The MAGA Cult around Donald J. Trump is well-documented. But now arrives its mirror: The Blue “Nothing to See Here’ Cult around Joe Biden.
NTSH, for shorthand, starts with preposterous denial of what millions of Americans saw with their own eyes at the Biden-Trump debate a few weeks ago. Just watch the video tape, of the President losing his train of thought and being unable to complete sentences.
Yet the various Team Biden explanations—that Joe simply had a bad night or a cold, or suffered from exhaustion from a foreign trip (concluded nearly two weeks before)—are endlessly repeated by NTSH cultists on social media and elsewhere.
So, what gives? Part of this, as is true of the MAGA cult, is genuine affection for the object of the reverence. Trump truly does have folks who love him. So, too, does Joe. He is seen by NTSH types, just as he sees himself, as an ordinary kind of guy who gets up no matter how hard he’s knocked down.
But the other part of NTSH is wholly irrational. There is conviction that “the media” (always seen as a cohesive group) must be lying about Biden’s mental and physical condition. A popular Facebook meme holds that the horrible New York Times, whose editorial board is calling for Biden to step down, is truly the decrepit institution in American life. Huh? Polls repeatedly showing some three quarters of Americans sensibly saying Biden is too old to run again are dismissed as flawed. Huh?
This Flowering of Irrationalism, in whatever patch of our politics it crops up, cannot bode well for the future. Yet at the rate we’re going, not even another compelling example of Biden’s infirmities—and what clear-eyed person can doubt another is coming? —will move the NTSH crowd. And with Biden dug in, NTSH seems to hold the whip hand in the Democratic Party. And Sanity lies defeated.
Good piece! I've seen the cult firsthand, and it's terrifying. There's not even a willingness to consider Kamala as the nominee, which is kind of surreal.