The Empire, Not Just Biden, Has Dementia
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I had just left Crater Lake National Park in Oregon and started heading west on Highway 138 toward the coast a hundred and fifty miles away when the Biden/Trump debate started. I could only catch a few minutes of it before I lost the signal for the next few days. So it was only the following week that I was able to catch up on what had happened. But I heard enough in just those few minutes to find it shocking, even for my jaded senses. Not only was Biden’s voice hoarse and pretty much undecipherable, but his sentences and logic made no sense at all. Meanwhile, Trump, in his very first response, sounded solid and authoritative, his voice booming—even if his content was likewise junk. But at least he was in control of the protocols of language, whereas Biden seemed to have lost the speech function altogether.
I have generally been skeptical of people saddling Biden with Alzheimer’s or dementia going back to 2019 when he started running for election. My mother had Alzheimer’s so I have personal familiarity with its ravages, and I’m careful to make such diagnoses from a distance. There was no doubt that compared to 2012 (when Biden handily demolished Paul Ryan in the debate), not to mention much earlier in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s—much as you might disagree with his racist, punitive, sexist actions—Biden had suffered severe cognitive decline. There were the outbursts against voters in the audience during 2019-2020. He seemed to be receiving some form of pacifying medication, when the rants and rages, or the inordinate attention to women’s hair or little girls’ bodies, got too much to bear. They probably administered some cocktail of medication for him to successfully get through the “debate” with Bernie Sanders, who unilaterally laid down arms anyway and let himself, and the left movement, be savaged. The debates with Trump in the fall of 2020 were more subdued affairs, when the cognitive decline was more obvious, and Biden had the excuse of Covid not to have to campaign in public.
Since then, his handlers seem to have been able to mostly hide him away, except for the rare occasion when he appears in public and each time is manifestly more fragile and incoherent. This whole cover-up got blown in the debate in such a manner that nobody can unsee it. Any doubts as to his mental decline have been removed.
The empire has in fact been running for the last four years on auto-pilot. The darkest, craziest, most doomsdayish forces in the deep state have actually been managing this empire, without any democratic input, or any care for the sentiments of the public. No one listens. It is in fact Jake Sullivan, Antony Blinken, Janet Yellen and other insane apparatchiks who decide the policies that Biden then rubber stamps, since he has no brain left to argue otherwise.
To a large extent, this explains Biden’s meandering inaction, or rather full complicity, in the Gaza genocide. It explains the mad drive toward direct confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia in a way that reminds us of Dr. Strangelove. It explains the total withdrawal of any progressive policy initiatives in the first year of the administration and letting Manchin and Sinema ensure that nothing substantive passed. Obama, Clinton, or a president Kamala Harris would never have given one hundred percent license to Israel to do whatever it wanted, no matter their own Zionist inclinations; the complete passivity is not normal.
Nobody is there to stop the runaway train, and there hasn’t been for four long years. That’s an amazing fact, a testament to the empire’s ability to run on the writ of nameless bureaucrats who are actually autocrats driven by passionate narrow agendas that have no regard for democratic sentiments. It doesn’t matter if seventy or eighty percent of the people oppose the Gaza genocide, or if overwhelming numbers of young people want student debt forgiveness, or none of the people except deep state operatives are for war with Russia. The deep state on auto-pilot doesn’t care about any of it.
Biden’s speech patterns are not an impediment or stutter but a rhetorical style suited to the moment. I don’t want to go all the way back to, say, FDR or LBJ or JFK or Nixon, but each president, in the mode of spectacle, has a pattern of speech that reflects the needs of the moment. It doesn’t always work perfectly, but there’s a pretty strong correlation. Bill Clinton’s convoluted reasoning—hair-splitting, if you will—worked well with the triangulation and Third Way strategies involved in imposing a neoliberal way of life upon an unsuspecting public. George W. Bush’s macho West Texas swagger—as fake an artifact as we’ve ever seen in American politics—suited the Project for a New American Century’s designs to forcefully implement the next phase of the New World Order upon recalcitrant foreign countries. Barack Obama’s resort to high-minded vagueness reflected the unease of the elites toward the devastation neoliberalism had wrought and their unwillingness to do anything about it except to seek refuge in verbal flights of fancy. Trump came along with his fake working-class grievances and the simplistic reduction of the world to those who belonged and those who didn’t in the wake of a neoliberalism that had reached the end of its persuasiveness for non-believers.
To resuscitate what was left of the American empire, what was then needed was a vacant mind, a vacant stare, a man who came so far from the past—a literal walking zombie from the era before consciousness of race and class registered even on neoliberal terms—that global military aggression could proceed apace again, as if the last fifty years hadn’t happened.
