• 3 Posts
  • 1.93K Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 20th, 2023

help-circle






  • At this point, I’m starting to get get really worried that Biden might go down as the most catastrophic example of the sunk cost fallacy in modern history. His Friday interview only intensified my concerns about him - that, I should add, are not centered around his age, but the fact that he appears to be largely out of touch with the core domestic issues that he must fight against in this election.

    This is a concern that I’ve had since 2016, and is one of the main reasons I didn’t like him in the primary back then. Like, he was saying a lot of the right things, but I frankly didn’t believe him… and that’s kinda panned out for pretty much his whole term as far as I’m concerned.

    Like, yeah, he’s had some policy wins, but none of them are actually addressing the root cause of the issues we’re facing recently: fascism is rising, and we need to build a firewall against it. That’s it. That’s the overriding concern. And it feels like he’s just done nothing meaningful to address anything close to the root cause. He’s so far up his own ass about his vaunted “ability to compromise” that he has failed to understand that a large swath of the right wing of American politics have effectively devolved into what I would describe as legislative and cultural terrorism. He doesn’t - and, perhaps, can’t - understand that we’re not playing poker anymore. He keeps bringing a deck of cards to the gunfight that American domestic politics have devolved into.

    If he had his head in the game with regard to how serious this needs to be taken, I could forgive a lot of other failings. But he clearly doesn’t have his head in the game. He thinks it’ll be fine if he “gives it his all”, ignoring that his “all” really doesn’t appear to be enough in this scenario - yes, somewhat due to age, endurance, and mental acuity, but much more importantly due to his frame of mind, ego, and hubris.

    TL;DR I am very fucking concerned that he just doesn’t understand how serious the consequences of failure are here, and his Friday interview kinda solidified my concerns on that front.





  • I should also add that his ABC interview on Friday only intensified my concerns. To me, all it really communicated is that he actually IS so wrapped up in his own ego and hubris that he doesn’t actually get that this is an existential election, and that the consequences for failure are well and truly catastrophic. Like, there’s a good chance we won’t have functional democratic processes anymore if he looses. But he thinks that’s fine because “he will have given it his all”, ignoring the fact that “his all” is shuffling around, trying to compromise with fascists, and bringing a deck of cards to the gunfight that American politics have devolved into these days.

    Really, it’s an evolution of the concerns I had in the 2020 elections, which have kind of proven out to be completely true: that despite some clear domestic policy successes, he’s more or less out of touch with the fact that he’s playing with an absurdly outdated rule book, and does not seem to understand that the rules have fundamentally changed. He doesn’t get that a lot of his old bipartisan negotiating tactics are straight up self-defeating these days.

    I am genuinely and deeply worried at this point that his refusal to see past his own personal situation in all of this is going to lead to the conclusion of the American experiment in its current incarnation, and replace it with something far, far darker.

    Edit: if you’re downvoting this, I am actually genuinely curious as to which parts of this you disagree with, or think are wrongheaded.