As a general rule, Democrats can never fail voters, only voters can fail them. This has been true of every election they’ve lost, even one as high-stakes and fateful for the future of democracy as the last one. The postmortems have been predictable if not increasingly uninspiring, mostly revolving around ditching “woke” and blaming voters who would prefer it if Palestinian children weren’t indiscriminately murdered. In a quest to find their own Joe Rogan, the Democrats have settled for debating how they can refine their messaging and rebrand their corporate-friendly centrism as the Abundance Agenda. It has been clear, since last Election Night and for years before that and as you read this now, that things should change, but futility is something that the Democratic leadership has shown itself willing to accept, provided the alternative is something more undignified like changing, well, anything. As Donald Trump has spent the last decade blithely lumbering through the crabbed sanctums of the American political imagination, the Democrats have charged headlong and smugly into another bleak episode of looking diminished and doomed. They appear either unwilling or unable to move on from the organizational and cultural defects that define them, as they are clearly an anti-party that reveres gerontocratic traditions and holds a grim patrician stodginess as its central ideological tenet.
The question, then, is why are they making the media rounds performing this facile and unconvincing mea culpa regarding their years-long insistence that Joe Biden was healthy enough to run for reelection? For the last two years of Biden’s presidency, Democrat apparatchiks fervently expounded on the president’s vitality, and rotating columnists in the New York Times or Washington Post would pen op-eds about how it was ableist and ageist to question his cognitive fitness, or smarm doctors like Simone Sanders would appear on MSNBC after a geriatric gaffe to say, You know what the president meant… To any American who has ever hung out with a demented grandparent, this dense heaping of Democratic fudge felt kind of grasping and desperate and off. The punditocracy isn’t exactly brimming with exceptionally discerning minds, of course, but even as they remain stuck on describing the shape of what politicians do instead of addressing what they propose, they surely could’ve sensed Biden’s brain has been on the fritz for years. Now that CNN’s Jake Tapper has been hocking his forthcoming book about the lengths the Democrats went to ass-cover Biden’s senility, affiliated operatives and pundits have responded with righteous West Wing cosplay.
This has been truly vile discourse, diseased at every level, and that was before it was revealed that Joe Biden had been diagnosed with “aggressive prostate cancer” that has spread to his bones. The initial Tapper-Axios news cycle was concerned with how the Democrats were wishcasting Biden’s senility away, but now we’re dealing with a decent possibility that they were covering up his impending death from cancer. According to an NPR report from last February, Biden would only receive physicals, but cognitive tests were not a part of his health assessments; either his neurologist would visit the White House to talk about the Phillies, or a sitting president couldn’t pass the test where they basically ask you to point at an elephant. It is evil, if not soul-rending, to see the Blue Establishment cover for a dying man who they insisted just under a year ago was fit enough to serve another four years as president.
The Democrats have long pretended to represent greater aspirations, but it is unclear what their gameplan would’ve been had they somehow dragged Biden’s corpse across the finish line. The ceiling would’ve been a starchy write-off of a presidential term where he’s awake for five hours a day and generally has no idea what’s going on. Or Biden dies in the middle of his second inauguration from the stress of being the target of a pointed Bradley Whitford quip and his eyes rupture from watching Billy Porter twirl around, then he evaporates like a Dark Souls 3 Black Knight, and Kamala becomes the most unpopular president in American history. To the extent that there’s anything beyond this gossip and theatrical monologuing, it’s that the White House was running on something like energy-saver mode since 2023, and even at the level of minimum viable governance, America kept selling billions of dollars worth of bunker-bombs to Isreal. If the automatic functions of empire continued, maybe it really was politics as usual. In retrospect, this gamble was psychotic, and not in the normal level of political sociopathy, but in the existential dilemma of whether a dead guy could be president.
Many of these headlines scan as a cheesy attempt at counterspinning the anecdotes that have come out of a book that no one has read or will ever read. There’s an alarmist tenor to these spurious revelations—how Biden’s aides thought he needed a wheelchair but it would be politically unviable, how Biden forgot who George Clooney was despite knowing him for decades, how he forgot the names of longtime aides halfway through his presidency—but these bombshells only confirmed what any non-lib-brained American already suspected. Tapper’s book is essentially what Jon Stewart describes as “The news is selling you a book about news they should have told you a year ago for free.” It was obvious Biden has been brain dead since 2020: His eye exploded in a presidential debate, he accidentally said he was a Black woman, a special prosecutor declined to prosecute his handling of classified documents because he came across as a grandpa dementia patient, and he experienced medical death at a presidential debate and shouted, “We defeated Medicare!” For years, there was a constant stream of polls plainly showing that Biden’s biggest vulnerability heading into re-election was that Americans thought he was too old to be president, and this was repeatedly confirmed every time he opened his mouth or was seen on television. The Democrats moved heaven and earth to get Biden elected in the first place, then diminished trust in their party and degraded the institutions they were running to uphold all for the appeasement of a doddering, hobbling mummy.
If the media seems genuinely flummoxed, it’s all part of a terrible and unmistakably empty Beltway cycle between the news and the government. We’re trapped in a perpetual recurrence of powerbrokers doing something spectacularly evil while Americans are ambiently aware of it in real-time, but elected officials and media pundits spend years covering it up until it crescendos to a point where it can no longer be contained. It is strange that Biden’s health is what our media is willing to be conciliatory about compared to something like the Iraq War; there has been much more teeth-gnashing from Jake Tapper-grade elites about how we were lied to, how they should’ve asked tougher questions, and how people need to be held accountable.
