Biden’s decline was clear. clear — Anyone paying attention would agree. It was a legitimate question during the 2020 presidential election, when Democratic presidential candidate Julián Castro raised it during a debate and The Wall Street Journal’s Burton Swaim reported that Biden’s “voice was drowned out and his words were slurred” while campaigning in South Carolina.
Four years later, Democrats surprisingly steered Biden to a second nomination without a serious challenger. The taboo against questioning his acumen, established after his first nomination, seems to have held. And as Biden’s decline has seemingly accelerated in recent weeks and months, the media has not simply ignored or downplayed the issue. Efforts to call it out have been vigorously policed, with the White House attacking “cheap fakes,” followed by a flurry of articles criticizing Biden’s “distorted online version” (New York Times) and “misleading Republican videos” (NBC).
After the debate, NBC’s Chuck Todd expressed his alarm, saying, “Biden looks like the caricature the conservative media has painted him.” Or was it a Biden supporter who painted the caricature? Philosopher Crispin Sartwell wrote this week that Biden looks like the caricature the conservative media has painted him, and he’s right. Biden’s The downside is that “none of you could see the problem until you all saw it together.”
In his 1995 book Private Truths, Public Lies, political scientist Timur Kuran describes the motivations that lead people to be unaware, or pretend not to be aware, of political or social realities. As Kuran wrote, this situation can become unstable: “At some point, the right event, even if minor in nature, may cause a few sufficiently dissatisfied individuals to reach a threshold where they speak out against the status quo. Their change may then spur others to join the opposition. Public opposition spreads through a bandwagon process, with each addition generating more and more people, until eventually a large portion of society is openly opposed to the status quo.”
The debate didn’t provide any dramatic new information about Biden — the president has previously spoken incoherently and appeared weak and confused on video — so much so that it spawned a conservative “cartoon” — but it did kickstart the Klan bandwagon effect, at least among journalists, donors and Democratic activists.
Klann said that when his book was published in the years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, some readers felt it was relevant mainly to Eastern Europe and other countries “that don’t have a long tradition of free speech.” The political freedoms enshrined in the U.S. Constitution should narrow the gap between the opinions people can express publicly and what they believe privately, at least on issues of national importance.
It should be. But Klan told me that “our internal discourse has become less honest” and that “as a society we have become less free.” I don’t think that the sudden liberal panic over Biden is a sign that we’re becoming more free. Rather, it reflects a recognition that this particular ploy is unsustainable.
The question now is whether Democrats can persuade or force Biden to step down, which might ease voter concerns about his fitness to serve as president but doesn’t negate the conditions that made this confounding deception-to-prey frenzy possible in the first place.
Biden is exploiting his party’s most sensitive divisions and the paralyzing fear of Donald Trump to stem the tide and maintain his grip on power. As respectable liberals plead with him to step down for the sake of his “statesmanship” and “legacy,” Biden is defying them with brute force.
This is a battle over power rather than values, with both sides driven by fear rather than reason. Part of me wants to see Biden crushed as a punishment for his arrogance and selfishness. But part of me wants to see him crush the loudmouths and hysterics who have rallied around him out of fear and are running away for the same reasons.
“False stability and explosive change” can be “two sides of the same coin,” Klan writes. Whether Democrats choose stability or change with Biden, this episode signals a weakening of institutions beyond the president himself.
