Thank you for your reply. I think this is a topic we’ll have to disagree about it. I do see a lot of the Russiagate stuff in my own personal online interactions, and it started as soon as the discourse about the 2016 election started. It got so bad for me, that I stopped visiting a message board that I had been a member of for over ten years. MSNBC and DailyKos to me seem to be particularly obsessed with Russiagate. However, given what a sprawling site DailyKos is or used to be, I could see how it might appear different to you. YMMV. As I’ve said before, my concern is how accusations of Russian influence are being used to silence critics of the Democrats’ domestic and international policies, to say nothing of the rising threat of nuclear war. However, I also realize that other people don’t have this same view.
Regardless of what one thinks about Russiagate, I do think that Biden, his supporters, and the Democrats as a whole have painted themselves in a corner they can’t get out of it. Biden appears to be convinced, for whatever reason, that he absolutely must be president. Biden supporters are convinced of the same. Based on what seems to be trickling out in the media, it seems like the Democratic leadership doesn’t know what to do. I think this is the result of a sunk cost fallacy; having expended almost four years trying to convince the voting public that Biden is a virile philosopher king, only to have that blow up on live tv must have left them scrambling about what to do. The same is true with the Biden true believers, where they have to either concede that criticisms about his age were either correct or double down. They would also have to concede that the White House and Democratic leaders lied to them about Biden’s health, which is another possibility they don’t want to think about. It seems that most Americans don’t want Biden or Trump, but the polls suggest that they might default to Trump, if only because seems more alert.
You’re right that it’s foolish to think that Biden is the only one who could defeat Trump. The only reason why someone might believe this is because of the supposed incumbent advantage. The problem is that Biden was polling badly even before the debate and before the war on Gaza. I’ve seen some people say that it would hurt morale if Biden had announced, say in 2023, that he would only be a one term president. But whose morale would it have hurt? Biden’s die hard supporters would vote for whoever the Democrats put forth as a candidate, so that can’t be it. Most rank and file Democrats would be happier with a younger candidate, and such a person might also attract the “never Trumpers.” So these reasons seem lacking.
The only explanation I have left is that Democratic leaders decided that it was Biden’s turn (much like how it was Hillary’s turn). He was also a “safe” choice, not just because he was an old white man, but also because he had center right views that wouldn’t harm the status quo. The problem is that the status quo is faltering and piecemeal policies aren’t going to keep it together. Democrats, both leaders and rank and file, decided that Biden would “save democracy” and now believe their own hype. As the song Billie Jean said, “be careful what you do/cause the lie becomes the truth.” I think something similar is going on with Trump, in that I think his first campaign started as a scam, and then he started to believe his own lies once he was in office.
Lastly, I don’t think Democrats understand how to deal with a figure like Trump in general or right wing populists in general. True, Trump comes off as crass and tacky, but it’s not hard to figure out why so many people find that appealing. Just regurgitating bills that have been passed by Biden (or whoever) isn’t going to be convincing if people’s material circumstances either keep getting worse or don’t improve. One really smart thing Trump did in 2016 was acknowledge that a lot of Americans felt terrible and validated those feelings, while Hillary was like, “nope, everything is fine.” The same thing is happening in 2024, and I fear a similar outcome. If Democrats have a hard time beating Trump, how will they manage against someone who is just as extreme but is more polished? Like, if the 2028 Republican candidate is an American version of Giorgia Meloni or Alice Weidel, I think they’ll be stumped.
Perhaps this is where the insane pro-Biden sentiments arise. The institutions and norms that were supposed to prevent Trump and Trump-like figures from arising are failing. Or alternatively, these institutions and norms are keeping in power the sort of person that the founders always intended to be in power (ie wealth property owning white men). Either way, it’s terrifying to think that the governmental structures that you always thought would not only protect you, but are supposed to the best in world are either not working or working contrary to what you believed. Biden is the kind of politician who is supposed to be in power, “the grown-up in the room,” especially in comparison to Trump’s loutish insults. If Biden is mentally unfit, at least relative to Trump, then who’s the real adult in the room now? Who’s been the one really making decisions in the White House? What does it really mean to vote in the US if you admit that you may be voting for a half-corpse and that that’s preferable to the other candidate? Maybe riding and dying with Biden is the only way to keep these existential questions at bay.
