Biden is old. Trump is worse.

My response to the blowback to the infamous Jon Stewart segment.

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It’s not nearly the same thing as getting used to it, but there is by now an identifiable rhythm to left-liberal discourse. That rhythm is jittery upon first listen, but it’s ultimately rote and derivative. The tofu pundits who blather in front of MSNBC cameras and pen tedious New York Times op-eds only know how to play a few notes, but they are paid to make noise. And for better or worse, the sounds these dullards make are predictable, to the point where there’s both a bleak comedy and buried burlesque in their game attempts to replicate the usual DNC geriatric talking points and catty rhetorical curlicues whenever they lash out at dissenters.

This is what it means to hold an election in an absolutely finished culture—one that cannot grow or even reconcile itself to its own limitations. Almost every piece of political commentary sounds the same, whether it’s from a hyperbolic tweet or a quintuple-byline newspaper column about some bleary depravity resulting from capitalistic entropy. Even as the country shudders and cracks around us, the partisans will be upset about the same things in the same stupid way. So given the dictates of culture war binarism, any criticism of Joe Biden or the Democratic Party or the most narrow interpretations of left-liberal dogma is swiftly interpreted as tacit or explicit support for Donald Trump. Every day unfolds in the shadow of this sour and soggy fact, and that recursive and stubborn idiocy is at the heart of why so many Democratic die-hards are losing their minds over a banal Jon Stewart segment. In making his return to the Daily Show after a nine-year hiatus, he merely pointed out that Biden’s age is an electability concern that warrants a frank discussion. In the minds of the irredeemable lib-brained and internet-poisoned, this is a case of bothsiderism that is threatening the delicate fabric of American democracy.

I don’t want this piece to come across as another both sides are equally bad polemic that pollutes the Substack top reads in politics, because those arguments are boring and pedantic, and Bari Weiss has already crowded out that market.

The following is what we in the business call the to be sure paragraph, so to clarify my political disposition, I will apathetically vote for Biden. I am not an accelerationist given America’s current socio-economic conditions—if there’s a breakdown in liberal democracy, this country will break toward fascism before socialism. “Punishing the Democrats” by withholding my vote will not accomplish anything; it is clear, if their reaction to 2016 is any indication, that they will utilize a second Trump presidency as a massive fundraising opportunity while blaming progressives for his election. I have yet to encounter an argument that has convinced me of the upside of another go-around of Trump in the White House. Joe Biden is only a “bad” president in the way that any Democratic president is “bad” because the party they lead is hardwired to pursue ineffectual corporate-friendly liberalism and empty bipartisanship at the expense of a coherent and inspiring ideological program. He has governed like a typical Democrat by racking up small-scale wins in the incremental tweaks department—infrastructure investment, strengthening of labor organizing, anti-trust action—while leaving the fundamental structural rot intact. His administration’s handling of Israel-Palestine is atrocious, Trump and the GOP will follow through on a similar, if not more inhumane, approach, which says more about the gruesome state of American foreign policy than any specific administration.

This outright refusal to acknowledge Biden’s vulnerabilities scans as a self-justifying rationalization of sorts from a party that has lost so much, for so long. The erratic and idiotic nature of online politics has programmed so many to think in scattershot and Pavlovian tribalism: Anyone who says Biden may be senile must think Trump is fit to be president. It has always been clear that the singular and obliterating sensationalism of 24/7 news has opened some uniquely deranged depths of American stupidity. Even the slightest bit of nuance feels like some kind of escapism. It is bizarre that so many Democratic partisans can’t grasp the idea that Biden looks like he is visibly confused in public a lot and that Trump is a mentally deteriorating sociopath who would soil American democracy if he wasn’t busy getting his dong stuck in a gold-plated toaster.

To put it simply:

Joe Biden is bad and Donald Trump is worse.

Given the choices, bad is preferable to worse.

This does not mean bad is good.

Trump is a fascist and Project 2025 is genuinely conerning.

Being better than fascism should not be the extent of our political aspirations.

In 2020, Joe Biden was pitched as the no-brainer “electable” choice, although given the levels of negative partisanship and Trump’s erratic mishandling of the pandemic, any Democrat slotted onto the presidential ticket would’ve produced similar results. Biden’s age was a concern then, and four years later, it remains an electability issue. Denial and shaming voters will not make this disappear. His favorabilities are at 2007/2008 Bush levels of unpopularity. Public perception of his administration is completely divorced from any conventional understanding of economic performance. In this context, what does “electability” even mean?

The crystallized threat presented by Trump’s unhinged rhetoric and this specific moment of Putin-curious Republicans requires a clear and commensurate response. But the Democrats’ usual tactics of speaking to the manager and entitled condescension are terrifyingly insufficient in response to normal circumstances like ravenous business interests or reactionary politicians. Falling back to complaining about unfair media coverage, tired accusations of ableism and ageism, and labeling any criticism of Biden as enabling fascism is not just nauseating in typical Democratic ways but damning in existential ones. I have my concerns about whether any of this comprises an effective messaging strategy, as this bears similarities to how partisan Democrats cynically deployed identity politics to shield Hillary Clinton from criticisms of corruption and political insiderism. Hopefully, I’m wrong.

