The Real Reason the Frenzy Over Biden is So Unsettling

The herd-like reversal of certain institutions on Biden’s abilities reflects a loss of political freedom.

By Jason Willick, Washington Post

Columnist

July 10, 2024 at 4:10 p.m. EDT

For many liberal commentators, the June 27 presidential debate and its aftermath have been disturbing because they revealed President Biden’s infirmity and hurt his chances of winning in November.

I’ve found the past two weeks eerie for a different reason. The reversal of knowledge-making institutions on the question of Biden’s age has been so sudden, so violent, so herd-like in its uniformity that it calls into question the very ability of America’s elite — as Biden rightly calls his media cheerleaders-turned-critics — to form opinions based on reason rather than fear.

Biden’s decline was obvious — obvious — to anyone paying attention. It was a legitimate question even in the 2020 presidential race, when rival Democratic presidential candidate Julián Castro raised it in a debate and when the Wall Street Journal’s Barton Swaim reported that Biden’s “voice was muted, his words slurred” as he campaigned in South Carolina.

Four long years later, the Democratic Party astonishingly let Biden glide to a second nomination with no serious competition. The taboo against questioning his acuity, established after his first nomination, seemed to hold. And as Biden’s decline apparently accelerated in recent weeks and months, the media didn’t just ignore or play down the issue. Efforts to point it out were actively policed, with the White House’s attack on “cheap fakes” followed by a burst of stories criticizing the “distorted, online version” of Biden (New York Times) and “misleading GOP videos” (NBC).

After the debate, NBC’s Chuck Todd declared with alarm that “Biden looks like the caricature that conservative media has been painting.” Or was it Biden’s supporters who had painted a caricature? Philosopher Crispin Sartwell had a point this week when he wrote that it isn’t Biden’s fault “that each of you was incapable of noticing the problem until you all noticed it together.”

In his 1995 book, “Private Truths, Public Lies,” political scientist Timur Kuran described the incentives for people to not notice political or social realities — or pretend not to — en masse. Such situations can be unstable, as Kuran wrote: “At some point the right event, even an intrinsically minor one, can make a few sufficiently disgruntled individuals reach their thresholds for speaking out against the status quo. Their switches can then impel others to add their own voices to the opposition. Public opposition can grow through a bandwagon process, with each addition generating further additions until much of society stands publicly opposed to the status quo.”

The debate didn’t add dramatic new information about Biden. The president had rambled before and appeared feeble and confused before on video — hence the diabolical conservative “caricature.” The debate was nonetheless the catalyst for Kuran’s bandwagon effect, at least among journalists, donors and Democratic operatives.

Kuran told me that when his book was released in the years after the Soviet Union’s collapse, some readers felt that it was primarily relevant to Eastern Europe and “countries that don’t have a long tradition of free speech.” Political freedom as enshrined by the U.S. Constitution ought to narrow the gap between the kinds of opinions people can profess in public and what they believe in private — at least on important matters of state.

Ought to. But Kuran told me that “the discourses within our institutions have become less honest,” and “as a society, we have just become less free.” I am not convinced the sudden liberal panic around Biden is a sign that we are getting any more free. Instead it reflects a recognition that this particular ruse is unsustainable.

The public question now is whether Democrats can persuade or coerce Biden to step aside. That might allay voter concerns about presidential fitness. It wouldn’t negate the conditions that made this disorienting deception-turned-feeding-frenzy possible in the first place.

Biden is capitalizing on the party’s most sensitive divisions and its paralyzing fear of Donald Trump to try to stop the bandwagon and maintain his grip on power. As respectable liberals plead for him to step down for the sake of “statesmanship” or his “legacy,” he’s defying them with brute political force.

This is a fight over power more than values, and it’s driven by fear more than reason, on both sides. Part of me wants to see Biden overpowered as a comeuppance for his hubris and egotism. But part of me wants to see Biden overpower the noisy hysterics who closed ranks around him out of fear and are now fleeing for the same reason.

Kuran wrote that “deceptive stability and explosive change” can be “two sides of a single coin.” Whether Democrats opt for stability or change with Biden, the episode is a signal of debility in institutions outside the person of the president.