Just Don’t Lie

On Old Joe, and having a good society.

Reflecting the crowd’s anxiety in a packed auditorium at the Aspen Ideas Festival*, moderator Jonathan Capehart joked as he took the stage: “We have 28 minutes and 25 seconds before all of your Xanax kicks in.”

The crowd laughed politely, but it was clear that Capehart’s joke had hit its mark. The audience included many of the most influential Democratic strategists, commentators, and perhaps a fifth of the donor base for the Democratic Party. It had also been waiting for months to see whether the decisions to politely sidestep warning signs about Biden’s condition would pay off.

There was very little waiting. Hardly ten minutes into the debate, Biden fumbled a question on abortion so badly that the entire room gasped, finally seeing what White House courtiers had been hiding for months. The split screen remained unnerving throughout the night. All of the old signs of Trump’s authoritarianism were still on display, but now they were being contrasted with Biden’s blank gaze and fractured, illegible answers. As the debate continued, shock turned to anger. This is an emergency. Biden has to go.

Biden’s decline on full display was startling, but I was far less prepared for what followed. Two of the commentators on stage — Sarah Longwell and Eddie Glaude Jr. — experienced what I did. I can still hear Longwell’s immediate comment in my head: “I cannot lie to you about what we just saw … You cannot tell people to deny what they saw with their eyes, which is somebody that is too old to be the President of the United States.”

But within minutes, other members of the panel were seeking to do exactly that. Mike Madrid, co-founder of the Lincoln Project, gave a hot-in-the face two minute rant about how anyone made uncomfortable by what they’d seen on the debate stage was ignoring the actual danger to democracy.

But the truly alarming moment came when Celinda Lake, one of the most prominent Democratic pollsters in the country, first tried to soothe (“Let’s remember almost nobody watched the debate”) and then manipulate (“We have got to control the spin”). When pressed by Capehart about how Biden might be replaced, she didn’t miss a beat in dismissing the notion. “It’s not possible. It is not possible … We have to vote for democracy … We saw the choice here. We cannot allow this to happen to our country.”  

Frankly, the entire display, and every echo of it in the news since, makes me furious. For months, Biden’s people have been insisting that the polls aren’t what they seem. That when people get into the voting booth, they will always choose democracy over authoritarianism.  This was to watch in real time as that same consultant class sought to assimilate a President who is clearly too old to govern and then spin it away before our eyes. 

Democracy, by aspiration, is supposed to be a substantive instantiation of the idea that the people can and should be trusted to rule. The “system” part —mechanics of voting, electoral rules, congressional structure — are all tied to that purpose, famously summarized as being “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

Power is always tempted to reject reality. If you are on the margins of society, reality is pretty apparent. The forces that shape the world aren’t in your hands, and you have to be savvy about what is there, and how to navigate it. In contrast, being in power — particularly in power in a hegemon — has the peculiar temptations of the solipsist. The only thing of consequence is the drama within the Roman imperial court.

Democracy — both in aspiration and in practice — is an alternative to such homogeneous rule. It enables us to get out of our heads, to hear what we could not hear otherwise. It is by design supposed to be a tangible instantiation of honesty. Voting and other mechanisms ideally force society as a whole to hear what people — those outside of the capital — actually see and how they care to live.

The problem with Lake and so many other party leaders that have spoken in the last few days is not the desire to defend democracy. Nor is it the idea that courtiers are paid to lie about mad King George. The issue is that using the word “democracy” as the justification to lie to “the people” is a unique form of immorality.

This entire attitude takes the precise word that is intended to mean accountability to the people — democracy — and turn it into the inverse. If democracy’s aspiration is to take the goods that were available to the aristocracy —the capacity to think about what society is, and help shape its future — and distribute them to the masses, this is the opposite. It involves trying from the top to shape opinion to get pre-formed outcomes, rather than empowering the people to see the truth and then decide as they will. 

Watching the debate was to encounter reality — Joe Biden is obviously frail enough that any observer should have legitimate doubts about his capacity to govern. To think that this reality should be spun away because the final outcomes are all that matter is to misunderstand the entire enterprise we are engaged in. There seems to be a significant generational divide on this point. Democracy does seem to be in trouble. Trump likewise seems like a deeply corrupting force. However, if one wants a democracy, there are some games that are not worth playing.

To be worthy of the name, democracy’s anchor must be honesty. Even if the party is able to spin its way to an electoral victory in November, it will have caused grave damage to the very concept of democracy. If the Democrats want to be the party of democracy, then they can’t lie.

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* I attend the Festival every year in my capacity as director of the Philosophy & Society Initiative for Aspen.

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