Reflections On Joe Biden’s Withdrawal

Joe Biden has pulled himself from the 2024 presidential election at last. This is the predictable time for Democrats to praise Biden for his courage, as though hanging around months too long, effectively doing everything humanly possible to hand the election to the man he has been saying was going to end democracy and usher in an authoritarian future for America, were some kind of noble act. Likewise, it is a time for Republicans to mock Biden for his idiocy and ineptitude, which is the Christian way to treat a man succumbing to the harsh reality of cognitive decline in the most publicly humiliating way.

But since I am neither a Democrat nor a Republican, and therefore have no self-satisfied narrative to cling to, I shall just offer a few random thoughts that cross my mind today.

The Democrats have just gone from an incoherent and uninformed candidate who might at least compete on pity points (as he did, for that matter, four years ago) to a presumptive replacement who has all the incoherence and incompetence, but without Biden’s pitiable excuse. What are the odds Kamala Harris will improve the party’s chances against Donald Trump? That’s a rhetorical question.

The Democrat old guard seems to be on board with Harris as the nominee, at least for now. If one were a cynic — and when speaking about American electoral politics in 2024, “cynical” is merely another word for rational — one could be forgiven for suggesting that the party has simply decided that if it is time to sacrifice one election to the GOP, they might as well use this defeat as an opportunity to score some points with their radical progressive base. “First black woman candidate!” And if my guess about Elizabeth Warren’s quick leap onto the Clintons’ pro-Harris bandwagon is correct, they could even tout this as the first all-female ticket! Then they could accuse the Republicans of being racists and sexists for not voting for the Democratic ticket, and, in 2028, with their progressive scorecard suitably filled out, they could go back to nominating a man who might actually have a chance to win.

One thing I assume the Democrats are probably pondering, in spite of all the feverish “Trump-as-surging-shoo-in” news coverage, is that their opponent is still Donald Trump, the man who lost the popular vote twice, to the two worst candidates the Democrats have ever run, and who is despised by half the country and a source of embarrassed frustration to a significant minority of the other half. He is clearly beatable, since he has been beaten — and that was before: before he saddled the country with Dr. Fauci and the fantasy vaccines; before he reneged on all his blowhard promises of “The Wall” and “Mexico will pay for it”; before his hero Vladimir Putin destroyed Ukraine; before his great foreign policy triumph with North Korea was exposed by years of the Kim regime’s continued technological development and provocation, not to mention Kim’s proud new alliance with Putin; and of course before “Hang Mike Pence.”

We non-cultists all know that Trump can certainly be beaten, because he is a tried and true loser, whose specialty is winning optics wars while losing real ones, who loves to play tough while in fact surrendering to everyone who dares to call his bluff, and who has now chosen a running mate with exactly his level of political credibility, but with none of the proven skills or instincts of the lowbrow showman and criticism-proof celebrity that have allowed Trump to hold onto such a substantial minority of the voting public with reality television smoke and mirrors. In fact, the sheer vulnerability of the Republican Party in the era of Trump, combined with the realization that he and they, in all their absurdity, can still find ways to win elections, only points up the essential dysfunctionality of the Democratic Party, which seems genuinely incapable of coming up with even one moderately well-spoken and likable candidate, at a moment when that would probably be enough to win the White House. A race to the bottom, to be sure.

A few weeks before the first presidential debate, the Democratic Party and its big corporate and entertainment backers were all in for Joe Biden, and uniformly denying that there was anything wrong with him that should have any effect on his ability to serve another term. They were all lying, and not merely to themselves. But what they were lying about must be made clear, and clearly remembered; for the lie in which they were caught, at that first debate, reveals the specific reason they leapt so rapidly onto the “Joe must go” bandwagon in near-perfect unison, as though to pretend they were as shocked by Biden’s apparent deterioration as (so they would like to imagine) everyone else was. The reason is that the truth about Biden’s condition, which they realized they could no longer hide from the public (as though it had ever been hidden — you must remember we are talking about the thought processes of deluded power-mongers here), would shine floodlights on the dark little secret of the Biden presidency, which is that there never was a Biden presidency. 

Everyone “sort of knows” that in modern politics, the elected official at the top of the hierarchy is in fact more brand name than individual will, i.e., that a committee of unelected people behind the scenes — policy wonks, appointed bureaucrats, moneymen, lobbyists, and so on — are doing most of the actual navigation and calculation that gets attributed to the president. The implicit proviso that the public has always fallen back on to save the appearances for themselves — the appearances of representative government, that is — is that even with all those unelected and largely unknown figures steering the ship of state from behind the scenes, there was still, at the end of the day, an actual human being, a rational individual, elected by the voting public, with the authority to give the final yea or nay to whatever the committee men put on his desk. Yes, the people whispering in the president’s ear were too many, too powerful, and too hidden. They exerted too much influence over the hand that would sign the decrees. And they themselves were too manipulative in foisting upon the public in election years only such candidates as they believed they would be able to control and constrain in the end. Nevertheless, when push came to shove, there was still a real live human being with some kind of mind, however average and unimaginative, whose own agreement was necessary to activate the final step in any policy process, to make it official and bring it into the light of democratic reality with pen or telephone, handshake or microphone.

But what if the “man at the top” is barely a man at all, due to a level of mental deterioration that renders him incapable of comprehending or remembering the information or proposals being presented for his approval, and so aware of his own slippage — as the declining intellect must, terrifyingly, be — that he will tend, as a face-saving measure, to compensate for his ever-apparent weakness with exaggerated shows of assertiveness and strength in the service of goals and methods that are not his own, which is to say of whatever his handlers are putting in front of him? In short, the proviso that the electorate counts on to save the appearances of self-government — the consolation that there is still, after all, an elected man at the end of the chain who must willingly and knowingly sign the paper before that secret committee can do anything — has quickly disintegrated in America since 2020. A man in Joe Biden’s condition can no more be seen as giving his personal go-ahead to the policy ideas presented to him by his handlers than a hostage may be judged as giving personal consent to the ransom conditions his kidnappers are forcing him to read on camera.

Many people have vaguely intuited this about the Biden presidency for some time. A few of us have been stating it openly for years. But barricaded in their world of lies behind the protective walls of media complicity, the secret insiders club of unelected manipulators thought they just might get away with the charade one more time. The debate, they obviously knew, would be the ultimate test. Within thirty minutes that night, they were already on the hotline to one another, pulling the plug on the whole thing, shredding the documents, setting into motion Plan B, the emergency bail-out, the deniability escape hatch: “We just realized, to our dismay, that he might not be up to serving a second term, so it’s time for Joe, as much as we all love and admire him, to cede the stage to a younger candidate.” 

Their four-year fraud perpetrated against the American people — a literal, glaringly obvious fraud against the US Constitution’s most basic provisions about the three branches of government and the elected executive — was exposed, and they therefore had no choice but to pretend, all of a sudden, to be on the side of the American public, calling for the withdrawal of a president “no longer fit” to govern, as though they had not all known this, and knowingly thrived on the fact, right up to the moment that fateful debate began.

Joe Biden was never President of the United States of America in any way that matters. Who, then, as I have asked before, has been the president these three and a half years? And how can such people ever be allowed anywhere near American government again, after the crime they have collectively committed?