The cultural elites got a free ride under Biden. That ends now.
Spiked
20th January 2025
The tragedy of Joe Biden is not only his cognitive decline. It is not only his very public demise, his transformation from an upright man who spoke in a Pennsylvania boom to a shuffling old fella whispering inanities to the world. It is not only that he ascended to power posing as the defender of the republic and three years later was yakking incoherently in a CNN clash with Donald Trump. ‘Democracy has prevailed’, he told the audience at his inauguration on 20 January 2021, two weeks after a Trumpist mob had sacked the Capitol in a fit of undemocratic pique. ‘We finally beat Medicare’, he mumbled surreally in that CNN debate. From the republic’s protector to its most memed jester – it was a fall of King Lear proportions.
No, the true tragedy of Joe Biden is that he promised to be one thing and became something else entirely. He promised to steady the great ship America in the swirling seas of both wokeism and populism. Yet he ended up steering the ship back into those woke waters. ‘Scranton Joe’, the DC operator who could hold a conversation with blue-collar folk, became Right-On Joe who seemed more interested in cosying up to Oberlin ideologues. On every issue – climate change, the border, the transgender ideology – he became the mouthpiece of America’s true oligarchy: the ideological junta of the coastal elites.
There is much discussion today, as Biden bows out and Trump is inaugurated, about how Biden became a political marionette of scheming Democrats. The Democrat elites and their acolytes in the mainstream media gaslit us for years on Biden’s demise. It was seen as a ‘right-wing, tin-foil-hat talking point’ to suggest poor old Joe was not all there. Yet they knew he was flailing. They knew, in the words of the New York Times, that his ‘memory lapses’ had become ‘more frequent, more pronounced and… more worrisome’. And they seemed content – thrilled, in fact – to run things behind his back. It was Weekend at Bernie’s reimagined by George Orwell – a frail old man dragged into the spotlight to distract attention from the shady manoeuvres of his power-hungry party officials.
We ended up with the autocratic spectacle of a president signing executive orders without knowing what he was doing. Last week, House Speaker Mike Johnson told Bari Weiss that his own ‘personal observation’ of Biden in recent months led him to believe that the president ‘has not been in charge for some time’. Biden even seemed to forget that he had signed an executive order pausing the export of LNG (liquefied natural gas). When Johnson pressed him on this order, telling him it would compel America’s allies to get their gas from Russia instead, ‘fuelling Vladimir Putin’s war machine’, Biden said: ‘I didn’t do that.’
What an indictment of four years of Democratic rule. We now know that, towards the end, at least, this was a Potemkin presidency. Biden was the fleshy edifice behind which bureaucrats did their business. He was the carefully coiffured front for a highly elitist operation. And yet, in some ways, this was only the physical manifestation of a political reality that preceded his decline. He was a marionette of the woke oligarchy long before he was a marionette of Democratic operators. The true story of the Biden years is the hijacking of the West’s institutions of power by ideologues whose beliefs and schemes grate so harshly against the interests of the masses.
The ensnaring even of Joseph Biden Jnr by the green, genderfluid, hyper-racial ideology of woke was a testament to that ideology’s power. As even CNN said, in 2019, it was strange to see someone like ‘Uncle Joe’ embark on the ‘long path to woke’. Here we had a politician noted for his ‘unique appeal to white, working-class Midwest voters’ openly embracing the white-bashing dogma of the new elites. At a discussion of violence against women in March 2019, as Biden was weighing up a stab at the presidency in 2020, he told activists that such violence is ‘white man’s culture’ and ‘it’s got to change’. From sharing a beer with white working-class blokes to damning whiteness as the source of sexist violence – Biden’s moral decline, courtesy of woke, preceded his mental decline.
It was a sign of things to come. For all Biden’s posing as ‘Moderate Joe’, as the avuncular politician who might steer a path between his own party’s obsession with ‘racial and gender issues’ and the populism of the Trumpists, in truth he embraced the new cultural orthodoxies. In the 2020 campaign, he was presented as the ‘Great Moderate Hope’, says Ruy Teixeira. Yet when he got to the White House, he was far more interested in flattering and rewarding the activist class than in pursuing policies that might boost the working class.
As Teixeira reminds us, he was fiercely eco-correct, cancelling the Keystone XL pipeline and pausing oil and gas exploration on state-owned land. He was soft on the border, an issue of concern to vast numbers of working-class voters. He ‘furiously denounced those who termed the situation [at the border] a crisis’. And he was drunk on identitarianism. To the joy of identity activists, he promised to promote ‘equity’ across federal government. And he threw his lot in with the trans ideology. He called it ‘the civil rights issue of our time’. He made Rachel Levine, a man who claims to be a woman, his assistant secretary for health and his administration’s de facto ‘spokesperson on transgender issues’. Kamala Harris sent a letter to trans TikTok influencer Dylan Mulvaney to congratulate him on his ‘365th day’ of ‘living authentically’ as a ‘girl’. I fear we still have not clocked how insane this all was.
Poll after poll found that, on climate, trans and the border, voters considered Biden far too ‘progressive’, which is to say crazy. Mike Johnson says poor old Joe ‘has not been in charge for some time’. But the past four years confirmed something even more troubling and tragic: voters have not been in charge for some time. What they want – well-paying jobs, cheap energy, common sense, equality rather than equity, and the right of their daughters to play sport without some hulking ‘trans’ boy pushing them around – didn’t get a look-in under Biden’s Potemkin presidency. The cultural oligarchy ruled, not those ‘working-class Midwest voters’ Uncle Joe might once have connected with.
There’s been much discussion about oligarchy this past week, after Biden said that, under Trump, an ‘oligarchy… of extreme wealth, power and influence’ will take shape. It is true that some in the billionaire class have cosied up to Trump, having been equally snug with the Democrats over the past decade. Yet the true oligarchy in modern America, the most influential oligarchy, is the cultural elite. The ideologues of the academy, the media establishment and the professional managerial elites. Their diktat has held sway everywhere from the classroom to the boardroom, from oil fields to international affairs. And Biden was their patsy. With his departure, and Trump’s arrival, this oligarchy will quake. They know their cultural hegemony now faces a grave and possibly existential threat. Good. This is the most positive thing that will spring from today’s events in Washington, DC.
Close
Comments
Post a Comment