I feel like the only thing that can explain what’s going on with Biden’s true believers is that they have fallen victim to their own set of conspiracy theories, Russiagate in particular. The Russiagate obsession was already bad, what with them gleefully imagining mutually assured destruction to avenge Hillary Clinton’s bruised ego, but now it’s just gone off the rails. Everyone is a Russian asset now: Republicans, the NYT, cable news, broadcast news, NPR, pro-Palestinian activists, anti-war activists in general, third parties, anti-police brutality activists, George Clooney (!), elected Democrats who want Kamala Harris to be the presidential candidate etc. Somehow Russia in 2024 has more power and influence than it did when it was part of a superpower sixty years ago. The die hard Biden supporters can’t imagine that people could have real criticism of the man they think is the only defense against fascism. So they must be Russian agents/bots. I think this is also why they downplay people’s unhappiness with inflation and claim that, actually everything is fine, it’s those Russians on the Internet who’ve convinced you otherwise.
This paralyzing fear of Russians behind every bush means that ride or die Biden supporters have no vision or strategy about how to improve the US, other than to clap harder for their incumbent and hope the Democrats never lose another election. No criticism is allowed about Biden because all criticism comes from Russia. It also means that the Democratic Party is moving the Overton Window even further to the right, by deeming that even mild social democratic policies are too dangerous to consider. This was apparent to me as early as 2017, where Russiagate and the Bernie Bros narrative was being used to silence anyone who criticized the Clintons and their center-right leanings. It’s just getting even worse now, with the claims that pro-Palestinian activists are all on the Russian payroll (or China’s depending on who you’re talking to). I’m not sure how Democrats expect to move forward, even if Biden and/Harris wins, when they’re calling their supposed allies, including big donors like Clooney, Russian bots and spies. They have no plans and no vision, other than not being Trump, and I don’t think that’s going to work in 2024 like it did in 2020.
So, you’ve brought up this topic several times, and I’m not sure if you’ve noticed that I’ve never engaged with you on it. This is mainly because what you’re describing does not match up with my experience. When I was on my former platform, Daily Kos, which is home to a nucleus of thought in the Democratic Party (I think it’s safe to say), I did not hear people yammering on about Russiagate. That term didn’t come up and people were not going on and on about Russia in general. The only diaries (i.e., essays) that touched on Russia as a topic, at least in the last two years, have been associated with the Ukraine conflict, and in that case bringing up Russia as an entity makes perfect sense. You can’t describe the conflict without doing so.
So I didn’t then, and don’t now, see evidence of this widespread fixation on Russia in Democratic circles, at least not among regular voters and commenters. As for the upper echelon of Democratic operatives, I’m not privy to those conversations. So I am not familiar with this.
Another reason I am not engaging on the topic is because I suspect that this topic, along with a handful of others, make up a constellation of beliefs that, once adopted, put someone right in the orbit of falling into conspiracy-theory land themselves. Many of the people who put stock in this idea that Democrats are besotted with Russia also believe that there’s something sinister in efforts to vaccinate people for Covid. I’m not about that foolishness. So I am simply suspicious (which is to say, highly skeptical but not foreclosing all discussion on the matter, because that would be a closed-minded thing to do).
I grant that there have been instances this year, among them Nancy Pelosi’s absurd comments this past spring about Russian money being behind pro-Palestinian / anti-genocide protests, that on their face are conspiratorial. Looking back at the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, it was born in the era where US capitalism was being pitted against Soviet Communism, and Israel’s fate was tied up in that dichotomy. I’m not surprised, in retrospect, that Pelosi’s words still are tinged with that fundamental cleft of reality. She’s privy to information the rest of us don’t have (though, if she were referencing confidential information, she should have kept that to herself instead of flinging out info that cannot be publicly substantiated), but more than that she came up during a time where the basic paradigm saw the US pitted against Palestine as a satellite of Soviet designs. So, I’m sure it’s hard to break out of that.
(I am not defending Pelosi here, to be clear. She was utterly irresponsible in smearing an entire movement, and even at the time I thought her comment were kooky.)
So, I don’t trace the tightness of the circling of the wagons that is evident in TrueBlue Biden folks to that topic at all. There’s no throughline. There seems, rather, that they’ve adopted wholesale the delusion that only one man out of 300 million people in the US can defeat the presumptive Republican nominee. This is an article of faith, and believing so deeply in it has caused these people to see malign forces in areas where those forces don’t exist. The people who’ve long said “We believe in science” now discount entire swaths of polls. Logic is inverted. Timelines have been reconstructed backwards in order to view them in a certain light. Magical thinking reigns. It’s downright disturbing, and I’m still trying to figure out the dynamics of this manifestation.
Clearly, this goes back to a desire to conform in the face of risk, but I think much more needs to be uncovered here.