We’re living through a low ebb of American history where the clock is winding back 130 years, the Ghostbusters container is slammed open to release AI slimers, and the dumbest people America has ever produced are in charge and pouring grapefruit juice into the USB-C ports of the computers that keep our country functional. And the discourse from the opposition party is basically, I should’ve been more upset when Joe Biden fell off his bike. It’s perfect Democrat loser energy to get on TV and air out this laundry in public. Beyond the fact that it’s terrible message discipline, an insult to anyone with real problems (which is to say any other problem), or a distraction from the Stanley Cup playoffs (did you see the Leafs implode??) or the Righteous Gemstones finale, this is like listening to someone you don’t know sit next to you on the subway and complain about their job. They can bitch about how Dennis has been on their ass all week, but the story doesn’t work until you know who Dennis is. It’s also deranging to see party insiders like Bakari Sellers talk about how he ignored all the warning signs of Biden’s senility, which is only proof of his loyalty and how much he understands how adults do politics. It’s like watching mafia guys get on a primetime interview to brag about how they would never snitch or never talk about how their boss ordered them to kill this guy or never disclose how much they stole. It would be less insulting if the DNC Twitter account dropped an AI video of Joe Biden leaping over a Lamborghini and winning the 2023 NBA Slam Dunk contest.
For decades, the Democratic establishment has campaigned on some antiseptic combination of describing the scope and scale of The Possible, finger-pointing and gawking Get a load of these other guys!, and proffering wonkish plans to administer something like the status quo. This Third-Way centrism remains vexingly prominent regardless of its repeated high-profile failures, dithering along despite a swelling desire for a bolder and broader promise to arrest and reverse an increasingly untenable rightward shift. This Biden cover-up should be a sufficiently damning indictment of a party with little emperors ruling their fiefdoms in consequence-free perpetuity. It’s easy to see why, in this context, they would not appreciate having attention called to their flagrant nudity, but the tactic of simply waiting for the emperor to put some damn pants on becomes untenable, especially when they insist on doing jumping jacks on television. The result is a machine that, if viewed from a sufficiently cynical perspective, is better served by its own continual failure than any meaningful success. As the other party only gets worse and the rest of the culture drifts into fatalism, the Blue Establishment only seems to exist to justify their existence; their rationale is something like, We may have been wrong about Joe Biden or how to beat Donald Trump, but we still deserve to keep our jobs and you should heed our advice about what the Democrats should and should not do in the coming years.
We’re left with this insistence that voters owe this mawkish deference to these impossibly self-interested, and in many cases, extremely decrepit and cynical party-lifers. This inexcusable and singularly rancid rhetorical tick is the irritant around this weird pearl that has formed, even if the process is completely unnatural. “And, saddest of all, the man known for his decency, empathy, humility and patriotic spirit was poisoned by power, losing the ability to see that, in clinging to his office, he was hurting the party and country he had served for over half a century,” Maureen Dowd writes in the New York Times, “And hurting himself, ensuring a shellacking in the history books. It is the oldest story in tragedy: hubris.” Tragedy offers dignity and a certain kind of poetic gloss to a person’s character flaws or their desire to do right despite their actions causing the worst possible outcome—and none of this applies to Joe Biden. If there is anything tragic about this, he was close to earning a legacy he did not deserve and stubbornly barreled into the one that he does. Biden hinted at serving as a bridge president, and in a single term, he could’ve overseen a competent prosecution of Donald Trump, leaned in harder on his party to restore voting rights, then announce in 2022 that he wouldn’t seek reelection so there would be ample time and space for the Democrats to choose a candidate that would at least ingratiate themselves to the public better than Kamala; those hypotheticals paired with his administration’s trustbusting and infrastructure spending would’ve been a decent enough legacy of Restoring The Soul Of America Or Whatever to earn him some of that hagiographic Obama shine.
The outcome that was instead authored is not a result of tragic hubris or destiny. It is the product of a venal geezer getting high on his ego and DMT flooding his brain, then convincing himself he had a few more years left of power and relevancy. This isn’t King Lear—it’s broad slapstick comedy with terrible downstream human consequences. It’s a perfect tale, the full-circle of everything Joe Biden has been his entire life, which is a complete farce. He has been on the wrong side of every bad decision that has led America to a second Trump term. All those handshakes with the six-faced gladhanders who deregulated the Big Banks and melted the global economy, all those windbreakers he got from AIG, the Supreme Court justice he helped install despite his reputation as a sex creep. It earned him a presidency he’ll barely remember serving and he’ll likely die soon after all the few laws he did pass are undone by a bloated marzipan golem. This is the perfect American farce for the most farcical figure in modern American politics. Political media has a pathological tendency to retcon these foibles into the grandeur of the Oval Office, and it’s clear how grubby and cynical this all was. If this doesn’t read like a taunt, it’s at least very telling how something so obviously preposterous is framed as something much bigger and more significant than what it actually is. Whether this further discredits a party that is already at a historic low depends on how much longer its supporters continue to believe its lies.
This is a fine summary. Imagine trying to rewrite this mess as Shakespearean when it’s really Fawlty Towers.
But there’s one aspect to it that I’d never fully appreciated. Kamala Harris’ reticence was her Trump card. She knew that Biden would never make it through a second term, while she couldn’t make it through a 60 Minutes interview without creative editing. If Biden had just kept awake till November 5th, Harris would probably now be President. There are possibilities there that surely haven’t been lost on J. D. Vance.
IOW, Democrats are a cult.