The Ruling Class’s House of Cards Crumbles

If the beauty of Helen of Troy launched a thousand ships, the ugly meltdown of Joe Biden on the debate stage has launched at least a thousand opinion pieces. This will be one of them. Don’t worry, however, it will only be launched by it. For the Biden collapse is not itself that interesting except insofar as it made manifest what many of us on the right have been saying for some time: our ruling class has been relying on a depiction of the state of the American house that is fundamentally false.

We’ve been presented with a picture of a solid brick building that will weather the storms. But every time Americans get a close-up, it is a house of cards that is leaning to and fro, with parts collapsing. 

What the Nobel Prize-winning Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote of his own country is now applicable to ours: “We know that they are lying, they know that they are lying, they even know that we know they are lying, we also know that they know we know they are lying too, they of course know that we certainly know they know we know they are lying too as well, but they are still lying. In our country, the lie has become not just a moral category, but the pillar industry of this country.”

This is an utterly depressing realization for many people. But it is salutary insofar as this recognition is the first step in starting to steer our country back to truthfulness. As the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous informs us, the first step to recovery is admitting that we have a problem—and that it is unmanageable.

Think of all the revelations this week. Even when, in the debate, he was uttering something coherent, President Biden was lying. Border Patrol Union chief Brandon Judd appeared on Fox News afterwards to make a categorical denial of the claim that the Border Patrol endorsed both Biden and his policies: “To be clear, we never have and never will endorse Biden. The border can be secured tomorrow if we would go back, and we would look at the policies that were in place that President Trump built. They were great policies.” More importantly on this topic, Biden claimed border crossings were down since he took office when they have at least doubled.

Yet the biggest lie smashed was that Joe Biden is a man in his prime with a command of the details of his job. For weeks, White House flacks, Democratic politicians, and pundits have told us that every video depiction of a man in steep decline is merely a “cheapfake,” a bit of video “taken out of context” to create a misleading impression. Never mind that, quite often, the full videos made Biden look worse.

Those of us long convinced that Barack Obama is the power behind the Oval Office swivel chair were given a lot more ammo this week. If it’s not the Lightbringer himself who makes the decisions, its certainly not Joe Biden.

Besides his “competence,” the “decency” of Joe Biden took a hit this month when it was reported that Ashley Biden confirmed that the diary attributed to her, with its entries about her father’s “inappropriate” showers with her and her wondering if she was “molested,” was absolutely authentic.

Again, such an accusation would be no surprise to anyone paying attention. Even liberals used to understand that Joe Biden was no vehicle for a return to decency. A 2014 U. S. News & World Report article reported on the then-Vice President’s habit of upsetting female Secret Service agents by swimming in his pool nude. Liberal outlets such as Talking Points Memo and the Washington Post used to publish reports of problems with the man’s behavior around women with titles like the latter’s 2015 article “What are we going to do about Creepy Uncle Joe Biden?” And, in 2019, even lefty Vox was sympathetic to Biden accuser Tara Reade’s claims.

Not only are the myths about Joe Biden being systematically dismantled, but so too are the myths about Donald Trump. The attempt to frame Trump as guilty of “34 felonies” is a case in point. We wrote in this space a few weeks ago about how the New York Trump trial was being labeled even on CNN as a “Frankenstein case” in which prosecutors “contorted the law in an unprecedented manner in their quest to snare their prey.” Last week, an older bit of dishonesty fell when ultra-liberal Snopes debunked the claim that then-President Trump called neo-Nazis and white supremacists “very fine people.” Yes, it’s seven years late, but that’s the point. Even the parts of the house of cards that have been glued repeatedly are falling apart.  

But there are other issues on which the lies are being revealed. The punishment of a 16-year-old North Carolina teen for using the perfectly correct term “illegal alien” to describe people in the United States without authorization has ignited a fight about the language. The doctrinaire insistence on describing people who have illegally entered the United States as “immigrants” or as “undocumented” (as if they had temporarily lost some forms) is a bit of linguistic dishonesty that is losing its cache. A new survey shows 62% of Americans favor using the correct terminology.          

So, too, the lies about medical interventions on children suffering from gender dysphoria. While the Biden DOJ has indicted Dr. Eithan Heim, the heroic doctor who blew the whistle on Texas Children’s Hospital for making such interventions against Texas law, the fund to cover his legal expenses has raised over $900,000 dollars. And, more importantly, the pressure to stop these abusive practices has gotten strong enough that even the Biden Administration has now come out in opposition to transgender surgeries for minors—despite the fact that they had brought a challenge in the Supreme Court to Tennessee’s law banning surgeries, puberty blockers, and cross-sex hormones. It’s unlikely that the Biden Administration is sincere or united in its opposition, but it says something about the subject that we’re seeing an official position that Biden himself would have called bigoted and hateful a short time ago.

So, too, the declining power of the lies of DEI. Though many companies are still riding the woke train, reports have started coming out that, in the business world, DEI programs and positions are being eliminated and reduced. As companies finally start to realize how divisive such programs are, they are beginning to have second thoughts about the embrace of left-wing political mythology at the expense of their own fields and customers. The most recent corporate announcement was from Tractor Supply, which promised to stop reporting to the Human Rights Campaign, to “eliminate DEI roles and retire our current DEI goals,” and to stop focusing on carbon emissions.  

And on the issue of inflation, the desperate attempts of apologists to say it’s gone away or not a problem have not convinced Americans who see what’s happening at the grocery store and in their accounts and are not happy. Especially not when even “mainstream” outlets such as NBC have been reporting since late spring that inflation is still a big problem.

The house of cards is crumbling at an alarming rate for the ruling class. People are not buying what they are selling anymore. Americans are asking more questions. Joe Biden’s dismal performance may well be remembered some day not merely as a bit of campaign lore, but a moment of revelation for an American people who now recognize we have a lot of work to do in rebuilding the house the Founders built.   

David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas. A past Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, he is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X @davidpdeavel.