In the Democrats’ epistemic bubble, wish-casting prevailed, the evidence in front of their own eyes was ignored, and critics were shut down. Although the Joe Biden bubble comes nowhere near the cultist post-truth bubble that surrounds Donald Trump, the parallels are still troubling: As in the MAGA bubble, truth and facts came second to a longer-term strategic goal. As Mark Leibovich wrote in The Atlantic last night, it turns out that “Republicans are not the only party whose putative leaders have a toxic lemming mindset and are willing to lead American democracy off a cliff.”
Again and again, establishment Democrats brushed off warnings of a problem. Polls consistently found that huge majorities of the electorate were worried about Biden’s age. Even inside the White House, Politico reports, Biden’s “growing limitations were becoming apparent long before his meltdown in last week’s debate.” One apparent sign of worry in Biden’s camp, according to some analysts: He skipped the traditional Super Bowl interview and seemed reluctant to sit down with reporters. He has held the fewest press conferences of any president in the past three decades. There was also the nagging visual evidence—clips of him in public appearances that seemed to show a president in decline.
Journalists and strategists such as Leibovich, Ezra Klein, David Axelrod, and James Carville warned repeatedly that Biden’s age was an issue. In June 2022, Leibovich wrote in The Atlantic that “the age issue will only get worse if Biden runs again. The ‘whispers’ are becoming shouts. It has become thoroughly exhausting—for Biden and his party and, to some extent, the country itself.” In retrospect, these warnings feel like notes smuggled out from behind the barbed-wired wall of denial that Team Biden and its allies built.
Were the Democrats being duped? It’s possible that some establishment Democrats and even members of Biden’s staff were shielded from the president’s condition—the Politico report suggests that Biden surrounds himself with a small circle of aides and advisers, although the White House has rejected the characterization of the president as isolated. Still, this offers at best a partial explanation for the Biden bubble, because lots of people both in and out of politics and the media knew or suspected that the president was showing signs of cognitive impairment. For the most part, though, they chose not to talk about what they were seeing, and the pressure not to break with the groupthink was intense. “There was a collective-action problem,” Klein explained last week. “Any individual politician or Joe Biden staffer or adviser or confidant who stepped out of line and said privately or publicly that Joe Biden shouldn’t run faced real career risk. Whereas saying nothing did not pose a risk.”
Another factor is what Ruy Teixeira calls the “Fox News Fallacy,” the idea that if a right-leaning outlet such as Fox News “criticizes the Democrats for X then there must be absolutely nothing to X and the job of Democrats is to assert that loudly and often.” The louder and more vicious the right’s attack on Biden’s age, the deeper Democrats dug in. There was furious pushback to news reports about Biden’s alleged frailty, and critiques of “cheap fake” videos that tried to make him look senile. Some of those reports and misleading edits were, indeed, dishonest. But in reacting to them, Democrats and journalists with glaring blind spots drew the circle even tighter around their denialism.