Episode 2538: Biden, Harris & the Exhausted Democratic Establishment

So why did Harris lose in 2024? For one very big reason, according to the progressive essayist Bill Deresiewicz: “because she represented the exhausted Democratic establishment”. This rotting establishment, Deresiewicz believes, is symbolized by both the collective denial of Biden’s mental decline and by Harris’ pathetically rudderless Presidential campaign. But there’s a much more troubling problem with the Democratic party, he argues. It has become “the party of institutionalized liberalism, which is itself exhausted”. So how to reinvent American liberalism in the 2020’s? How to make the left once again, in Deresiewicz words, “the locus of openness, playfulness, productive contention, experiment, excess, risk, shock, camp, mirth, mischief, irony and curiosity"? That’s the question for all progressives in our MAGA/Woke age.

5 Key Takeaways

* Deresiewicz believes the Democratic establishment and aligned media engaged in a "tacit cover-up" of Biden's condition and other major issues like crime, border policies, and pandemic missteps rather than addressing them honestly.

* The liberal movement that began in the 1960s has become "exhausted" and the Democratic Party is now an uneasy alliance of establishment elites and working-class voters whose interests don't align well.

* Progressive institutions suffer from a repressive intolerance characterized by "an unearned sense of moral superiority" and a fear of vitality that leads to excessive rules, bureaucracy, and speech codes.

* While young conservatives are creating new movements with energy and creativity, the progressive establishment stifles innovation by purging anyone who "violates the code" or criticizes their side.

* Rebuilding the left requires creating conditions for new ideas by ending censoriousness, embracing true courage that risks something real, and potentially building new institutions rather than trying to reform existing ones.

Full Transcript

Andrew Keen: Hello, everyone. It's the old question on this show, Keen on America, how to make sense of this bewildering, frustrating, exciting country in the wake, particularly of the last election. A couple of years ago, we had the CNN journalist who I rather like and admire, Jake Tapper, on the show. Arguing in a piece of fiction that he thinks, to make sense of America, we need to return to the 1970s. He had a thriller out a couple of years ago called All the Demons Are Here. But I wonder if Tapper's changed his mind on this. His latest book, which is a sensation, which he co-wrote with Alex Thompson, is Original Sin, President Biden's Decline, its Cover-up and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. Tapper, I think, tells the truth about Biden, as the New York Times notes. It's a damning portrait of an enfeebled Biden protected by his inner circle. I would extend that, rather than his inner circle protected by an elite, perhaps a coastal elite of Democrats, unable or unwilling to come to terms with the fact that Biden was way, way past his shelf life. My guest today, William Deresiewicz—always get his last name wrong—it must be...

William Deresiewicz: No, that was good. You got it.

Andrew Keen: Probably because I'm anti-semitic. He has a new piece out called "Post-Election" which addresses much of the rottenness of the American progressive establishment in 2025. Bill, congratulations on the piece.

William Deresiewicz: Thank you.

Andrew Keen: Have you had a chance to look at this Tapper book or have you read about Original Sin?

William Deresiewicz: Yeah