But then the debate began, and it became very clear that what we were getting was something historic, if only in the sense that it would live in infamy. Biden imploded, as perhaps no candidate has since Richard Nixon against John F. Kennedy. Except that where Nixon’s flop sweat made him look like an untrustworthy ghoul, Biden looked more like something an actual ghoul might turn up while robbing graves. In front of a shocked nation, a naked corpse emperor shambled to the mic and revealed his obvious devolution into what Shakespeare called second childishness and mere oblivion. It couldn’t be spun. It couldn’t be denied. It couldn’t be explained away. It was just there. For ninety minutes. With everyone watching.
This was, for many on the Right, both a cause for celebration and concern. After all, with so much time remaining before the election, surely the Democrats would react with the kind of ruthless efficiency which they used to eliminate other powerful but “problematic” figures who were past their prime. Obviously, they’d force Biden to quit and replace him with some slicker alternative with less baggage. While it was gratifying to see the old goat humiliated, in other words, we feared that it had come too soon and had given them too much time to avoid certain doom.
Or at least, so we thought.
Certainly, early indicators from the Democrats’ donor and media class suggested that this precise maneuver was in the offing, so thoroughly did Biden’s shambolic performance scandalize and horrify the Democratic party’s so-called elite. Jon Stewart, speaking for the West Wing-poisoned millennial Left, put it with characteristic bluntness: “This cannot be real life.”
But then, the next day arrived. And the next week. And even now, Joe Biden is still the nominee for the Democratic party, even despite multiple calls for him to step down from essentially every Democrat with an IQ above room temperature and/or any sense of political self-preservation. Biden, meanwhile, has reverted to an argument that would be laughable if it weren’t so depressingly familiar: namely, that the “elite” and “establishment” are out to get him. In other words, it wasn’t that he transformed into an extra from Night of the Living Dead on national TV, it’s just that the evil privileged elites have it out for him.
However, we’re not here to mock that line of argument, ridiculous as it is. Because despite its being ridiculous, it’s also exactly the argument that Joe Biden needed to make in order to keep his spot. It’s the only one that would persuade the people who now run the party to keep him, and even if he’s forgotten everything else, Joe Biden knows that. Because Joe Biden, for all his fumbling senility, is truly the candidate of the modern Democratic party.
Which brings us to a larger point: for some time now, those few sane souls who remain in the higher echelons of the Democratic party have been engaged in willful mental gymnastics to avoid realizing what their party now stands for. What that is, is not “hope,” or “change,” or even socialism or communism. No, there is only one dictum that has ruled the Democratic party since at least 2014, and it can be summed up in one sentence: “You’re not supposed to notice.” Which is to say, when a person who is politically favored, nonetheless very obviously cannot do whatever job you’ve set for them, you’re not supposed to notice.
That’s what all the critical theory and wokeness of the past ten years amounts to: the demand that you ignore your lying eyes. That your eyes deceive you, because your eyes have been indoctrinated with racism, sexism, ableism, cisheteropatriarchy, and whatever else TikTok told them to hate. In fact, on that note, we find it stunning that no enterprising professor of Disability Studies has come out of the woodwork to declare the left-wing freakout over Biden’s mental capacities as problematic and hateful because it has the audacity to face the truth. Though to be fair, they’ve played every card but that; we’ve lost count of the number of tweets we’ve seen declaring Biden’s critics to be privileged white men. Which isn’t surprising. According to Politico itself, Biden’s most strident supporters in the Democratic party are, in fact, the most mercilessly anti-merit members of its base.
But really, we must ask: what did the Jon Stewarts of the world expect? Were they seriously so naïve and so stuck in the fog of early 2000s Democratic idealism that they still believed this was the party of the West Wing? No. Just ask Jen Psaki herself, who dismissed talk of an open convention as “like, what would happen in ‘The West Wing’ episode, if there was a ‘West Wing’ episode about this.”
Got that, liberal idealists? They think your fantasies about civic duty and making history and all that Sorkin word vomit are stupid. To be fair, we do, too, but the difference is, we think that because we know Sorkinism doesn’t work. They disdain it, on the other hand, because they don’t work. Their brand of “equity” has never been designed to elevate overlooked but worthy people; their mission is to subject every job in America – especially the most demanding (and thus most lucrative) – to an identity-based spoils system, and if you notice that the result is a Potemkin village of incompetence, then you’re the problem. Can Joe Biden do the job of president? No, of course not. But neither could Claudine Gay serve effectively as president of Harvard. Neither can Alvin Bragg successfully run the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. Neither could Disney Star Wars turn a profit. But you went right along with all of those because you bought the same line of argument now being used to defend Joe Biden: that even when a corpse walks out onstage and leers at you before hacking up rotten word salad, you’re not supposed to notice. Because to notice is to be mean. To notice is to not be agreeable. To notice is to be problematic.
Which gets to the real point here, which is this: if the Democratic party had proven itself remotely capable of holding back this kindergarten-level idea of “equity” from its worst ideas, rather than enshrining them in exhibits at the Smithsonian, they would have some chance of enforcing the old-fashioned idea that a president that is this out of it can’t do the job. But not now. Not when they’ve spent a decade slandering the very idea of qualifications as a way for their scapegoats du jour to rig the system, and brainwashing even their few competent leaders to believe it. After that, something like the Biden zombie campaign was inevitable.
And the really supreme irony? This is their version of populism: they think standing up for the least qualified, least intelligent, least strong, least lovable, and least functional among us is somehow standing up for the people, writ large. And in so doing, they reveal the truly contemptuous nature of their view of the people. Because, as President Trump understands, true populism is aspirational. True populism recognizes that to appeal to the people, you must speak to the parts of the human soul which aspire to greatness, not revel in condescending to the ugly urges which always, everywhere, turn human existence into an ant heap. Every human being dreams of being more, and President Trump holds out the prospect of seeing that dream become reality. The Democrats tell you that even if you have no redeeming qualities, that’s okay, because we’re all created equal, and by God, if we don’t stay that way, someone must’ve cheated.
Well, they didn’t. It’s the Left who advocates cheating. Joe Biden cheated by keeping questions about his age off the agenda. His party cheated by censoring criticism of its policies out of existence. And now that their cheating has been found out by the rest of America, they’re screaming for some mythical coach figure (or perhaps a Dean of Students) to come out of the wings and bench their drooling ignoramus of a nominee for someone competent? Please. If that person existed, they’d be president. But they don’t. The Democrats ran everyone like that out in the past ten years. Now, they will reap the whirlwind, and find out just how much pain pretending not to notice the incompetence of their pets can cause. Because now, the man running for president has made himself one of those pets. We won’t call him Old Yeller, but we will say he’s an old yeller. And this November, President Trump is going to take him round the back and put him – and his rabid party -- out of their misery.
