Bari Weiss: The Era of the Noble Lie

The reason there is no Democratic presidential nominee right now—27 days before the party’s convention in Chicago begins—is because of a lie. The reason the Democrats are going to scramble to whip a majority of their 3,936 delegates into line behind Vice President Kamala Harris—the reason the most basic elements of the Democratic (and democratic) process are being so dramatically challenged—is because of the lie that everyone around Joe Biden told themselves and then told the public.

By now, there is no denying that that’s exactly what happened.

Once the reality of Biden’s deteriorating condition became plain on that CNN debate stage, the question was only who was going to admit what they knew and when. 

To choose just one example: George Clooney, who had been onstage with Biden at a fundraiser on June 15, wrote in The New York Times on July 10 about what he had actually seen when he was hauling in checks for Biden’s second term. “The Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fund-raiser was not the Joe ‘big F-ing deal’ Biden of 2010. He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate,” Clooney wrote, referring to the disastrous June 27 CNN debate that led to Biden’s withdrawal from the race.

It’s not just that they knew about Biden’s condition and lied about it. They knew they were lying and believed they could dupe their supporters at least through November 5, 2024. In other words: double talk. One message in public. A different message in private. Until it became impossible to sustain.

I remember my own little encounter with this strange phenomenon last summer at a dinner in New York with some muckety-mucks. The conversation inevitably turned to the presidential election. The dinner guests went around the table, expressing their preference for the only candidate acceptable to support: Joe Biden.