Bari Weiss: The Era of the Noble Lie

 Why do we have a crisis of trust? 

Because the experts keep lying. 

Joe Biden is only the latest example.

https://www.thefp.com/p/bari-weiss-the-era-of-the-noble-lie?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=260347&post_id=146899189&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=rd3ao&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

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.

When my turn came, I suggested that I thought Biden was dangerous not because he was a bad man but because he was not fully there anymore—a point I thought was entirely obvious to anyone who had been paying attention and therefore uncontroversial. How wrong I was. Those sitting around the table were aghast. But the man next to me—a major Democratic donor—admitted privately to me that Biden, who he had known for years, could no longer reliably remember his name. 

Why did these Democrats lie? Or at least: why did they avoid voluntarily telling the truth? 

As political scientist Timur Kuran recently explained in these pages, until the debate, “a majority of Democrats were afraid to tell a basic truth in public—to say openly what they know about Joe Biden’s physical and mental health—for fear of emboldening Donald Trump or taking a position that may seem adverse to their party. . . . Why did they do this? Fear. Fear, in this case, of being punished by their fellow Democrats.”

A Democratic insider put it more bluntly to me over the weekend when I asked him what had taken so long: “Proximity to power, privilege, prestige. That’s the currency. And people fiercely protect their access. They put self-preservation over principle.”

The more generous read for why Democratic elites chose this path goes like this: Donald Trump represents an existential threat to democracy, and Joe Biden is the only Democrat who has beaten him. If we want to defeat Trump again—and save democracy—let’s stick to the winning horse. 

You can understand how the logic got them there. Americans, they told themselves, are ill-informed and impulsive and taken by celebrity and fame and don’t understand the implications of their preferences and choices. Better to put the thumb on the scale—just the lightest of touches—and make sure we get the right outcome. A few white lies for the sake of the Republic seems a small price to pay.

That condescending logic is by now very familiar to Americans.

It’s the same thinking that during the pandemic led public health experts to demand the closure of communal spaces, schools, and vast swathes of our economy, and to refrain from visiting grandma, to “stop the spread.” But in no time, these experts published an “open letter,” supporting nationwide protests. As one Politico headline suggested at the time: “Suddenly, Public Health Officials Say Social Justice Matters More Than Social Distance.”

It’s the same logic that drove many to smear anyone who uttered the words “lab leak” as a conspiracy theorist. Better to cut off that line of inquiry—that pursuit of truth—than to risk raising questions about where and how the virus started, questions that could be embarrassing to U.S. public health officials.

The same logic—of only telling the public what the elites think they ought to know—led to the unforgettable CNN chyron that summarized the absurd summer of 2020: a reporter standing in front of burning Kenosha, Wisconsin, while beneath him flashed the words: “Fiery but Mostly Peaceful Protests.”

(CNN)

Imagine if we had been told: kids are safely going to school across Europe, and our kids should, too. And it turns out there’s no scientific basis for standing six feet apart, so we can drop that, as well.

Imagine if we had been told: it’s very possible this disease came from a lab. We don’t yet know. Getting to the bottom of what happened is a priority for the U.S. government to make sure it never happens again. 

Imagine if we had been told: many of the Black Lives Matter demonstrations descended into violence and particularly hurt small, uninsured businesses that bore the brunt of the damage. Acknowledging that does not take away from the fact that many protests actually were peaceful.

We’ve written thousands of words in these pages about the crisis of trust we are facing—a crisis gripping our most important institutions, from the legacy press, to our public health officials, to our universities and our government. What’s become clear is the crisis of trust is more accurately described as a crisis of trustworthiness. 

In other words, it’s not that Americans have randomly stopped trusting the experts while softening toward the conspiracy theorists. It’s that so many experts have been exposed as partisan and unreliable and stopped deserving our trust. And too many of the ideas dismissed as the province of nuts have turned out to contain more than a kernel of truth.

How do our institutions and experts—who do tend to possess above-average knowledge of important subjects—come back from this?

Stop spinning, stop lying, and stop the condescension. 

Apologies are also in order. The people who have misled us with noble lies and obfuscation need to own up to the damage they’ve caused. 

Time to accept the new normal: in the age of X, there is no gatekeeper or censor powerful enough to veil what we can see with our own eyes. You can’t hide reality when everything is seeable. 

Now we are faced with the fact that the very same people who last month insisted that Biden was at the top of his game have now shoved him into some Delaware basement and are sporting “Harris ’24” sweatshirts. How are we supposed to believe anything they say? 

Imagine if our experts and pundits and politicians spoke to the American people as if they had an iota of intelligence. Imagine if they treated us like adults, capable of handling uncomfortable, nuanced information. Imagine if they told the truth.