The fallout from the American president’s addled performance shows the real nature of Washington’s “democracy” and its empire
There is very little to say about the content of the recent televised debate between the current American president, Joe Biden, and the former and likely next president, Donald Trump. That’s because the one feature that mattered was so obvious: Biden is, as those with eyes to see have known for a long time, deeply senile. That is a personal if not uncommon tragedy. Given Biden’s many sins – a lifelong record of systematic, almost compulsive lying, of policies that have, for decades, abused the weak and the poor and pandered to the rich, and, last but not least, the Gaza genocide co-perpetrated with his Zionist friends – it is impossible to feel pity for him. But given the unfortunate power of America, his mental decline is also a global scourge. Yet another one the ‘indispensable’ nation is inflicting on the rest of us on this planet.
The difference between before and after the debate is simply that now even the most mendacious Democratic Party hacks and behind-the-scenes manipulators cannot deny this fact any longer. Don’t get me wrong: Many of them are at least pretending to try, including former president Barack Obama, despite ongoing, widespread, and irrepressible speculation that Michelle Obama, his wife, might enter the fray at the last minute in the melodramatic role of – nobly reluctant – savior. And, of course, Democrats are also blaming anyone but themselves and their atrocious president. Yet their efforts are largely in vain. Even in America, with its post-truth media, the “secret” that never really was, is out, and the taboo is broken.
Panicked by the return of Donald Trump, key outlets of extreme Centrism, such as, to name only three, the very popular TV ‘news’ (really, agitation and propaganda) show Morning Joe, the de facto Democratic Party newspaper the New York Times, and The Economist, the British Pravda of the American empire, are openly and insistently calling for Biden to quit. Polls in the US indicate that the public has had enough, too: According to a CBS News poll, only 28% of registered voters think Biden should stay in the race, while 72% acknowledge the obvious: Biden is mentally unfit for the presidency.
Yet none of this is a surprise. What is more interesting now is what the political fallout of Biden’s debate fiasco reveals about the nature of two things that, unfortunately, still shape much of our world: American ‘democracy’ and American empire.
Regarding ‘democracy’, even in the US, some observers – such former President Jimmy Carter and researchers at Princeton University, have long understood that it’s silly to describe their country as a democracy. Instead, any halfway objective assessment of its real political system has to start from the fact that it is an oligarchy. But Carter and the Princeton researchers acknowledged that fact a decade ago. The question is where are we now?
Spoiler alert: Things have only gotten worse. Exhibit A – the manner in which the Biden dementia debate debacle is being handled. It is not only the fact that Democratic Party apparatchiks are engaging in Orwellian falsifications to cover Biden’s catastrophic cognitive failure that enables us to see with our own eyes. It is also the way in which Biden’s family (or would clan be a more exact term?) is still widely treated as having the apparently divine privilege to help him decide whether finally to drop out or not.
A family matter? A political system in which issues of obvious and extremely urgent public interest are up to a totally unaccountable ‘family council’ – such as whether a dementia case should have final say over almost 5,000 nuclear weapons – does not qualify as a democracy. Indeed, it does not even qualify as a republic anymore. It may, with a ginormous dose of generosity, pass as a rather rotten monarchy. Less charitable observers would class it as a form of mafia or mobster rule.
But even the resistance to Biden continuing his zombie-like shamble toward electoral defeat offers no hope for democracy. Clearly, there are only two forces inside US politics that could actually compel the obstinate octogenarian and his stubborn wife and handler ‘Dr. Jill’ to accept reality: a rebel faction within the Democratic Party elite, or within the so-called ‘donor class’ – that is, those rich enough to buy American politics by financing its stupendously expensive election campaigns.
The possibility of a rebellion from within the Democratic Party nomenklatura is of course, a very real one, and when the day comes it will probably include most of those now ostentatiously still swearing fealty to Biden. In other words, it would be a mostly silent coup, a (political) knife in the back in a dark alley echoing with whispers of Obama’s almighty phone calls.
