Biden’s Enablers Crushed Dissent and Paid the Price
The Powerful Rarely Appreciate Viewpoint Diversity
Each day you wake up and realize today could be the day the world discovers your chicanery.
Each day requires you to push your fakery a little further. Each day demands another agonizing test—maybe your act has to go on the road or fool a new group of people. Forget President Biden’s mental fitness, White House staffers must be edging toward insanity.
They’ve been carefully orchestrating his every halting step and word. Each public appearance requires almost Cirque du Soleil levels of choreography. And if anyone catches on, staffers must attack like their political lives depended on it.
Imagine the stress they’ve endured as they try to hide what nearly everyone already knew—that Biden’s not all there.
The failing octogenarian protagonist offers a new twist, but the core of the story is as old as politics. Push a narrative, attack dissenters, and survive one more election.
Eight Percenters assume enforcing groupthink will advance their political goals, but sometimes it undermines them.
Here’s how Jonathan Haidt puts it in The Coddling of the American Mind movie:
When we suppress dissent, when we intimidate dissenters, we make ourselves stupid, because other people challenging us make us smart. It's almost like they're an extension of our brain.
Haidt likens punishing dissenters to “shooting yourself in the brain.”
Punishing dissenters makes us dumber, and it does more than that. It creates a fog of ignorance that makes us vulnerable. It might even cause ambitious elites to lose what they covet so dearly—power.
Let’s examine the players and ponder why they behaved as they did.
The White House Staff
The members of Team Biden have long insisted the president is just fine, and they attacked anyone who suggested otherwise. Recall their fury over special counsel Robert Hur describing Biden as an “elderly man with a poor memory" or The Wall Street Journal’s report from just a month ago whose title now reads like an understatement: “Behind Closed Doors, Biden Shows Signs of Slipping.”
In this saga, the reporting by Hur and the Journal are some of the only things that have aged well. But we shouldn’t be too surprised by the behavior of the president’s staff. They had so much to gain by maintaining the illusion, so it’s no wonder they would defend Biden’s mental capacity so ferociously.
It’s easy to depict them as cynical puppeteers hungry for personal glory, and maybe that’s an apt description. But we should never underestimate the power of self delusion.
When our careers are on the line, we humans become extremely creative rationalizers. We become blackbelts in motivated reasoning.
The Media
Most in the mainstream media stuck to the White House’s script.
Journalists largely share Team Biden’s progressive worldview, but there’s another force that contributed to the groupthink—fear. Journalists are terrified of doing anything that could be perceived as helping the orange Satan.
Even former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson highlighted that fear. She told Semafor, "I worry that too many journalists didn't try to get the story because they did not want to be accused of helping elect Donald Trump."
That same fear courses through actors, writers, producers, and directors.
Related:
Attack of the Eight Percenters: Why We’re Releasing Our Movie on Substack
Why Won’t Late Night Comics Rip Biden? Conventional wisdom can’t explain the groupthink
Why is Late Night Comedy One-Party Territory? Groupthink grips Colbert, Kimmel, and Fallon
Hollywood
The incentives for people in the entertainment industry mirror those in the media. They also fear being ostracized for helping Trump. They also root for progressive policies. Indeed, they’re often more brazen about their partisanship than their media comrades, who are still somewhat burdened by the expectation of nonpartisanship.
For the Hollywood set, their participation in the ruse goes beyond their predictable support for anti-Trump movies and their reluctance to needle Biden. They have been actively involved in the reelection effort.
Entertainment mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg co-chairs Biden’s campaign, and many celebrities have been raising money for the president. Just over three months ago, Stephen Colbert moderated a star-packed Biden fundraiser that hauled in a record $26 million. Last month, Jimmy Kimmel racked up an even larger amount.
Then came the debate, and the charade could last no more.
So what can this fiasco teach us?
Lessons Learned
Power can sometimes foster weakness.
Eight Percenters dominate the institutions that had been keeping the smoke and mirrors show chugging along. They were mighty enough to orchestrate the illusion, but their power remained brittle.
It took only a few minutes of debate stumbles to destroy the elaborate apparatus of illusion. A little reality goes a long way.
But it didn’t have to be this way.
Powerful people tend to regard the welcoming of viewpoint diversity as a magnanimous gesture on their part. And it’s true that a culture of free speech usually offers them the least amount of upside. After all, if you’re powerful, you’ll always get to have your say.
Even so, there are times when the powerful could embrace a culture of free speech on self interested grounds.
In hindsight, the Eight Percenters propping up Biden probably would have been better off if they hadn’t forbidden dissent.
Imagine a Different Story
We shouldn’t expect much from the White House staff, but imagine if the other designers of delusion behaved differently.