Every day that Joe Biden stays in office, he seems to increase his humiliation.
We all depend upon others to support our narratives.
I’m a convert to Orthodox Judaism. If no Orthodox Jew supported my transition, I couldn’t sustain my story that I am a Jew.
If I only received humiliation for my online posting, I would quit. I think I am doing something important, but I depend on getting some support for my narrative. The stronger the person, the less support he needs. I have the strength to do livestreams where everybody in the chat disagrees with me (for example, I don’t believe voter fraud determined the 2020 presidential election and I believe the elites did better than expected with regard to containing covid), but this strength is not unlimited.
As I have gotten older, I’ve become less needy. I’ve shifted from external motivation to internal motivation. If I write something, then switch to a browser and read it back to myself, and I like it, I feel good, but I know there’s a level of public humiliation for the post that would likely change my mind.
Over the course of my blogging, positive feedback has exceeded the negative. That is my perception anyway. I reframe things in ways that make me happy.
Hillary Clinton was right that it takes a village. We are social creatures. We usually get our hero system from our community.
At a certain level of opposition, Joe Biden will quit. We’re not wired to accept unlimited amounts of humiliation. None of us can sustain narratives that receive no external support.
Republicans are more reluctant to speak out about politics in social settings than Democrats because Republicans fear being labeled racist, for which there is no easy cure.
In a July 6, 2024 video, America’s best political reporter, Mark Halperin, says: “Republicans investigating Joe Biden during his presidency have been a clown show. They haven’t done it well and in part they haven’t done it well because like with the Hunter Biden investigations the press was against them. The press didn’t want to help them. Now the press is interested in these two stories too so the incompetent Republican party on Capitol Hill in terms of investigations is now going to have the wind at their back because they’ll be working with reporters. One is what did the president’s people know and when did they know it (his condition)… It’s been a conspiracy. The press has been in on it.”
Ross Douthat writes July 6, 2024 for the New York Times:
…having the media and the intelligentsia turn fully against you is more devastating for a Democratic president, because the Democrats generally see themselves as the party that trusts the mainstream press and academic expertise and respectable opinion, whereas Republicans generally assume that those forces are biased or blinkered or somehow out to get them.
To be sure, there are plenty of Democrats who regard the wave of negative coverage for Biden since the debate as a put-up job or a media conspiracy; social media is full of those voices at the moment. But in its natural posture the Democratic Party really cares about its reputation among figures of cultural authority in a way that the Republican Party in its natural posture does not. So Biden’s incapacity, and the wave of elite anger at its concealment, has already created a greater sense of tension for Democratic politicians and staff members and apparatchiks than could ever exist on the Republican side.
Finally, even after Trump’s most disgraceful moments in 2016, Republicans found ways to reconcile themselves to his candidacy, to take the path of least resistance, by telling themselves that things might get better — that he could hire better advisers, lay off social media, learn to discipline himself, grow into the role of presidential candidate or ultimately president.
This was mostly self-deception, but it was a story that people could cling to or talk themselves into as a means to avoiding difficult choices. (And there were, in the end, more and less stable periods of Trump’s presidency, depending on which subordinates he hired.)
With Biden’s condition, though, even the most ardent partisans have to know in their hearts that things will not get any better, that they can only deteriorate from here. Hoping for a moral breakthrough or a sudden discovery of personal discipline from a public figure is generally naïve. But hoping for a reversal of the aging process is a different level of delusion, a higher bar to clear.