And that’s what Biden’s rhetoric—and it is a form of rhetoric, even if demented—represents at every moment: It is as if the last fifty years of even gestural progress in social justice terms hadn’t occurred. It is as if domestically we were living in the age of opposition to busing and Storm Thurmond’s hold on the South, and in the arena of foreign policy there were those who believed that Kissinger’s détente toward Russia had gone too far in the direction of pacification. The deep state needed that kind of leader to revive its fortunes against a Trump who threatened to cease perpetual war, not give due respect to enemies real or imagined, and instead direct the country to a form of crass vulgarism whose culmination he represented in his own body and spirit.
The interview with George Stephanopoulos was even worse than the debate. This is when I first came around to accepting the Alzheimer’s thesis. On the one hand, his political instincts seemed as sharp as ever. Biden knew exactly how to deflect every one of the awkward questions Stephanopoulos directed at him about whether he would submit to cognitive tests, whether he would consider stepping aside, and whether he would feel shame if Trump won because of his weakened condition. He had the correct political answer ready in every instance to deflect attention from the real problem. His defiance—I would say arrogance—knew no bounds in this interview, as it hasn’t in other settings since the debate debacle. He remains immovable, regardless of whether he has Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s or some other neurodegenerative syndrome that causes the slurred speech and stiff gait.
After the first few hours and days when his position seemed quite untenable, it’s possible that he may have rallied enough support to outlast the storm, being able to convince the party elites that to displace him now would be even more disastrous than going forward with a replacement. Someone is doing the convincing.
In the Stephanopoulos interview, he barely mentioned even the token gestures toward progressive policies that his administration has enacted, such as the minimal student debt forgiveness, or helping some undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens. He kept raving about expanding and fighting the wars and being the only one who could stand up to Russia. That’s it, the wars are what his mind has distilled to. One domestic policy he never forgets to mention, however, is the reduction in the price of insulin for seniors, but aside from war, both in the debate and in the interview, it’s as if he has no other presidential function to perform. Quite aptly, his big demonstration of cognitive facility is supposed to occur at the press conference heralding NATO’s 75th anniversary in Washington, D.C. on Thursday, fully two weeks after the debate.
In the 1990s, we were wayward horndogs, newly liberated from Reaganite 1950s family consensus and suburban bliss (minus feminism), and Clinton gave us the ribald, semi-repressive tunes to sing by, fake jazz and all. In the 2000s, we needed to revive past wars without awkward remembrance of our own role in creating historical backlash, so we ordered up a Texas cretin, or one who acted like one for the duration of the presidency. In the current stage of empire, the rising competitors are all but ready to speed past us in the race, and all we can do is muster up incoherent idiots who harken back to an America that has ceased to exist, in the form of bringing back that extinct reality intact via Trump, or forgetting that the world has changed drastically in fifty years if we go with Biden. Essentially, they are mirror images of each other, since in the debate Trump also narrowed his own talking points to just a handful of enemies that needed to be beaten, as if he couldn’t be bothered to contemplate the range of policy options available to him. They both have very few words left, at least to go by the evidence of the debate.
Again, it is remarkable to think that the empire has been firing on all cylinders without an ignition key or a driver all this time. When it has a chance to run like this, infinite war and destruction on a planetary scale are empire’s natural and only instincts. It has no goodness left in it to release when left unchecked.
What about Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom and the other younger leaders who have the right vocabulary? Essentially, they are all post-Obama wordmongers, wanting to stay within neoliberalism’s confines in a world that is disgusted with neoliberalism, even if ordinary people cannot articulate the problem in so many words. Theoretically these “challengers” to senile Biden exist, but it’s interesting that empire in its last days always seems to fixate on doddering old fools who have quite literally lost control of their body functions and cannot connect the tongue to the mind. The theoretical counterforce, in the form of those who are still able to articulate empire’s rationale, is just that, theoretical, meant to appease, built into the system as a validating force but not much more than that.
It is interesting that the entire country got upset with Biden for not having the words to justify worldwide slaughter and the destruction of the planet. The genocide was quite okay, the media would never challenge him on that, but not being able to articulate why we are complicit in the genocide presents an insurmountable problem. All the economic tyranny—the doubling or tripling of the cost of living in the Biden years—is fine, not worthy of getting riled over, but the media cannot stand someone who does not articulate empire’s rationale the way that Obama did in the years of his terroristic onslaught on innocent nations, and the impact this has on the quality of life of citizens in this country. That’s the problem with Trump too, although he does it intentionally.
In that sense, the media—and most of the American people—have not yet caught on to the degree to which Biden’s speech pathologies are in fact perfectly synchronized with where the empire stands at this point, and the need for a vacuum for the deep state to step in after Trump’s unholy utterances. No words are needed at this point. Biden’s vacant stare, when he is searching for words that just won’t come to him at the start or in the middle of a sentence, is where the empire really stands: staring at the pure abyss.
It is the abyss of forgetfulness and madness and denial, shrouded by an arrogance so deep that the complete failure of the body is not enough to rectify it. It is also why RBG and Diane Feinstein went the way they did, protected until the last by enabling servants, just as Jill Biden and the president’s closest associates are pretending that someone is there when nobody is.
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