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Ever since the Great Debate Debacle—and its successor event, the Stephanopoulos Sit-Down That Could Have Gone Better—Joe Biden’s most fervent supporters have chosen one of two tacks. The first is full-on denial: the president is doing fine, they say! Amazing, even! Any blips in his performance were merely the result of poor preparation, or a cold, or some secret saboteur inside CNN who installed a “ghastly pallor and verbal incoherence” filter on the camera in front of him. 

But in the second camp, the one not completely disconnected from reality, an arguably more disturbing idea has emerged: that Biden’s fitness for office actually doesn’t matter and never has, because he has good people around him. 

Is the president sane? Competent? Entirely alive? You need not ask yourself these questions, because the president is not the president; he’s just a figurehead, more of a mascot, really—like the Geico Gecko of the executive branch. The actual presidency consists of somewhere between five and 50 people, whose identities may or may not be public knowledge, who stand behind or around or sometimes on top of the president and execute the duties of the office according to their collective wisdom. Did you think, when you pulled the lever for Joe Biden in 2020, that you were actually voting for Joe Biden the singular human being? You fool. You absolute imbecile. 

Needless to say, it has been quite something to see some of my fellow liberals, who have been arguing for years that democracy is on the ballot this November, now also insisting with a straight face that it’s ridiculous to expect our democratically elected president to, like, do the job. (Also: per news reports, the team of good and competent people currently advising the president is led by his son, Hunter, which is not exactly reassuring. It’s almost like the type of cognitive decline that affects a person’s presidential capacities could also affect his judgment about whose advice to trust.)

But if you’ve ever wondered if those folks are right—if Americans are in fact totally cool with a group of unelected officials pulling strings behind the scenes, while the man known as POTUS watches Dick Van Dyke reruns and drools contentedly into a bowl of creamed corn—may I direct your attention to one of my favorite movies, the 1993 Kevin Kline comedy Dave, in which some devious Washington insiders attempt to do exactly this?

The premise of Dave is simple. When the president has a stroke and ends up comatose, his chief of staff Bob Alexander secretly hires a body double—that’s Dave—to impersonate the president full time. Obviously, hijinks ensue (the scenes between Kline and Ving Rhames as his Secret Service agent are particularly fun) but for our purposes, what matters is Bob, a power-hungry schemer who takes advantage of the president’s incapacitation to veto bills and set agendas and generally keep his corrupt, conniving hands firmly on the levers of power. 

But that’s fine, right? After all, Bob is part of the team, handpicked by the president to do exactly this; surely it would trouble nobody to learn that he’d taken over the president’s duties. Except, of course, it’s not fine—as illustrated perfectly in the moment when Dave threatens to reveal their charade to the public.

“The whole press corps is right out there,” he says. “Should I go tell them, or do you want to?”

Bob doesn’t answer. He’s trapped, he knows it—and so do we. It is impossible to watch this movie, this scene, and not understand intuitively that he can’t tell the press what he’s done. That what he’s done is a bad thing. That the American people would absolutely not be comforted by the notion of a shadowy cabal secretly running the country, while the man they voted into office lies comatose in a basement room under the White House. 

That’s not what they voted for. That’s not what we vote for.

Kat Rosenfield is a columnist at The Free Press. Read her recent piece, “Harrison Butker Is Catholic. So What?” Follow her on X @katrosenfield.

I have spent the weekend struggling mightily with a new manuscript and have had little time to study the news.

The most notable event from the day is that in a stunning upset, French voters have rejected members of Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally party in legislative elections. After the first round of votes, National Rally candidates appeared to be comfortably ahead, but left-wing and centrist candidates combined forces to prevent splitting the vote, and voters then flooded the polls to elect the candidates that coalition fielded. 

Le Pen has said her policies are the same ones advanced by Russian president Vladimir Putin and former president Trump. 

On Thursday, elections in the United Kingdom saw a landslide victory for the center-left Labour Party for the first time in 14 years. Lauren Frayer and Fatima Al-Kassab of NPR noted that it was the worst defeat for the Conservatives in their almost 200-year history. 

There are always many factors that go into any election, but these results at least raise the question of whether western politicians are finding effective ways to counter the techniques of Russian disinformation. France has been flooded with Russian disinformation trying to create divisions in society as Putin seeks to break European support for Ukraine. Russia openly supports Le Pen.    

The U.K. also has been similarly flooded with Russian disinformation for years now. Russian trolls lie on social media websites and populate the comments sections of popular websites both to end support for Ukraine and to exploit wedge issues to split people apart.

