RUTHFULLY YOURS

Those who favour psychodynamic in-group explanations can certainly find support in the rapid about-faces staged by America’s leading pundits. Earlier this year, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman was boasting of the personal time he spent with Biden, who he proclaimed to be “completely lucid and with excellent grasp of detail”. After the debate, Krugman called on Biden to step down. Senile dementia is a clever disease. Or maybe Krugman didn’t like the face he saw in the mirror the morning after Biden’s debate performance.

What astounded Krugman and his fellow bold-faced journalist types about Biden’s rotten debate performance wasn’t the obviousness of Biden’s mental decline, but the fear that they were now publicly shown to have been lying. Krugman’s fellow in-house NYT author of Soviet state propaganda, Thomas Friedman, who fancies himself an “old friend” of Biden’s, was writing fibs about Biden as late as last month while boasting of his long off-the-record conversations with the President about the future of the Middle East. It took Friedman less than 24 hours to proclaim that Biden’s debate performance had made him “weep”. Poor man — no doubt it did. David Remnick of The New Yorker, who authored a door-stopper-sized hagiography of Barack Obama during the President’s first year in office, was equally quick to go public with his discovery that Joe Biden was maybe not exactly up to sorting marbles by size or colour, just in time to become a virgin for the next election.

It’s hard to be revealed as a fibber — especially when your job is ostensibly to tell the truth. But the sight of journalistic worthies suddenly grabbing hand towels to cover their proximity to power was not by itself enough to explain the Night of the Journalistic Long Knives.

Thank goodness, then, that Barack Obama emerged from the shadows the following morning, as he has done like clockwork after every significant moment of the Biden Presidency, to proclaim that everything was fine, and that he was in charge — another obvious fact of the Biden Presidency that America’s commentariat has firmly repressed. After having just led a confused-seeming Biden off-stage by the shoulder at a recent Hollywood fundraiser, Obama took to social media to reassure the Party faithful that “bad debate nights happen” and that “this election is still a choice between someone who has fought for ordinary folks his entire life and someone who cares only about himself. Between someone who tells the truth; who knows right from wrong and will give it to the American people straight… Last night didn’t change that.”

Who was that first “someone”? The absence of Biden’s name from Obama’s tweet wasn’t the only broad hint that America’s shadow President insisted on dropping. In fact, nothing had changed. The election still offered the same choice between someone and someone. Meanwhile, who did you people think was running things for the past three years? It’s me, Obama.

The corollary of Obama’s remarks was also clear. The shock and surprise were all for show: The Washington Post and NYT could save their tattered journalistic honour by pointing to their calls for Biden’s resignation, while donors could be assuaged by blaming Biden’s poor debate performance on his “insular senior team” of “long-time aides” who had “isolated” and “cocooned” the President, according to Politico. Meanwhile, “adults in the room” like Obama’s former Homeland Security chief Jeh Johnson made the rounds to patiently explain that “a Presidency is more than one man”. According to Johnson’s novel theory, who the President is actually doesn’t matter, even “on his worst day at age 86”. Instead, what matters is “the people around him”, presumably including Johnson’s fellow Obama White House veterans like Lisa Monaco, Merrick Garland, Samantha Power, Bret McGurk and Jake Sullivan.

Whether Obama runs Joe Biden’s “Weekend at Bernie’s”-style Presidency from his basement in his sweats while watching ESPN, as he fantasised to Stephen Colbert on national television about doing, and no matter how often Biden’s cabinet secretaries make trips with Secret Service escorts to Obama’s Kalorama mansion, what remains startling is the seeming absence of any curiosity on the part of the country’s elite about how the country is actually being run. In the minds of the people who ostensibly run things, or at least pretend to know who runs things, it’s been enough to dismiss observations about Biden’s health, or Obama’s role in his Presidency, however large or small, as “conspiracy theories” — a term of art that has become something like “premature anti-fascist” in Stalinist nomenclature.

To extend the analogy: There is a point in the arc of failing regimes where the language they habitually use to describe themselves is so at odds with reality that propagandists and apologists no longer try to resolve contradictions or argue details. They simply lie. It doesn’t matter what you see, think, hear or believe. The sky is blue. Or maybe it’s orange. Maybe the sky is Fruit Loops. They can say any nonsense that they want, and they are powerless to say otherwise. The more obvious the lies they tell, the more powerful they are — and the more powerless you are. That’s what it means.

