Confession of a partisan leftie

It is time to admit that our political opponents sometimes have it right

President Biden’s disastrous performance in last month’s CNN Presidential Debate has plunged the Democratic Party, his voter base, and his supporters around the world, me included, into deep despair. 

He has been consistently behind in the polls this year, even with one of the strongest economies and lowest unemployment among industrial nations, even though Donald Trump, his opponent in the coming election, is a convicted felon, was found liable in civil court for sexual assault, who inspired a violent attack on the Capitol and refused to concede election loss, whose company was guilty of fraud, whose charitable foundation was shut down for misusing funds, whose “university” was fined U$ twenty five million for scamming its students.

Yet at the debate Biden was unable to prosecute the simple case against Trump in front of the fifty million TV audience. He frequently lost his train of thought, confused his words and figures, stared blankly at the distance with his mouth open while Trump talked. 

Perhaps his failure on the stage should not be a surprise, because as many medical experts point out, Biden was not suffering from dementia, but rather behaving exactly like many 81 year old people do at this age. The contrast with his relative sharpness four years ago is simply nature taking its toll. 

To me, what is more shocking is the success with which Biden and his advisers have convinced many Democrats that he is fine and capable of handling the gruesome work of running the country for another four year term. 

For years I have been fighting with my Trump supporting friends on social media against their caricature of Biden as a weak and senile nursing home resident. I accepted without second thought the Biden team’s excuse of COVID restrictions for his lack of public campaigning in 2020. I blamed dishonest selective editing for those viral video clips of Biden seeming disoriented and lost in public appearances. I joined the Twitter chorus attacking a recent report from the Wall Street Journal about Biden’s mental decline as a typical right wing media hatchet job. Now I realize those arguments were never made with much conviction. I saw what I saw, heard what I heard. I simply didn’t want to believe it.

In other words, the Biden supporters are behaving exactly like Trump supporters in their rejection of reality out of tribal loyalty. They insist that polls showing Biden behind are structurally flawed, that intense media coverage of Biden’s age is the national press’ overcorrection against Trump’s accusation of their left wing bias, a repeat of the treatment of Hillary Clinton’s “but her emails”. We attribute the best intentions to our side, that Biden broke his implied promise not to seek reelection out of a higher duty to protect democracy against the threat of Trump, rather than ego, hubris and attachment to the trappings of power, but assume the worst of their enemy, that Trump is running in this race simply to stay out of jail (though that may still be true). 

Partisanship is a powerful drug, and negative partisanship is even more potent. Too often we take positions not because we think our argument is flawless, but that our opponent can’t be allowed to be right. Just as the Republicans hold their nose in support of a criminal being their candidate because they hate the other side more, the Democrats are in self-denial about Biden’s mental and physical weakness which renders him unfit for another term, because they view Trump (rightly I might add) as an existential threat to American democracy and rule of law. 

The Democrats are in self-denial about the unprecedented wave of undocumented arrivals at the southern border, because they can’t bring themselves to concede that Trump had a point in his relentless attack on immigration: every house needs a door, and every country needs a functioning border. There is an eerie parallel to our immigration debate: Remember how the Australian Left vehemently opposed the Coalition’s tough border policies? We called them cynical, cruel, racist and xenophobic. We insisted that so-called “push factors” rather than our own asylum policies were responsible for the boat arrivals. In the end it took an electoral wipeout in 2013 for Labor to admit its fault. In addition to perception about his age, the border crisis may prove to be another fatal nail in Biden’s electoral coffin.

We refuse to acknowledge the excesses in our noble push to equality, for example on the issue of transgender athletes in women’s sport, because we think arguments from the other side are malicious, transphobic and bigoted (many are). We refuse to acknowledge the inflationary impacts of many of our economic policies, because the critics are radical adherents of trickle-down economics serving the interests of only the rich and the corporations.  We remain blind to the blatant rorts of the NDIS, since the conservatives are always against expansion of social welfare, they can’t be trusted in their assessment of the scheme. We stick to our long held dogma against nuclear power because Peter Dutton and his cohorts are a bunch of climate deniers so what do they know about renewable energy, even though nearly every major industrial nation adopts nuclear energy. 

This Biden debacle has been a teaching moment: no side has a monopoly on wisdom, on truth.