These efforts were part of what Russian political theorists called “political technology”: the construction of a virtual political reality through modern media. Political theorists developed several techniques in this approach to politics: blackmailing opponents, abusing state power to help favored candidates, sponsoring “double” candidates with names similar to those of opponents in order to confuse voters on the other side and thus open the way for their own candidates, creating false parties to split the opposition, and, finally, creating a false narrative around an election or other event in order to control public debate.

These techniques perverted democracy, turning it from the concept of voters choosing their leaders into the concept of voters rubber-stamping the leaders they had been manipulated into backing.

This system made sense in former Soviet republics, where it enabled leaders to avoid the censorship that voters would recoil from by instead creating a firehose of news until people became overwhelmed by the task of trying to figure out what was real and simply tuned out. But those techniques dovetailed with the rhetoric of homegrown far-right figures as well.

It has always been a question what people who have embraced a virtual world will do when they figure out that the narrative on which they have based their government is fake. It seems possible that they create centrist coalitions and turn out to vote in huge numbers to reassert control over their politics and their country. 

The United States has had a similarly contentious relationship with political technology, Russian disinformation, and far-right leaders echoing that disinformation as they seek to take power by dividing the American people.

And long before anyone had begun to call disinformation political technology, the United States had a small group of elite enslavers seeking to take control of the nation by hammering on their narrative that the only true basis for society was racial slavery and using racism to divide their opponents. 

When they managed to get Congress and the Supreme Court to give them the right to move slavery into the American West, where new slave states could work with southern slave states to make slavery national, voters woke up. Disagreeing about immigration, internal improvements, public education, tariffs, and finance—all hot-button issues in the 1850s—they nonetheless built a centrist coalition to stop elite enslavers from replacing democracy with an oligarchy. 

Indeed, their coalition was so effective that Illinois senator Stephen A. Douglas, who had sponsored the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act that permitted enslavement to move west, objected that it was unseemly for abolitionists who opposed human enslavement in principle to work with those like Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln, who focused on the Constitution and argued that it protected enslavement in the slave states. 

In 1854, Lincoln answered Douglas: “Our Senator…objects that those who oppose him in this measure do not entirely agree with one another…. [H]e…says it is not quite fair to oppose him in this variety of ways. He should remember that he took us by surprise—astounded us—by this measure. We were thunderstruck and stunned; and we reeled and fell in utter confusion. But we rose each fighting, grasping whatever he could first reach—a scythe—a pitchfork—a chopping axe, or a butcher’s cleaver. We struck in the direction of the sound; and we are rapidly closing in upon him. He must not think to divert us from our purpose, by showing us that our drill, our dress, and our weapons, are not entirely perfect and uniform. When the storm shall be past, he shall find us still Americans; no less devoted to the continued Union and prosperity of the country than heretofore.” 

Six years later, that coalition of voters elected Lincoln to the White House.

The French elections left no party in an absolute majority, so governance will be messy. Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez nonetheless cheered tonight’s results: “This week, two of the largest countries in Europe have chosen the same path that Spain chose a year ago: rejection of the extreme right and a decisive commitment to a social left that addresses people’s problems with serious and brave policies,” Sánchez posted on social media.

“The United Kingdom and France have said YES to progress and social advancement and NO to the regression in rights and freedoms. There is no agreement or government with the extreme right.” 

Notes:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/07/07/france-election-result-2024-left-far-right/

https://www.npr.org/2024/07/05/g-s1-8456/uk-labour-party-win-keir-starmer

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/12/30/france-russia-interference-far-right/

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-exposes-sick-russian-troll-factory-plaguing-social-media-with-kremlin-propaganda

https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/virtual-politics-and-the-corruption-post-soviet-democracy

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/interview/gleb-pavlovsky/

https://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/peoriaspeech.htm

https://www.cnn.com/world/live-news/france-election-runoff-results-07-07-24-intl/index.html

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GORDES, FRANCE — On Saturday night, I was at a birthday party here, in Provence, and everyone was asking everyone else whether they planned to vote fascist in Sunday’s election. Most of the attendees were Jews.

They were being a tad ironic. They don’t think the current incarnation of the National Rally party is actually fascist. No swastikas. No goose-stepping. 

But the party is fascist-adjacent. It’s the direct descendant of fascists: the National Rally (formerly known as the National Front) is run by Marine Le Pen, the daughter of the late Jean-Marie Le Pen, who founded the National Front in 1972 and hated Jews. (Among other Le Pen lowlights is this 1987 quip: “I’m not saying the gas chambers didn’t exist. I haven’t seen them myself. I haven’t particularly studied the question. But I believe it’s just a detail in the history of World War II.”)

But that was then. And now? Well, now the “fascists” and the Jews are bound together by a common foe: radical Islam, which has cut a gaping hole through the French body politic.

Now, the French far right and many of the country’s 500,000 Jews believe that they are under siege, and that unless something radical changes, France will soon be lost forever.

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