It is astounding that many liberals cannot comprehend that maybe people are concerned about Biden’s age specifically because he is … *gulp* the last bulwark safeguarding American democracy against a crude and insurgent Trumpist cult. And for the third election in a row, the Democrats are trotting out an uninspiring candidate with a campaign built on the demoralizing premise of, Get a load of this other guy!

By perusing the riff-raff around Biden’s gradual descent into senility, I have been confronted with the infuriating superfluity of blame-deflection. There are flabby and inert rationalizations for his on-camera senior citizen moments—that they are, of course, caused by his stutter. Granted, I don’t have a medical degree, so I am open to someone explaining to me how a stutter is responsible for him forgetting when he was vice president and when his son Beau died or confusing world leaders or falling off his bike or describing America as “Asufutimaehaehfutbw” or mixing up his wife and his sister at a Super Tuesday rally or his meandering Cornpop rants. I have seen people circle the idea that Biden isn’t experiencing cognitive decline, but rather he is just a man in his 80s who has survived two brain aneurysms, as if that isn’t a self-defeating argument. And if it is ageist and ableist to harbor concerns about whether Biden (and Trump!!) can handle the rigors of the most stressful job on the planet—a position that has significantly aged men much younger than either candidate—is it also a form of prejudice to assume that an advanced age may hinder someone’s job performance in other contexts? Is it ageist and ableist to assume an 80-year-old man can’t play quarterback in the NFL or be a competent fighter jet pilot? The idea that not all people can do every job should be eminently self-evident and uncontroversial. It stands to reason that an octogenarian who has numerous displays of foggy memory or random tangents may be experiencing signs of mental deterioration, which could affect specific aspects of their performance—especially as it pertains to the most demanding job on the planet!

In regards to unfair media coverage, it should be obvious by now that mainstream outlets prioritize ratings and profits over responsible journalism, and in a presidential election, their editorial bias skews towards horserace politics. For this cycle, the media imperative for “objectivity” is further degenerating into a “both sides,” false balance framework that is distorting our sense of what is at stake in a presidential campaign that will feature one candidate who is under criminal trial as a matter of daily routine and continually promises retribution on his political enemies. For example, the New York Times recently ran a story with the headline: “Which Is Worse: Biden’s Age or Trump Handing NATO to Putin?”

Whether it is valid or not, Biden’s age will frame coverage of the election. “Biden, fairly or otherwise, is the lightning rod for deep generational discontents and widespread unhappiness at the persistence of an American gerontocracy,” as Fintan O’Toole recently argued. As a two-time Bernie Sanders supporter, I could also complain about how the flubby redundancy of corporate media only ever served to cast both of his candidacies in the most unflattering light possible, but that doesn’t change the fact that his campaigns made several strategic blunders, that he didn’t convince enough primary voters to buy into a working-class agenda, or that progressivism is in a perpetual state of self-defeat and circular cannibalism. Joe Biden has held public office since 1972 and retail politics is his signature strength, so he and his team should be competent in dealing with counter-spinning our cynical and self-regarding media institutions. But there is now a dynamic, and one that should be facile and unconvincing, where the perception of Joe Biden is not a result of what he does, but how voters respond to his actions. It’s not Joe Biden’s fault for having repeated old man gaffes on television, apparently, it’s the voter’s fault for being ageist and the media’s fault for reporting that he confused the leaders of Mexico and Egypt. It’s not the Biden Administration’s fault for passively abetting mass violence directed at Palestinians, it’s the voter’s fault for thinking he is indifferent toward Palestinian lives.

The people who sit atop the institutional Democratic Party and its aligned media organizations have made their living by defining and describing the scope and scale of the possible. In the face of a rightward drift that feels increasingly untenable, the limits of liberalism should be something more than incremental tweaks and a brand promise that is essentially, Capitalism is good because it gives us Pride Month Sponsored by Bank of America. The result is an inert machine that, if viewed from a sufficiently cynical perspective, is better served by its own continued dysfunction than any meaningful success. As the other party grows more perverse and depraved, the decision more or less makes itself. As the rest of the culture drifts into fatalism, there’s a savage irony to the fact that this type of uninspiring Democratic governance has not only failed millions of Americans but has helped put this nation on the precipice of rising fascism. No meaningful lesson has been learned since 2016; political consultants and pollsters continue to traffic in the familiar rhetoric of half-loaves and compromise while partisan libs plug their ears and shriek in denial. It says a great deal about where the Democrats are as a party that attempts to tar Trump as a fascist has done nothing to boost Biden’s favoribilities.

There is something deadening and bleak about the way in which pundits and campaign strategists and candidates alike center the idea of beating Trump, if only because it leans into the idiotic premise that doing something about the atrophied state of contemporary left-liberalism is secondary and antagonistic to abstractions about electability and a familiar learned helplessness. This principal refusal to accept any responsibility for playing a part in putting America on the brink of an authoritarian demise seems, if anything, more apt to deliver the outcome liberals dread—reinforcing the Orange One’s wholly unearned place of maximum influence in the crabbed sanctums of the American imagination. I hope Trump never steps foot in the Oval Office again, but this election is shaping up to be the most depressing I’ve lived through, and it’s the one we deserve.

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