By that logic, the point of letting Biden onstage to stumble and mutter incoherencies was precisely to underline to people what they voted for in 2020, and are now being asked to vote for a second time. Better to elect a corpse than a convicted felon who will destroy American democracy. Besides, we all know the corpse isn’t really in charge of anything. As for who is in charge, someday, someone will surely write a book about it.

And lest we forget: Barack Obama always wanted to be a writer, although that part of his career didn’t turn out as wonderful as he had hoped — at least not yet. At 63, there is still time for him to buckle down and become Jorge Luis Borges or even Mario Vargas Llosa. As a politician, however, he has accomplished exactly what he set out to do, which was to become Abraham Lincoln. As President, Obama advised his speechwriters to model his sentences and paragraphs on Lincoln’s, and to keep copies of Lincoln’s collected speeches on their desks.

Why Lincoln? The answer is simple, of course. Lincoln freed the slaves. More than that, he founded a new American Republic, of which there have been exactly five, just like in France. The fact that American historians present the country’s history as an unbroken chain of glory (or more recently shame), beginning with the Constitution and continuing through every successive Fourth of July holiday weekend, is simply a narrative device meant to imbue earnest grade-school students and their instructors with the country’s progressive historical bias. Yes, children, America is always moving towards realising a more perfect union with equal rights for everyone. The one notable exception being Native Americans, whose story, unlike that of illegal migrants or members of historically oppressed BIPOC trans communities, can’t be accommodated into anyone’s idea of progress. Native Americans lost, and were more or less wiped out, and then confined to miserable reservations in empty parts of the country where they are denied many basic federal benefits, have minimal opportunities for education or employment, and drink themselves to death in large numbers. It is much more pleasant to talk about slavery.

Dividing up American history into five Republics is another good way of showing that the story spun by historians of the progressive school is bunk. The First American Republic, the one founded by the rich Norther traders and bankers and Southern planters who financed the American Revolution against the British crown, was an elite construction based on Greek and Roman models that aimed overtly to constrain popular democratic power, which it viewed as a destabilising evil. That Republic was shattered by the election by Andrew Jackson, a Trump-like figure who inveighed against bankers and elites and founded the second American Republic as a rude people’s democracy.

But Jackson’s Second Republic later foundered on the incompatibility of the slave economy of the South and the manufacturing economy of the North, which became first an economic crisis and then a political crisis, and finally a Civil War. Abraham Lincoln, President of the North, then founded the Third American Republic, rooted in a strong federal state, the dominance of Northern elites and the abolition of slavery, while continuing the Jacksonian push to settle the West. This Republic lasted the longest, from 1860 until 1932, when it collapsed in the face of the Great Depression. The Fourth American Republic, founded by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the most powerful and enigmatic of all American Presidents, excised the New England elites in favour of the “New Deal alliance” of Southerners and northern urban immigrant voters — and more or less conquered the entire planet.

When exactly the Fourth American Republic ended is a plausible subject for historical debate. One might pin the tail on Bill Clinton’s embrace of global trade treaties like NAFTA and GATT, and China’s entry into the WTO, which blew up the broad middle class that FDR’s party had spent decades building and turned the Democrats into the party of Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan. Or you could blame the technologies that some argue made globalism inevitable, and make Bill Gates and Steve Jobs the poster-boys for the Fifth American Republic, which is the country that Americans are living in now.

What’s missing from both these accounts, though, is America’s obsession with race, identity politics, quotas, ideological and personal purity tests, and other hallmarks of what is called “wokeism” — all of which became part of American culture under Obama. In turn, it is the harnessing of these tools to the rule of fantastically wealthy oligarchs who operate politically through the Democratic Party that characterises the current American system, a development that again took place under Obama. Without Obama, it is hard to see the current system operating as it does, or having the features that it has — making his actual day-to-day involvement in the affairs of the Biden White House something of a moot point.

Let the conspiracy theorists debate whether and how Obama pulls the strings of Biden’s corpse. This Fourth of July, Americans can celebrate the founding of the Fifth American Republic and its founder, Barack Obama, who has lived up to his goal of becoming the 21st-century Abraham Lincoln — at least as far as his impact on American political history goes. History, however, also tells us that Lincoln also jailed his political opponents, and that the Republic he founded quickly became a kleptocracy that eventually imploded amid a massive social crisis, before a new Republic arose. Hopefully, Americans will get lucky a sixth time, too.