Hardly anyone paid attention to President Joe Biden’s Jan. 5 speech in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. That’s fine. But if the contents indicate how the campaign is going to go between now and November, we’re in for an ominous period of U.S. history.
The speech rattled me with strong Chernenko vibes.
Konstantin Chernenko was installed as Soviet leader following a succession of apparatchiks that took power following the death of Stalin, thus succeeding Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and Andropov, and before Gorbachev took over and presiding over the end times. Chernenko was a puppet, but good at promoting the line of the moment, which was mostly bound up with finding scapegoats for the failing empire. No one in the Politburo really liked or respected him, and he was in ill health, but he was useful for parroting the thinking of the Soviet ruling class. His tenure served that purpose alone.
The system was everywhere failing, and the scapegoat was always the same: enemies of the state, the resistors to communism, the evil U.S. sympathizers within, the doubters, and dissidents. Were it not for those bad guys, everything would be going swimmingly. Peace, prosperity, and strength would bloom. It’s the rebels and refuseniks keeping that at bay. This is why the party must continue to rule and even intensify its control. It must protect the people and the ideal from the unenlightened rabble.
It was an almost surreal experience. Who are these people in the audience? Who brought them there? There was simply no way that normal people were there. The only normal people who could be cajoled into attending something like that would be protesters. To make sure that there were none of those, the place was vetted down to every last hair on each person’s head. Only trusted people can sit there.
That opening cheer of “four more years” was overly scripted and canned—too uniform and simultaneous, like a basement rally by Sir Oswald Mosley in the interwar years. The whole thing was weird theater to create the impression of some mythical and authentic support out there somewhere. The only real moment came at the very, very end when his wife tried to get him off stage—he never knows which way to exit—and he leaned into the mic with some grandpa joke about the real power in the room.
As for the text itself, it was as if real life as you and I understand it doesn’t exist. It was 100 percent about the grave threat of Donald Trump/Hitler and, mostly, the evil of anyone who would support him and not support President Biden as the savior of the nation keeping at bay the terrible pestilence of MAGA.
You would get the impression that nothing else matters. Home prices, inflation, crime, the migrant crisis, ill health, homelessness, insane debt, mass collapse of education and learning, the middle class crushed, unaffordable everything—none of it exists.
Never mind the decaying cities, the loss of trust, the massive disapproval of everything, the population-wide terror of the Great Reset, the barely suppressed fury at the COVID-19 response, the befuddlement as to why the United States is backing some kind of Ukraine thing in a border dispute with Russia, the disgust at institutionalized gender dysphoria, the corruption in media and tech, the censorship, and all the rest.
There’s plenty about which to be depressed, alarmed, and angry, not the least of which is that courts are harassing a former president within an inch of his life and even rigging the election to keep him—and other competitors to President Biden—off the ballot. This is egregious, and everyone knows it. And it’s all for one reason only: to keep him and that cause he represents (entrenched administrative state hegemony) on top.
In other words, his whole purpose is to disable democracy. That’s plainly obvious. So how does one get around those bad optics? He starts with extolling the glory of General Washington, yammers on about civic history, throws in some bromides about freedom, and then flips the script exactly as Soviet leaders used to do: They must maintain power, else evil forces of tyranny and suffering will swallow the country.
As a kid, I could never understand how the Soviet Union imagined itself to be a democracy. Now I get it. You need a one-party state in charge to keep the enemies of democracy at bay, and so long as they do, you have preserved democracy. You see?
In essence, the Biden campaign is overtly enemy-izing half the country, or maybe two-thirds of the country, or maybe everyone not in the 1 percent of ruling class overlords. It’s extremely creepy because it seems authentic in some way, as if they really believe their rhetoric.
There’s a psychological basis for why they’re so good at describing the anti-democratic ambitions of the opposition. It’s called projection. They get it because they are it.
For most of my life, I’ve been able to trust that anyone in elected office in the United States accepted the rules of the game that we play in this country. The rulers are elected by popular vote, and then they go to the halls of government and represent our interests. If they fail, we the people kick them out and replace them with someone else. This system trains people who aspire to be statesmen to pay close attention to the people’s wishes.
Nothing that I can ever recall shook my belief that this was an accepted and incontrovertible tenet of the U.S. civic faith. Today, it seems as if a line has been crossed. It appears that the people and regime associated with Biden Inc. no longer believe that. They need total power without challenge forever. ... in the name of preserving the democratic ideal. Notice that they rally around the ideal, not the practice, because if we practice it, they might lose power!
Making it even stranger, President Biden spent much of his speech denouncing former President Donald Trump for opposing democracy. This is because President Trump encouraged protests against an election that he said was unfair and badly counted. I’m not going to go into the ins and outs of the January 6th bit, but suffice it to say that this hoary tale is an obvious fable and has always been. There were outliers there, but the overwhelming number of people there that day were protesting a system gone wrong. That’s all there is to it.
As for President Trump himself, you don’t have to be a fan of his to support him, think he handled the election issue well, or even plan to back him in the primary or general, to see through what President Biden is doing here. I’ve been brutal in my criticism of President Trump’s lockdowns and found his post-election kvetching about the mail-in ballots that he approved to be ham-handed and tacky.
Pick any dystopian parable that you want, even “A Bug’s Life” (which is an underrated film, by the way). Every would-be dictator needs to scapegoat a threat real or imagined that’s worse than what we have now. Is this the whole of the Biden playbook? It certainly looks like it.
We’ve sunk very deeply from when the worst thing that you could say about U.S. political culture is that it had too much negativity and was dominated by “sound bites.” My goodness, looking back, those seem like the good old days. We seem to be headed to much darker places. So far, unless something dramatic happens, it would appear that the 2024 election cycle is going to take us there.