Thank you for your reply. I think this is a topic we’ll have to disagree about it. I do see a lot of the Russiagate stuff in my own personal online interactions, and it started as soon as the discourse about the 2016 election started. It got so bad for me, that I stopped visiting a message board that I had been a member of for over ten years. MSNBC and DailyKos to me seem to be particularly obsessed with Russiagate. However, given what a sprawling site DailyKos is or used to be, I could see how it might appear different to you. YMMV. As I’ve said before, my concern is how accusations of Russian influence are being used to silence critics of the Democrats’ domestic and international policies, to say nothing of the rising threat of nuclear war. However, I also realize that other people don’t have this same view.
Regardless of what one thinks about Russiagate, I do think that Biden, his supporters, and the Democrats as a whole have painted themselves in a corner they can’t get out of it. Biden appears to be convinced, for whatever reason, that he absolutely must be president. Biden supporters are convinced of the same. Based on what seems to be trickling out in the media, it seems like the Democratic leadership doesn’t know what to do. I think this is the result of a sunk cost fallacy; having expended almost four years trying to convince the voting public that Biden is a virile philosopher king, only to have that blow up on live tv must have left them scrambling about what to do. The same is true with the Biden true believers, where they have to either concede that criticisms about his age were either correct or double down. They would also have to concede that the White House and Democratic leaders lied to them about Biden’s health, which is another possibility they don’t want to think about. It seems that most Americans don’t want Biden or Trump, but the polls suggest that they might default to Trump, if only because seems more alert.
You’re right that it’s foolish to think that Biden is the only one who could defeat Trump. The only reason why someone might believe this is because of the supposed incumbent advantage. The problem is that Biden was polling badly even before the debate and before the war on Gaza. I’ve seen some people say that it would hurt morale if Biden had announced, say in 2023, that he would only be a one term president. But whose morale would it have hurt? Biden’s die hard supporters would vote for whoever the Democrats put forth as a candidate, so that can’t be it. Most rank and file Democrats would be happier with a younger candidate, and such a person might also attract the “never Trumpers.” So these reasons seem lacking.
The only explanation I have left is that Democratic leaders decided that it was Biden’s turn (much like how it was Hillary’s turn). He was also a “safe” choice, not just because he was an old white man, but also because he had center right views that wouldn’t harm the status quo. The problem is that the status quo is faltering and piecemeal policies aren’t going to keep it together. Democrats, both leaders and rank and file, decided that Biden would “save democracy” and now believe their own hype. As the song Billie Jean said, “be careful what you do/cause the lie becomes the truth.” I think something similar is going on with Trump, in that I think his first campaign started as a scam, and then he started to believe his own lies once he was in office.
Lastly, I don’t think Democrats understand how to deal with a figure like Trump in general or right wing populists in general. True, Trump comes off as crass and tacky, but it’s not hard to figure out why so many people find that appealing. Just regurgitating bills that have been passed by Biden (or whoever) isn’t going to be convincing if people’s material circumstances either keep getting worse or don’t improve. One really smart thing Trump did in 2016 was acknowledge that a lot of Americans felt terrible and validated those feelings, while Hillary was like, “nope, everything is fine.” The same thing is happening in 2024, and I fear a similar outcome. If Democrats have a hard time beating Trump, how will they manage against someone who is just as extreme but is more polished? Like, if the 2028 Republican candidate is an American version of Giorgia Meloni or Alice Weidel, I think they’ll be stumped.
Perhaps this is where the insane pro-Biden sentiments arise. The institutions and norms that were supposed to prevent Trump and Trump-like figures from arising are failing. Or alternatively, these institutions and norms are keeping in power the sort of person that the founders always intended to be in power (ie wealth property owning white men). Either way, it’s terrifying to think that the governmental structures that you always thought would not only protect you, but are supposed to the best in world are either not working or working contrary to what you believed. Biden is the kind of politician who is supposed to be in power, “the grown-up in the room,” especially in comparison to Trump’s loutish insults. If Biden is mentally unfit, at least relative to Trump, then who’s the real adult in the room now? Who’s been the one really making decisions in the White House? What does it really mean to vote in the US if you admit that you may be voting for a half-corpse and that that’s preferable to the other candidate? Maybe riding and dying with Biden is the only way to keep these existential questions at bay.
