By Jeffrey Blehar
Tuesday, July 23, 2024
I assume most people aren’t familiar with Lars von
Trier’s crowd-pleasing film Antichrist. Trust me, you’d hate it,
and all you really need to know is that it does a fine job of living up to its
title. But one image from it has stuck with me: Willem Dafoe, out walking in
the woods, finds a dead fox that somehow comes to life, turns its rotting head
toward him, and growls “chaos
reigns.” (Seriously: Please do not watch this movie unless you
are tired of having good dreams.)
Naturally, this was the metaphor I reached for first when
contemplating the state of the 2024 race at the end of Monday night. Where do
we even begin? As of Sunday afternoon, Joe Biden is out of the race, but not
the presidency. He has not been seen in public since last Wednesday, when he
was diagnosed with Covid-19 while at an event in Las Vegas; he was videoed
waving weakly to reporters — without a mask — while boarding his plane with an
alarmingly unsteady gait. The lack of a mask caused many a wag to suggest that
his aides had faked the Covid diagnosis as an excuse to get him off the
campaign trail (where Biden was last seen describing his own secretary of
defense as “the black man”) and buy time against the push to get him to step
down as nominee.
But something was clearly amiss with him and remains so.
He resigned the nomination on social media in a limp dishrag of a statement
that was clearly penned by a subordinate and not Biden himself. He promised to
address the nation sometime later this week to deliver his own eulogy and
curiously declined to endorse Kamala Harris (though he did thank her, which
made the lack of an endorsement that much more conspicuous). This was only
“cured” in a subsequent tweet that by definition had to have been
written for him by a staffer — Joe Biden does not have a Twitter game, Jack —
leading one to wonder why all these momentous decisions were being taken out of
view of the public eye. Finally on Monday morning, as Kamala was addressing her
new campaign, he phoned in with a hoarsely slurring voice to offer his
endorsement on speakerphone.
I suppose it will suffice for bare proof of life. But it
is not proof of health, or fitness for his job. And other than that, he has
been a ghost. Joe Biden has functionally been missing in action for five days
now, and no true reemergence seems in sight. (Israeli prime minister Benjamin
Netanyahu’s scheduled meeting with Biden has been cancelled out of what must be
humiliating necessity.) So pause to take in what we have just lived through: The
president of the United States, in the advanced stages of both mental decline
and a losing reelection campaign, resigned from the race via text message and
has gone to ground. The fact that this is civically appalling is mostly
being ignored right now — there are too many stories to process, too many
angles to consider — but we can instantly recognize it as a historic moment
both bleakly comedic and yet also depressingly emblematic of the present
moment. We live in “interesting” times, but debased ones.
Meanwhile, the idea that anyone other than Harris will be
Biden’s replacement has been tamped down like a glowing ember of hope being
hurriedly smothered with a fire-retardant blanket. Every major Democratic
grandee (except, interestingly, Obama) immediately endorsed Kamala, she is
taking on Biden’s campaign manager as her own, and any opportunity to swap her
for a politician untainted by the Biden administration’s record to date has
passed. What’s that I hear you say? Harris lacks any pretense to legitimacy as
the choice of Democrats? Don’t be so naïve, silly voter! Heck, the people
behind Biden’s reelection campaign would tell you, if they were being honest,
that when you rubes voted for Biden in the primary you were voting Harris for
president anyway. (Sure, they concealed Biden’s mental decline and boxed out
any serious primary contenders, but in their defense, honesty isn’t their
strong suit.)
Literally overnight, the Democratic Party and its media
attendants have recalibrated their orbits to center around Harris. At the first
day in her new campaign headquarters, she delivered a prepared speech to
predictably delirious rave reviews from the left and the media, the whole lot
of them convulsing online in rapturous shudders of joy like Pentecostals
experiencing their first baptism with the Holy Spirit. (Never before has an
entire political class been so visibly thrilled just to see a candidate read
off a teleprompter without spontaneously inventing new phonemes.) It’s
understandable on an emotional level, however irrational; after staring
political apocalypse in the face for the last three weeks with Biden at the top
of the ticket, getting a chance to “start over” with anyone — even Kamala —
feels a bit like walking out of your own grave.
So Kamala Harris is about to be turned by media coverage
into a saint, if at all possible. All of her once agreed-upon flaws and
political hypocrisies are going to be downplayed and her relationship to the
last four years of failure and deception left unexplored. The nation will be
asked to reset its psychological clock and pretend that she simply fell out of
the coconut tree last week, unburdened by all that has come before. The unity
of effort is remarkable: Democrats are desperate to turn the page on Biden and
the media is praying for any shot at salvation, any chance to write a story
other than the one of Trump’s inexorable triumph.
Will it work? I am doubtful. As long as Harris is kept to
scripted events and friendly audiences, her ability to conduct basic
campaigning is light years ahead of Biden’s — she almost appears normal — so
it’s safe to bet that she will be kept to tightly scripted appearances and
friendly venues as much as possible. The hope is that Trump remains so
inherently unpopular that she can win as “Generic Democrat.” But Biden dug the
Democrats an enormous hole, and even were it possible to climb out of it in three
and a half months, Harris is the candidate least equipped to do so. She is the continuity
candidate as Biden’s vice-president, and while she solves the problem of
Biden’s senility, progressives delude themselves that this was the only problem
people had with Joe Biden’s presidency. Can she be kept away from hostile
questions and skeptical audiences until November? Perhaps so, but then it’s
hard to see how she overcomes her preexisting unpopularity; she is not the
blank slate her newfound champions act like she is.
All the while, chaos reigns. Biden is the lamest duck in
recent presidential history — lacking not just a political future but control
of his basic mental faculties as well. The replacement candidate is a
grievously cracked vessel being asked to carry the hopes of a Democratic
coalition that barely agrees with itself and has failed to persuade the
country. On Monday afternoon, thousands of Democratic partisans began willing
themselves to believe they had avoided a near-death experience. That is their
right. By the same token, it is my right to suggest they are still at death’s
door, and — much like poor Tim Robbins in Jacob’s Ladder — they have
refused to accept that they may actually be experiencing their vision of
political hell.
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