Commentator

The Fabulous Collapsing Center

Dear Friends,

I’m sharing a news roundup/analysis.

Best,

Sam

BIDEN IN RETROGRADE

I almost can’t think of a moment — at least in my lifetime — where so much hangs in the balance all at once. And, yet, there’s an odd sort of torpor that’s kicked in and somehow not all that much to say. “This was the worst possible outcome,” New Republic editor Michael Tomasky wrote on X of Biden’s Stephanopoulos interview — a line that captured the current mood of hapless dread. “Not anywhere near good enough to settle matters, but also not quite bad enough to be a slam-dunk that he has to go tomorrow.”

The situation is completely obvious. Biden has to go. If he stays in the race, he drags the whole party down with him. I’d been giving Biden something of the benefit of the doubt — that he was playing out the string for another week and then would fold his hand once the polls came in. But the polls are in, and are bad — a six to eight-point lead for Trump in the Times/Siena poll, 80% of voters saying Biden is too old in The Wall Street Journal — and yet Biden just doesn’t care.

So what we’re clearly dealing with is an octogenarian’s intransigence. Some of that is just age — Biden likes being president and doesn’t want to give it up. Some of it is Biden’s lifelong tenacity ossifying into stubbornness. “In most ways this tendency of Biden’s has made for a resilient, healthy psyche,” writes Franklin Foer in The Atlantic. “Right now it is his psychological prison, a mental habit that might doom American democracy.” And some of it, most inexplicably, is a narrative that the Biden camp has clearly bought into — that Biden (of all people) is the populist and that the ‘elites’ are out to get him. “Well, guess what? They’re trying to push me out of the race,” Biden said in the Stephanopoulos interview. It’s a view that echoes the long-standing belief of the Biden campaign that, as Michael Tyler, the director of communications for the Biden campaign, put it, “Polling continues to be at odds with how Americans vote, and consistently overestimates Donald Trump while underestimating President Biden.”

There’s very little red meat in any of the exhaustive coverage of Biden this week. More and more lawmakers are joining in the groundswell calling for Biden to withdraw. The Democratic donor class is staging something of a revolt. It does seem impossible for Biden to ignore everything that’s happening around him — as Evan Osnos notes in The New Yorker, he is, “at his core a creature of Capitol Hill” — and my money would be that he’s out by the convention, but at the moment the trend line is pushing in the opposite direction, with Biden sleepwalking to inevitable defeat in November and the party unable to dislodge him.

In the absence of news events, I’m left reaching for theory. I’m aware that I quote Martin Gurri too much on this Substack, but what can I do? Gurri still has the best theoretical model for understanding our current era and the Biden meltdown is a textbook case of the dynamics Gurri described in 2014 in The Revolt of the Public. “The two protagonists in the struggle — authority and the public — have arrayed themselves in contrary modes of organization which require mutually hostile ideals of right behavior,” Gurri writes. “The conflict is so asymmetrical that it seems impossible for the two sides actually to engage. But they do engage and the battlefield is everywhere.”

In the case of Biden, the job of ‘authority’ was, for two years to engage in what Olivia Nuzzi calls “a conspiracy of silence” — simply refusing to talk about Biden’s age, or running stories that advanced some different narrative about it (The New York Times opinion piece “I’m A Neuroscientist: We’re Thinking About Biden’s Memory and Age in the Wrong Way” is a choice illustration of that approach), or changing the terms of the conversation by treating clips revelatory of Biden’s as ‘misinformation’ or ‘cheap fakes.’ Nuzzi reports that Democratic elites, faced with the inarguable truth from some recent meeting with Biden, “would literally whisper” when they discussed his inability to remember the names of old acquaintances or to get to the ends of sentences. And, meanwhile, the public knew — as had been reported in poll after poll — and basically were waiting for an event like the debate to watch Biden collapse. As Gurri astutely put it, “Democratic life has been reduced to the exhibition and contemplation of the Emperor’s naughty bits.” And that’s what we’re now facing — a sort of Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane situation in which the advisors and courtiers are all fleeing, in which the emperor is surrounded on all sides and fully exposed, and in which power and ‘authority’ reveal itself for what they really are, an intractable, incurable stubbornness, a clinging on long past the point where ‘public service’ is at all plausible.

BRITAIN AND FRANCE

I’m relying on theory as well to make sense of the somewhat bewildering electoral news coming simultaneously out of France and Britain. Britain is the easier case — after 14 years in power, the Conservatives had plowed through any remaining goodwill they had, and the country, eager for anything different, switched overwhelmingly to Labour. In the case of France, journalists all over the world abruptly had to ditch their stories discussing the advent of the far-right and switch instead to a more sober narrative based on the unexpected showing by leftist parties and the unwieldiness of the new Assemblée Nationale.

