My inbox was overrun this morning with comments and questions about last night and the spectacle we all watched on CNN. I want to talk about what I believe happened and how to carry on from here.
I was prepared for something bad, but I was not prepared for how bad that something might be. I’ve always known that we were still in a precarious place because all forms of news media are behaving as if this was a normal election with normal candidates. Just like in 2016 and again in 2020, our election traditions carry on as if nothing was strange. The debates, the conventions, the campaigning all proceed as they have in every election cycle before.
The instinct to keep steady in a crisis is powerful. I don’t know whether this is cultural or human nature, but it seems to be a one of human’s typical response to a crisis: keep calm and carry on, as the British would say. For many of our everyday crises, this is a good strategy. Most things right themselves by themselves, so the main thing we need is to simply not over-react.
This is where we’ve been stuck for the past nine years or so. It’s a little like having company come over with an elephant pooping in your living room. If you’ve spent time in an alcoholic family, you probably know intimately how common and crazy-making this scenario is. I know we’ve talked before about what constitutes a bona fide crisis and how it leaves you virtually dangling off the edge of a cliff until one of two things happen:
You adapt and deploy a new coping strategy, or
The stick you’re holding onto snaps and you plummet to the ground.
Joe Biden is doing what practically everyone does in this situation. He ran for president in 2020 as if we could simply have a regular election and everything could go back to normal. He said he was running, despite his age, because of the existential threat Trump represented — but he behaved as though everything was business as usual in that election cycle. This continues to be Biden’s biggest problem. In 2024, he’s doing it again. This morning he knows (hopefully!) that the “keep calm and carry on” strategy does not work anymore. While it is not helpful for people to panic and run around with their hair on fire, it is equally unhelpful to pretend there’s not an emergency when there is.
What happened?
Last night’s event was so aberrant that even the hackiest of pundits know better than to opine about who won vs. who lost. Going back to the party analogy, what everyone there desperately needs is for someone to address the elephant in the room. Social psychology and group dynamics being what they are, this is an unbearably hard thing to do — in part because it’s a gamble. No one can promise the evening won’t end in disaster, no matter what you say or do. People instinctively avoid disaster, much like we avoid barfing if at all possible. It’s common, it’s human, it’s not useful.
Last night’s event — however it was titled — was not a debate. To say there’s a debate taking place is tantamount to telling everyone there is no elephant in the living room. That sort of set up sends a strong message for everyone to behave as if nothing is happening.
In the case of last night, that’s exactly what you saw. Donald Trump and Joe Biden were doing two distinctly different things. Joe Biden was trying to reassure supporters with the “keep calm and carry on” strategy. Donald Trump was playing rope-a-dope. Nowhere and in no way was anyone “debating,” yet no one managed to state the obvious. You may have felt the overwhelming sense of panic because Joe Biden was neither confronting nor distracting us from the elephant in the room. Well, lemme tell ya: the situation was from the start had a high likelihood that Joe Biden would come out looking crazy or feeble or out of control.
The reason Biden looked so stunningly awful is because he walked into a classic double-bind. We’ve touched on this subject before. I warned you it could make you barf and, so far, it appears I was right. A double-bind is a paradoxical situation similar to — but not the same as — a no-win situation. It is world-renowned as one of the most crazy-making set ups a person can experience. In a very brief nutshell, a double-bind consists of the following two conditions:
ONE: Two or more contradicting messages are present, creating a situation where responding to one message automatically negates the other.
Without thinking of it in these terms, Joe Biden put himself at risk of a double-bind when he opted to share a stage with Donald Trump. The two conflicting messages we got — neither of them verbal — were:
“This is a benign and ordinary campaign event.” That’s the message sent by calling this a “debate” and setting a stage like every other presidential debate that presumes the candidates are normal and unremarkable.
“This is a five-alarm emergency” Donald Trump, felon and insurrectionist, was on national television as a presidential candidate, lying about nearly everything — lying about things that were easy to debunk, endangering national security and no one said or did anything about it.
TWO: There is no escaping the situation. This usually takes the form of a strongly felt imperative that we not talk about what’s actually happening while it’s going on. Yet it’s nearly impossible to simply leave the situation. Imagine what it would have looked and felt like if anyone — Joe Biden or one of the moderators — had said, “This event has to stop now because you are lying. This event is now not legitimate. It is impossible to debate points that are not true. So — here we are with ninety minutes of television time to fill and we have no back-up plan for how to fill it after I walk off the stage.” …and then walked off the set.
This reminds me of R.D. Laing — a psychiatrist who was famous for being anti-psychiatry. For the most part, this guy was a quack, but one thing he said holds true: normal people appear to be crazy when they’re in a crazy situation that pretends to be normal. That, in a nutshell, describes Joe Biden on CNN. You could see it in his facial expressions in reaction to Trump’s outrageous lies. His slack-jawed appearance seemed to always be saying, “Whuuuuuut???” But the pressure to carry on as if nothing were happening is immense. In reality, there was nothing Biden could say or do in that situation to make it go differently — except to bring an end to the situation.
Where we are
It takes extraordinary courage and presence of mind to call out a double bind while it’s happening. The chances that anyone could have done better are slim to none. Still and all, the facts are these:
The United States is in a bona fide crisis. By definition, that means we’re in an unprecedented situation in which none of our learned responses are adequate. The reason no one can say what to do is because nobody knows what to do. Most people can’t even think straight in the bind Biden was in last night.
