Maciek Wisniewski: The cloying praise for Biden's decision shows that the cult of the Leader is also something characteristic of liberalism, not just Trumpism and/or the
"new authorita
rianism"
"NEW AUTHORITARIANISM"
1. Immediately after Biden announced his withdrawal from the presidential race three weeks ago (bit.ly/3WMJV4d), liberal commentators – many of whom had previously insisted unwaveringly that, despite signs of his clear mental and physical deterioration, he should remain the Democratic candidate for the US elections in November – began praising him for his decency, humility, selfless decision and willingness to sacrifice his political career for the good of the country.
2. Historian Timothy Snyder—one of the leading “late Cold War warriors” and critics of the so-called new authoritarianism—insisted, for example, that what the president did was humanly magnificent, morally extraordinary, and spectacularly strategic. Years from now, historians will be searching for words to describe Biden’s blessing, he wrote.
3. Not only did Biden not deserve any of this praise, but this kind of bombastic, saccharine, and—most importantly—utterly out-of-touch narrative dramatically reduced our ability to understand politics and the present. It demonstrated that the cult of the Leader is also something inherent to liberalism, not just Trumpism and/or the “new authoritarianism.” And it was part—consciously or unconsciously—of an entire damage control operation calculated to cover up the fact that in the four weeks after the presidential debate debacle, Biden, the decent man, was behaving like a normal person. In quintessentially Trumpian fashion (https://lahaine.org/eH5s), lashing out at any kind of criticism or suggestion that he do, for the good of all, precisely what he has finally been forced to do.
4. It is therefore important to clarify what happened here: after the fraud calculated to hide his true condition from the outside world was revealed and after Biden had been insisting until literally the last day on continuing with the campaign, what made him change his mind was the definitive loss of support from the big donors (so much for the greatness of American democracy) and from the leadership of his party, which has left him with the option of doing it the easy way or the hard way.
5. As reported by Seymour Hersh, the dean of American journalism, Biden – much against his will – has been forced to resign under the threat of being removed from office. It was clear to the Democratic bosses that his obstinacy and selfishness threatened the interests of the party. According to Hersh, in the morning, before issuing his statement, Barack Obama called Biden to tell him, no more and no less, that they had Kamala's [Harris] (sic) support to invoke the 25th Amendment (which stipulates the transition process in the event of the death or disqualification of the president) and that they were waiting for his response.
6. Thus, in his decision there was nothing noble, moral, selfless and much less strategic (at the beginning of the year Biden forced his candidacy in the primaries and now he left it to the Democrats to decide his replacement in a climate of emergency or, indeed, a coup d'état). In his sudden beatification by liberal commentators such as Snyder or Paul Krugman – who also called him a good man who did the right thing – there was only the desire to cover up the true spiritus movens of politics in the US (money) and the deep emptiness of the liberal Democratic project (https://lahaine.org/eL6a).
7.- Proof of this is also the fact that the whole good man narrative originally emerged after the disastrous presidential debate to salvage what was possible and convince voters that Biden might not be able to express himself intelligibly, but unlike Trump, he was at least a decent person. And it persisted until it became unsustainable only to be resurrected in another context, despite being equally antipodal to the truth.
8. Is a decent man someone who, after having campaigned criticizing Trump's cruel immigration policies (the wall, children in cages, separation of families), reproduced and even radicalized them (denial of asylum)? Is a good man someone who, after having introduced in the 1990s an extremely punitive anti-drug legislation targeting consumers, always protected his addicted son and today even seems to consider pardoning him – from a recent drug-related conviction – at the end of his term?
9. Is a good man a man who blatantly lied about the 40 babies beheaded by Hamas, repeating Israeli propaganda invented to justify the genocide in Gaza? Is a man who supported and financed this genocide and has never found in his heart an ounce of empathy for thousands of Palestinian children – real ones – killed in its course a decent man?
10. Snyder was right about one thing (who for his part, used a sea of ink to talk about the dead in Ukraine, but did not spill a drop to talk about Gaza): historians will still be searching for words to describe Biden: his presidency, his decision to withdraw from the race (based on real events, not liberal fables), his personality. Ecpathy – the voluntary mental process of excluding feelings, attitudes, thoughts and motivations induced by another – the opposite of empathy, could be one. Cruelty could be another.
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