Euphoria on the French left

Gurri describes the key political dynamic of our era as the conflict zone between ‘center’ and ‘border.’ Rory Stewart has a similar framework in which he discusses the ‘bell jar’ consensus of the 1990s giving way to a “U shape” political structure “with the votes at the extremes and nothing left in the middle.”

In Britain, Labour’s resounding victory would seem to recall the balmy days of the Blair period, but the smart analysis — Rory Stewart in The New York Times, Nick Cohen on his Substack, Sam Kriss and Luke Hallam in Persuasion — makes clear that Labour’s victory was a “loveless landslide,” as Gary Gibbon put it. Turnout was low. Enthusiasm for Labour was, actually, low. The Conservatives were understood to be a spent force, and Labour was able to win without saying much of anything. Farage made real gains on the right, and, as Stewart put it, “What centrist forces in Britain have earned is not so much a victory as a brief reprieve.” The assumption is that Starmer will govern in more or less the same technocratic fashion as Rishi Sunak. The new administration will get bogged down much as Sunak did and the next election will go to whomever can hit on a more clearly-delineated ideological stance — which is more likely than not to come from one of the wings.

In France, the European Parliament elections and the first round of voting made clear that Macron no longer really had a leg to stand on. “What we see is the collapse of the center-left and the center-right,” Olivier Roy said on the Persuasion podcast. Macron’s strength was personal charisma, but, as Roy put it, “he had never really tried to set up a strong political party.” The decision to call for snap elections was about trying to buttress the center, but, as The New Statesman wrote after the first round of voting, “His last hope had been that the left and the centre would unite against the hard right in a tactical voting alliance. What is happening is that the French are uniting against him.”

The results from the election look very much like Stewart’s analysis of our era — the extremes picking up all the votes and leaving the center bereft. Ironically enough, that may play to Macron’s benefit. The New Statesman is quick to claim that “the Macron era” is over but he is in power for three more years — and Le Monde astringently notes that he “retains a central role,” with, in a sense, the center now more important than ever given that the simultaneous rise of the far left and far right results, almost certainly, in a parliamentary deadlock.

A RECKONING FOR COVID

The sense of the magically-diminishing center extends, as well, to the Covid hearings in June. I was proud to help edit, for Persuasion, an article by Bethany McLean, which really ripped apart the old consensus position on the pandemic and made the case that it’s high time to adopt a new consensus.

The old consensus had been that, in an emergency, the thing to do was to put partisan bickering aside — to ‘trust the experts,’ which in this case meant bringing out of deep-freeze a set of public health officials to administer a data-driven pandemic response. The premise was that the experts simply knew more than the public did and should be allowed considerable margin of error even when some of their responses — lockdowns for all, no-masks and then masks — didn’t exactly follow common sense.

But, unfortunately, it turns out that the vaulted health experts and public servants were really just winging it. Public health agencies were extraordinarily slow to recognize that Covid was an airborne pathogen. The six-feet rule “sort of just appeared,” as Anthony Fauci guilelessly put it in congressional testimony. Lockdowns were just “copied” from China’s Covid policies, notwithstanding the WHO’s recommendations against them. And the long-lasting belief in a zoonotic spillover as the virus’ point-of-origin was — as has been thoroughly documented — really just the approved narrative of the scientific powers-that-be, who preferred it for their own narrow political reasons to the lab-leak theory.

Fauci in Congress

At long last — through a book like Joe Nocera and Bethany McLean’s The Big Fail, through writing in The New York Times by Zeynep Tufekci and David Wallace-Wells — a new consensus emerges. Given how lockstepped publications like The Times were with the public health authorities at the time of the pandemic, the new narrative is surprisingly vituperative. “I wish I could say these were all just examples of the science evolving in real time, but they actually demonstrate obstinacy, arrogance and cowardice,” writes Tufekci of actions of the public health officials at the pandemic’s height. The new narrative leaves to the side some issues that I might like to see addressed — above all, the flagrantly discriminatory campaigns, ‘Key to the City,’ etc, that liberal cities pushed in 2021, denying access to public spaces of all kinds for those who were unwilling to take the vaccine — but it’s, on the whole, an acceptable place to get to in understanding the pandemic.

