Biden Would Have Won!

No, befuddled reader, the headline is not disingenuous. Your scribbling striver isn’t being facetious… entirely. Betteridge’s Law isn’t being violated—mostly because a question wasn’t put forth.

Joseph Robinette Biden would have won a second term if it wasn’t for meddling kids like Nancy Pelosi (born: 1940) and Chuck Schumer (born: late Mesozoic period). Just like in 2020, the Scranton scapegrace would have left-hooked the Queens blowhard despite his personal and professional failings, an exhaustive list of which would fill not just multiple columns, but could constitute a door-stopping tome.

I know what you’re thinking: that you’re japing jotter is pulling your chain. How could anybody who witnessed Biden’s halting, ungainly embarrassment of a presidential debate performance last June conclude that he had the wherewithal for four more years? Didn’t he admit the Reaper’s shadow was gaining on his gait, recently asking aloud “who knows what I’m going to be when I’m 86 years old?”

Don’t be silly. That was just ol’ Joe speaking candidly, off the cuff, prosthetic lips flapping, dentures to the wind, like an everyday dude chewing the bull. He’s been through so much tragedy—can’t a guy get a bit existential sometime? It’s relatable, pondering one’s drop off, isn’t it? Which is exactly why blue-collar-root’d, Rehoboth-soakin’, middle-class lovin’ Joe Biden would have outfaced Trump in their scheduled rematch.

OK, fineeeeeeee. Perhaps my contention was a dose dubitable. And maybe—just maybe—my heart wasn’t behind the postulation. You may suspect some dissimulation is afoot. But before I divulge my conscious intention, I’ll let Joe mumble for himself, aided by a lexical crutch gifted by the fiercely independent USA Today. When reporter Susan Page pressed the President on if he could have snuck through the November ballot battle, Biden answered: “It’s presumptuous to say that, but I think yes, based on the polling that…” He was cut short by Page who shot another question before Biden could spin a yarn about fabled favorables.

But could Biden have really edged out Trump? The polling industry, staffed primarily by bespectacled spreadsheet sniffers, underscored red voters, unable to contact prospects inside the Dolly Parton working block. Who’s to say they weren’t undercounting the most elusive voter—second-shift admirers of senile scarecrows?

Herein lies why counterfactuals are such effective arguments: they cannot be disproven, and are bolstered by their backer’s persuasive powers. Time travel doesn’t yet exist, much to the dismay of those of us trying to cheaply acquire a television that functions with the original Nintendo 64 AC adapter. The scientific method is a blind alley without a reliable control. The invocation of an alternative history necessarily becomes a barstool debate: sheer disputation is its only truss.

Any cock-eyed schmuck can contend all day and night long that Biden would have womped Trump without having to cite solid evidence. But you must be wondering after so much stuffed verbiage why I kicked off the column making such a claim. So I’ll go ahead and show my hand: arguing that Biden could have, should have, and would have won is a debased form of what Matthew Walther calls “meta-arguments.” Ordinarily, an honest interlocutor should keep his opinions bound within the ontological rails established by philosopher Joseph Butler that “everything is what it is, and not another thing.” Consensus can’t be established unless disputants agree on elementary terms.

In making the case that a zombified prosthetic man who popped out the womb years before the first GI touched down on shores of Normandy could win a national election, one isn’t actually making that argument, just charading a position. It’s performing what internet sociologists call “concern trolling.” The tactic—which is a deceitfully expressed worry over a matter that would otherwise be mocked or ignored—has taken up more and more verbal space in our civic discourse that it’s rendered common agreement all but futile because of how much mistrust it engenders.

Twinned examples of recent days: the liberal valorization of Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde, who, while leading the inaugural prayer service, enjoined President Trump and Vice President Vance to “have mercy” on “transgender children” and those “lacking proper documentation.” The kindly, feeling-full Bishop was warmly received on the henhouse gab program “The View,” where she was praised, even worshipped, for seeming to “strike a nerve” within the new regime.

In similar stride, Democratic lawmakers peppered Trump’s pick to head the Agriculture Department, not asking long overdue questions about the efficacy of chemical fertilization or why we continue dumping corn runoff into kids’ cereal, but about the financial plight of our behemoth farm syndicates. “I just wonder if we ought to give fair warning to farmers and ranchers across America that if you have immigrant labor, you can expect federal agents to come and search your property,” Sen. Dick Durbin inquired, referencing the new administration’s proclivity for pouncing out illegal residents.

Durbin’s disquiet should be discounted, of course. His party doesn’t ordinarily stick up for the right to toil in hot, laborious conditions for pay below the federal minimum wage, with zero legal recourse against employer abuse. This was a ploy to draw division within the new Republican Administration: do you dare risk the wrath of Big Ag by drying its cheap labor pool?

As for the bumptious Bishop Budde, her celebrity won’t advance beyond a weekend’s worth of Twitter buzz. The left’s inherent anticlericalism forestalls any respect of men (or, in this prog-Prot case, women) of the cloth. But Bubbe proves a useful tool. She’s a synecdoche for the church, an institution still regarded reverently by the right. And what owns the cons more than verbally bludgeoning them with their own sense of the sacred, not at all dissimilar to Bolsheviks or French Revolutionaries who tortured priests using liturgical instruments.

Both instances lack the good faith necessary for democratic cordiality. Yet this cheap heightening-of-contradictions infuses our politics, with prop fights substituting the carving of common ground.

So when I say “Joe Biden would have won,” I don’t actually mean it. My ulterior motive is using Biden recalcitrance and his party’s internal coup as a wedge to split the Democratic coalition, hoping to arouse suspicions in their ranks.

I know we’re weeks past the deadline for New Year’s resolutions, but the country is just starting to thaw from the Arctic blast that froze much of January. With our icy stasis finally thawing, I should resolve to quit the nasty habit of imposture expostulation.

If only Twitter didn’t make it so easy to lodge complaints! Instead, I’ll follow the footsteps of St. Augustine: Oh, Lord, make all my declarations genuine, but not yet!

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Free the People publishes opinion-based articles from contributing writers. The opinions and ideas expressed do not always reflect the opinions and ideas that Free the People endorses. We believe in free speech, and in providing a platform for open dialogue. Feel free to leave a comment.

Taylor Lewis writes from Virginia.

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