Donald Trump’s presence signals that at least one of our political parties is melting all the way down. They’re not merely wrong, they’re not merely being destructive — they are dying, violently, before our eyes. In a system such as ours — a two-party system — this is tantamount to your house being on fire.
Joe Biden’s presence means that (back to that first bullet) we are in a major existential crisis. Eighty-year old people do not run for president. Nothing about this is normal. Now, Joe Biden is a trustworthy, immensely qualified and accomplished guy. He knows what I’m saying here is true — so imagine what he must be seeing that is so unthinkable that he feels compelled to suit up and hold the reins of leadership. He’s already proven he has every competency for the task, so it’s not like he can’t succeed. It’s just that he is legitimately and seriously old and no one has successfully verbalized the reasoning behind his candidacy. If we knew the thinking behind his candidacy, we’d have a way into figuring out what to do today.
Donald Trump cannot be beat at his own game. He isn’t competent and he isn’t smart, but he is truly masterful at what he does — which is flood the zone with shit. The only way to beat him is to not engage him in the first place — at least not on regular terms. A lot of us keep hoping he’ll blow himself up, but he never does and never will. He’s an Olympic-level rope-a-dope player.
What we need
Some folks are saying we need to dump Joe Biden. Others are saying how dare we even THINK about dumping Joe Biden. This line of questioning is not useful insofar as helping us go forward from here because neither “solution” pierces the double-bind.
So what we need is to make peace with some difficult truths. We do not know what to do next to keep Trump out of power. We do not know what to think about the situation we’re in. I don’t know what to do next and neither do you. What we need to do right now is lean in, breathe, hold the ambiguity, anxiety, and uncertainty that’s in the air.
I cannot overstate how hard this is to pull off. For instance, when you’re involved in a difficult discussion, how long do you think you would be comfortable with stone silence? Ten seconds feels like an eternity. We can’t fault people who can’t hold difficult issues, but holding is what we need to do right now:
No drawing conclusions
No panicking
No glib analytics that end with conclusions (that I just said we should not be drawing).
If I were queen of the world (instead of just being queen of my street), I know what I’d have Joe Biden and his campaign do: dig deep for the courage to give voice to what is actually going on here. Specifically, Donald Trump (and more importantly, the people behind him) are an immediate danger to the U.S.’s existence as a democracy. It’s not hyperbole (as Joe Biden himself often says). Once it began, it only took the Soviet Union two years to completely collapse. From soup to nuts, the Nazi takeover of Germany took fifteen years. In the end, once Hitler was in a position of power, it took just eight years to commence the Holocaust. This shit goes down fast once it starts.
So, here’s the thing:
THING ONE: This emergency is happening. It is real and will not just disappear.
THING TWO: Joe Biden is very old.
THING THREE: We don’t know how to get ourselves out of this time of danger.
I believe that only one person can lead us to sanity at this moment: Joe Biden.
He’s the only one who can name the dynamics at play and call them out. The possibility that he could fail exists. Everyone knows it. What we need to know now is whether Joe Biden knows it. Joe Biden has to show us how to hold anxiety (and outright fear) and go forward in a situation whose conclusion is not certain. He’ll need all the help from all of his surrogates, but the nation needs the message to come from our leader.
Joe Biden needs to talk to the American people from a place of transparency and even vulnerability. He needs to give voice to the fact that people are nervous about an 80-year old candidate and they’re not crazy to feel that way. I don’t know of any precedent for this sort of conversation — FDR’s fireside chats are the closest thing I can think of. There are few, if any, of us left who were there in 1933 and heard those broadcasts, so I’ve got no current day corollaries to offer as an example he can copy.
The same principle FDR embraced also applies here. It’s counter-intuitive as all hell, but Joe Biden needs to lean into this moment — not try to make it blow over. He’s the only one who can help us make sense of it.
So take a breath. Settle your thoughts. Give yourself a hug. Stand your ground. Get out the vote. If you can’t get out the vote, send money to people who can. I’ll be right here with you.
Song of the Minute
It’s hard to come up with a fitting tune on such short notice, so I’m leaving you with one that is completely unfitting. I give you this in recognition that today a lot of us woke up feeling like we’d been clubbed with a frying pan. Today feels like the hangover from hell. We need to do two seemingly contradictory things at once: 1) get a grip, and 2) keep our spirits way up.
“Feeling Single, Seeing Double” — Emmylou Harris
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Keep on keepin’ on,
Cindy
You wrote: "THING THREE: We don’t know how to get ourselves out of this time of danger."
False. We know exactly what to do, we just need the courage to do it.
Biden is a weak candidate who does not install confidence. There is still time to make a change. This is not an ordinary election.
We know exactly what to do; it's what Democrats always get wrong: Speak with one voice. Speak with conviction: Biden must announce he will not run. He must do it quickly so we can unify behind a strong replacement who instills confidence and can persuade the base and moderates to vote for her/him not the wanna be dictator.
Speak with one voice. Loudly. Aggressively. Kindly. We love Joe. And we must to win. Losing is not an option. Biden's approval rating was 38% BEFORE the collapse. Wanna risk it and wait a month or so to see if it goes back up from whatever horrific number it will drop to? Do not fuck this up Democrats.
Muddling through this without taking decisive action is surrendering our freedoms to a convicted felon.
Do not fuck this up Democrats.
Very well said Cindy.