The real point is that civil society — traditional news outlets, social media companies, etc — were far too willing to fall in line behind anything that seemed ‘establishment.’ At a time of intense polarization, it seemed safe to ‘trust the science’ — and Dr. Fauci’s exquisitely tailored suits — and elected officials and legacy publications more or less completely surrendered their own prerogatives, turning critical decision-making over to epidemiologists, who weren’t thinking about the public much at all and who in any case had only a shaky grasp over the science of Covid. The result was unnecessary lockdowns, economic devastation, spiraling national debt, an enduring loss of trust in government. In some sense, everybody gets a pass on the early months of the pandemic — Trump had abrogated any governing responsibility and local governments felt they had to make do by turning to the experts — but that sort of exoneration only goes so far. The pandemic would have played out very differently had the media and elected officials stuck to their mandates — there would have been a fair hearing for, for instance, the Great Barrington declaration. The lesson is to be very wary of a too-easily orchestrated consensus, of too-readily giving over power to ‘experts’ no matter how reasonable they sound or how many spreadsheets they produce.

There’s a nasty corollary to this new pandemic consensus in a freshly-reported story about the DoD’s adventures in pandemic misinformation. That was real misinformation this time, with the DoD, astonishingly enough, posting fake social media accounts in an effort to discredit China’s Sinovac vaccine in the Muslim world and particularly in the Philippines. Probably not too much should be made of the revelation. The campaign was fairly small, it was opposed at the time even within the military, and represented Donald Trump and Mark Esper’s off-kilter idea of how to respond to Covid — “we weren’t looking at this from a public health perspective,” said an official involved in the operation, “we were looking at how we could drag China through the mud.”

But it does go to show just how absurd and politicized the entire US response was to Covid. If the domestic messaging was a relentless campaign to stigmatize the “vaccine hesitant,” in the developing world the US military was pushing the exact opposite idea — promulgating the rumor that the Chinese vaccine contained pork and was therefore haram, and doing so for no higher purpose than to score a tactical point against China.

GAZA, UKRAINE, SUDAN

And what of the three wars underway at the same time? All three have pretty much disappeared from the news in the past couple of weeks. Israel has re-attacked Gaza City, including raiding the UNRWA headquarters. As the right-wing Jerusalem Post surprisingly concedes, “The reinvasion seems to show that the IDF's initial defeat of Hamas in various areas has done nothing to replace Hamas as the governing authority and has not ended the terror groups' ability to make a comeback.” The implication — which is I’m sure where The Jerusalem Post is going with this — is that the war is meant to continue indefinitely, no matter the cost, until the full, final defeat of Hamas. Meanwhile, more and more Israelis have had enough and are protesting, calling for a deal and for elections, even as Netanyahu seems to be slow-walking cease-fire talks.

Ukraine is in its own holding pattern. Russia continues to drive forward in the Donbas and to launch devastating strikes on Ukrainian cities — including a missile attack on the country’s largest children’s hospital. But the general sense is of both sides playing wait-and-see. Reporting from Ukraine, Tablet’s Vladislav Davidzon writes, “The newest tranche of assistance will last the Ukrainians until the end of the year. That is, it’s enough to make sure the Ukrainian army won’t be overrun by the Russians before the U.S. elections.” A new peace offer by Putin — demanding Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhia and Kherson and a guarantee of Ukraine’s permanent non-admission to NATO — makes somewhat clearer how Putin views the endgame. If Trump is elected — as seems overwhelmingly likely at the moment — Putin assumes that he will be able to dictate terms somewhat along those lines.

Outside the Okhmatdyt Children’s Hospital, Kyiv

And, as for Sudan, “the single largest humanitarian crisis on the planet,” as Samantha Power put it — nobody seems to be paying attention or getting any accurate information. Around 750,000 people are on the brink of starvation, said an international famine organization. “This is possibly the crisis of a generation,” said Edouard Rodier, of the Norwegian Refugee Council, who was recently in Sudan. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Something of the issue with Sudan is the absence of any clear narrative. Both the nominal government and the Rapid Support Forces have, according to the US, used “starvation as a weapon of war.” The outside parties involved in the fighting — the UAE and Iran — have only exacerbated the conflict. And the international community isn’t close to breaking through blockades and supplying starving populations with needed resources. It is hard to imagine what would actually happen to alleviate the suffering — there is no talk of a multi-national armed coalition as there was at the time of Save Darfur. But it can’t help that, as this is going on, the West is facing such an acute leadership crisis. The center seems to be collapsing everywhere, and meanwhile, far away and unnoticed, Sudan suffers abysmally.