, after all that, was the inadequate, grotesquely over-rewarded white male par excellence, right there on CNN, leading the country, including the officially excluded, straight to hell.

Following the debate, the liberal media turned, en masse, on a dime against Biden, after years of gingerly acknowledging Biden’s visible mental decline and then delicately refuting it: “Mr. Biden has been a wise and steady presence” (The New York Times, 29 February 2024). A recent “insider-access” (read: sycophantic) book about Biden, Franklin Foer’s The Last Politician, published just 10 months ago, noted the President’s mental stumbles only to dismiss them by celebrating his “weathered instincts and robust self-confidence”, his “calming presence and his strategic clarity”, and “the advantages of having an older president”.

An authoritarian regime that constructs an alternate universe of peace and harmony with which to hide its monstrous subversions of the human spirit creates an atmosphere of almost universal irony. The ironies in American life are proliferating as fast as America is declining. For eight years we have heard, again and again from liberal mandarins, that Trump poses an “existential threat” to democracy. But a president who cannot mentally function is a greater one. And even amid all the sudden liberal calls for Biden to step aside, there is the same reliance on Trump to justify Biden. Trump lied again and again at the debate, we are told, and he indeed lied, again and again, shamelessly. But, aside from Biden’s own lies — Obama built cages for illegal immigrants, not Trump, who happily made use of them; Trump never vowed to cut Social Security and Medicare — the Democrat lie that the President is in control of his faculties when he has been, for years, descending into dementia is far more destructive than Trump’s lies about his “achievements” — lies that are, after all, merely campaign and debate boilerplate.

It would be productive if, before the liberal establishment answers the question of what to do if and when Biden steps aside, it asked itself why it promulgated the Big Lie of Biden’s Mental Health in the first place. Obviously, jobs depend on Biden remaining in the White House; a change in president is a change in career, income and status for many people. Beyond that, though, it seems plausible to consider another reason. A victory for Trump is a victory for liberal culture. The worse, the better, as the Trotskyists used to say.

In America, you can buy something called an E-Z pass, a plastic sensor that you stick on the windshield of your car in order to drive through a toll without having to stop. Since 2016, Trump has provided a moral E-Z pass for the American liberal establishment. You stick the Trump E-Z pass on your conscience, as it were, and you can betray your obligations as a journalist, artist, teacher, politician or just about any position that requires you to approach a situation without bias, or the baggage of an ideological presumption. Since the advent of Trump, fiction, poetry, the theatre, film, even music have all been reduced to exercises in social justice. Yet, in the eyes of the liberal mandarinate, work remains to be done. Some among them still brood over oppressive hegemonies like the “moral imagination” and “critical thinking”. A victory by Trump in 2024 would embolden the reduction of all cultural expression to social issues as never before.

As the liberals conceive of it, let the Right have the political institutions anyway. Generations of post-structuralist thinkers have shown how impoverished they are — the “deep state” is a Left-wing construction. Culture and civil society are what matter. Behind the cover of anti-Trump defiance, they are yours for the taking. After all, Biden didn’t decide to run in 2020 because he was horrified by the violent demonstrations in Charlottesville, as he said he did. Having lost his bid for president twice before, he ran because the revulsion against Trump after Charlottesville was so striking he felt he couldn’t, at long last, lose. In that moment, his instincts, and those of his closest advisor, Lady Macbeth — I mean Dr Lady Macbeth, his wife — were unerring.

Beyond Biden fumbling his golf handicap — first six, he said, then eight — not many people made much of the two ghostly cognitions sparring over their 18-hole capacity. But it was the most depressing moment of the evening. The question of who was the better golfer made both men more animated and engaged than they had been for the entire debate. At that moment, they were not bitter political adversaries. They were avid sports competitors, and they were closer to each other than either man has ever been to the people they are so madly driven to represent. Let the American people eat super-accelerated changes in the most intimate public and private dimensions of their lives. The power lunch stays the same, always, and no “$40,000” human, in any part of America or the world, is invited.