Regarding the donor class, its self-confident millionaires and billionaires are, as you would expect, a little more brash and louder, doing without any pious loyalty theater. Instead, as one of them has said, they are already “unanimous… that Biden needs to go.” If you want to call that ‘democracy’ – a bulldogs-under-the-carpet-like struggle (or dirty deal, as the case may be) between an unaccountable family clan and its personal retainers in the campaign on the one side, and a possible insider coup and all the money on the other – I have a special-deal Boeing 737 Max to sell to you.
What about the second thing on which the Biden cognitive catastrophe fallout can shed light? What about American empire? There we can again learn three important things: The US ‘elite’ hardly cares what its vassals think. Its vassals mostly shut up and do as they are told. And when they dare to speak up, they never challenge the real, underlying problems of systemic incompetence and irresponsibility.
Regarding Washington’s open disinterest in what its so-called allies around the world think about the fact that their leader is a wreck, just peruse American commentary. Yes, you will find some articles about international reactions to the debate debacle – for instance, in the Washington Post and Bloomberg – but you will not find any serious argument that the vassals’ opinion, anxieties, or even very timid complaints (if that’s the word) should play a role in deciding what to do next.
Imagine, if you will, the actual US political power structure as consisting of concentric rings. Right now at the center of decision-making you will find the Biden clan and a very small number of power brokers, mostly from the Democratic Party ‘elite’ (with a representative or two of AIPAC in the mix as well one way or the other). The next ring consists of the donor class, or simply put, the rich. The third one, the loyalist (or not so much anymore) media. And the fourth, perhaps, containing the Democratic Party as a whole, more or less.
Voters? No ring for you. Tell the pollsters what you feel and maybe someone who matters will be impressed enough to care. Imperial vassals? Hang in there with the voters, please.
Yet you cannot blame all of this on the Washington ‘elite’. The vassals also have themselves to blame because when they dare to make noise, it’s usually extremely muffled and deferential to a fault, with occasional exceptions. A recent one has been provided by the enfant terrible of Polish and NATO politics, Radek Sikorski. Yes, that’s the current foreign minister of Poland, who was indiscreet enough to admit (in obsequious gratitude, of course) that the US was behind the bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines. Now he has compared an American president to a Roman emperor (clearly oblivious to the fact that so-called republics and ‘democracies’ should not feature autocrats). And, even worse, he has implied that Emperor Biden is messing up his “ride into the sunset” (with apologies for the mixed “Magnificent Seven” and “Gladiator” references – they are not mine).
Sikorski’s boss, Poland’s current EU proconsul and prime minister, Donald Tusk, was bold enough to state in public that the American Democrats “have a problem.” The insight! Perhaps, if given enough time, Tusk will even think his way through to pondering the problems all of us have with the Democrats and their insane choices. But that, probably, is asking too much.
In general, Bloomberg finds “consternation and handwringing” among America’s EU clients. And that is, in essence, that. A silly X post and a sigh of misplaced commiseration out of Poland. Otherwise, long faces hardly even displayed in public. If Washington were to read this non-response as at least confirming its firm grip on its transatlantic underlings, it would be right: The emperor’s decline is naked, and the Europeans maintain decorum.
In a normal US, Biden would long have been retired. Indeed, he would never have been president. In a normal Europe, there would be a pervasive, urgent, high-priority debate about what is structurally wrong with an America that can produce and keep a Biden, and how to become independent of such a bizarre hegemon as quickly as possible. And yet, on both sides of the Atlantic, we see not only the political and cultural pathology of a man like Biden in the highest office. We also see virtually no normal responses to this pathology. The US ‘elite’ and its EU-NATO vassal ‘elites’ deserve each other: they both inhabit a topsy-turvy universe of so much lying that they could not find their way back to reality even if they tried. But how do all of us, the other 99.9%, deserve them?