I feel like the only thing that can explain what’s going on with Biden’s true believers is that they have fallen victim to their own set of conspiracy theories, Russiagate in particular. The Russiagate obsession was already bad, what with them gleefully imagining mutually assured destruction to avenge Hillary Clinton’s bruised ego, but now it’s just gone off the rails. Everyone is a Russian asset now: Republicans, the NYT, cable news, broadcast news, NPR, pro-Palestinian activists, anti-war activists in general, third parties, anti-police brutality activists, George Clooney (!), elected Democrats who want Kamala Harris to be the presidential candidate etc. Somehow Russia in 2024 has more power and influence than it did when it was part of a superpower sixty years ago. The die hard Biden supporters can’t imagine that people could have real criticism of the man they think is the only defense against fascism. So they must be Russian agents/bots. I think this is also why they downplay people’s unhappiness with inflation and claim that, actually everything is fine, it’s those Russians on the Internet who’ve convinced you otherwise.
This paralyzing fear of Russians behind every bush means that ride or die Biden supporters have no vision or strategy about how to improve the US, other than to clap harder for their incumbent and hope the Democrats never lose another election. No criticism is allowed about Biden because all criticism comes from Russia. It also means that the Democratic Party is moving the Overton Window even further to the right, by deeming that even mild social democratic policies are too dangerous to consider. This was apparent to me as early as 2017, where Russiagate and the Bernie Bros narrative was being used to silence anyone who criticized the Clintons and their center-right leanings. It’s just getting even worse now, with the claims that pro-Palestinian activists are all on the Russian payroll (or China’s depending on who you’re talking to). I’m not sure how Democrats expect to move forward, even if Biden and/Harris wins, when they’re calling their supposed allies, including big donors like Clooney, Russian bots and spies. They have no plans and no vision, other than not being Trump, and I don’t think that’s going to work in 2024 like it did in 2020.
Hello again, Leah. Thanks for your response.
So, you’ve brought up this topic several times, and I’m not sure if you’ve noticed that I’ve never engaged with you on it. This is mainly because what you’re describing does not match up with my experience. When I was on my former platform, Daily Kos, which is home to a nucleus of thought in the Democratic Party (I think it’s safe to say), I did not hear people yammering on about Russiagate. That term didn’t come up and people were not going on and on about Russia in general. The only diaries (i.e., essays) that touched on Russia as a topic, at least in the last two years, have been associated with the Ukraine conflict, and in that case bringing up Russia as an entity makes perfect sense. You can’t describe the conflict without doing so.
So I didn’t then, and don’t now, see evidence of this widespread fixation on Russia in Democratic circles, at least not among regular voters and commenters. As for the upper echelon of Democratic operatives, I’m not privy to those conversations. So I am not familiar with this.
Another reason I am not engaging on the topic is because I suspect that this topic, along with a handful of others, make up a constellation of beliefs that, once adopted, put someone right in the orbit of falling into conspiracy-theory land themselves. Many of the people who put stock in this idea that Democrats are besotted with Russia also believe that there’s something sinister in efforts to vaccinate people for Covid. I’m not about that foolishness. So I am simply suspicious (which is to say, highly skeptical but not foreclosing all discussion on the matter, because that would be a closed-minded thing to do).
I grant that there have been instances this year, among them Nancy Pelosi’s absurd comments this past spring about Russian money being behind pro-Palestinian / anti-genocide protests, that on their face are conspiratorial. Looking back at the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, it was born in the era where US capitalism was being pitted against Soviet Communism, and Israel’s fate was tied up in that dichotomy. I’m not surprised, in retrospect, that Pelosi’s words still are tinged with that fundamental cleft of reality. She’s privy to information the rest of us don’t have (though, if she were referencing confidential information, she should have kept that to herself instead of flinging out info that cannot be publicly substantiated), but more than that she came up during a time where the basic paradigm saw the US pitted against Palestine as a satellite of Soviet designs. So, I’m sure it’s hard to break out of that.
(I am not defending Pelosi here, to be clear. She was utterly irresponsible in smearing an entire movement, and even at the time I thought her comment were kooky.)
So, I don’t trace the tightness of the circling of the wagons that is evident in TrueBlue Biden folks to that topic at all. There’s no throughline. There seems, rather, that they’ve adopted wholesale the delusion that only one man out of 300 million people in the US can defeat the presumptive Republican nominee. This is an article of faith, and believing so deeply in it has caused these people to see malign forces in areas where those forces don’t exist. The people who’ve long said “We believe in science” now discount entire swaths of polls. Logic is inverted. Timelines have been reconstructed backwards in order to view them in a certain light. Magical thinking reigns. It’s downright disturbing, and I’m still trying to figure out the dynamics of this manifestation.
Clearly, this goes back to a desire to conform in the face of risk, but I think much more needs to be uncovered here.