The Great Debate

No more illusions

In a rational world, a world of grown ups, Joe Biden would withdraw from the Presidential race. But liberals are not rational even though they like to huff and puff about the cognitive deformations on the other side of the aisle.

In 2016, I watched the liberal, credentialed classes talk themselves into believing Hillary Clinton was a viable Presidential candidate This level of delusion about Biden is so much worse, because Biden may not be a viable adult human being. Clinton was a vicious, ambitious woman who wanted power and had convinced enough rich people that she would protect their interests to function as an avatar for their political hopes. Biden is a child, maybe was a child always, but has not in his dotage, regressed to childish incapacities. I don’t believe in coddling children. I believe in caring for them and I’ve seen the accusations of elder abuse, which may or may not exaggerated at this point. Biden doesn’t seem to be suffering — yet.

I used to believe in adult human beings, like my father, even though he gave us no evidence of any degree of trustworthiness or honesty. My mom used to say, well at least he doesn’t let you go hungry She wasn’t wrong, — he could have abandoned us, but what a low bar to set for adult human behavior.

That bar seems to get lower and lower.

It’s hard to live without illusions, but I used to think that that was the goal of human life, to get closer to the truth of things, to remain awestruck by human struggles, while shedding the illusions and delusions of childhood for something like reason and open mindedness. Wasn’t that how we either as members of a family or nation, or a professional class reached the possibility of communication with others? Sharing a world with people so that we could talk to other people, even debate them?

Last night, all these liberal dreams of communicable reality dissolved. We were in a world of pure demagoguery, pure force, pure power. The office of the President and the power that that holds was supposed to protect the man, Biden, obviously failing at a critical cognitive level. The place of the presumptive Republican nominee gave sanction to Trump to be himself, clowning, lying and deflecting and attacking.

If you have enough power, you can say anything you like in any way you like and people will have to accept you.

Everyone wants to believe in something, but we can’t believe in the American political system. We can’t believe in the institutions that support that system. We can’t believe that any of this functions in any way to provide the bases for collective good or social cohesion. But life goes on today. The weather is perfect. The car starts. The coffee machine worked.

By the way, the efficacy of speaking truth to power is one of the dumbest ideas I’ve ever heard. To believe that power is not deaf and that you have a channel to it is one of the biggest delusions of all. Pace bell hooks and Edward Said.

In the Confucian order, the family and state order are guaranteed by a clearly demarcated hierarchy, but everyone must know their place and play their roles properly. The power of the ruler becomes illegitimate if the ruler does not rule properly and does not take care of his subordinates.

Incompetence and decadence sow the seeds of rebellion in succession. The dynasties destroyed themselves through misrule. China ‘hands’ are always on the watch for the CCP to falter so that they can help usher in their ‘democratic’ dissidents.

What is amazing, from the Confucian perspective, is how pacified the American populace is at such blatant evidence of incompetence and misrule — of both parties and both candidates, one doddering, the other a felon.

The Anglo-American system loves to pride itself on the peaceful transition of power, which is why the pearl clutchers were so outraged by January 6. Yeah those fools were led into the halls of power by their enablers, but you wish there were angry enough people on the Democratic side who would rise up as a mass and demand that Biden step down.