How the Biden left is hurting and disempowering non-majority Americans.

Andrew Sullivan

May 24, 2024

∙ Paid

The last two Democratic presidents have one thing in common: they have both given commencement speeches at Morehouse College, an HBCU for black men, whose alumni include Martin Luther King Jr. But the two speeches are worlds apart. One reason for this, of course, is that Obama was himself a black man, and so had more leeway to offer some hard truths than Biden did. But even taking that into account, the moderation and uplift of Obama contrast so vividly with Biden’s fatalistic leftism.

Obama encouraged Morehouse men to reach high:

[O]ver the last 50 years … barriers have come tumbling down, and new doors of opportunity have swung open, and laws and hearts and minds have been changed … So the history we share should give you hope. The future we share should give you hope.

Here’s Biden on where America is on race a little more than a decade later:

What is democracy if Black men are being killed in the street? What is democracy if a trail of broken promises still leave Black — Black communities behind? What is democracy if you have to be 10 times better than anyone else to get a fair shot? And most of all, what does it mean … to be a Black man who loves his country even if it doesn’t love him back in equal measure?

Here’s Obama:

Your generation is uniquely poised for success unlike any generation of African Americans that came before it … There are some things, as black men, we can only do for ourselves … One of the things that all of you have learned over the last four years is there’s no longer any room for excuses.

And here comes Biden with the excuses:

If Black men are being killed on the streets, we bear witness. For me, that means to call out the poison of white supremacy, to root out systemic racism.

Obama calls on the graduates to seize the day, overcome the residual racism in this country, fix their own problems, resist cynicism, and join America’s progress. Biden tells them that all they can do is “bear witness” to the horror of “white supremacy” and fight against “systemic racism.” (And of course the vast, vast majority of black men “killed on the streets” are not killed by cops, as Biden sickeningly implies.)

Leave aside for the moment the question of which president is more accurate in telling America’s racial story — and focus instead on the psychological impact of both messages. Obama evokes personal energy, taking command of your own life, living up to your own responsibilities, acting to make the world better for you and others. Biden’s evokes passivity, helplessness, “bearing witness” to racism, and despair about the eternal nature of America’s racial evil.

Yes, Biden included some boilerplate about the brightness of the futures of the Morehouse grads; but every policy he mentioned was something government had done or could do: mainly channeling money to black universities, and practicing constant race discrimination against Asians, Jews, and whites, in order to give blacks an advantage. There was nothing wrong with black America, he seemed to imply, that white Democrats can’t solve by discriminating in favor of them.

This message is empirically wrong, I’d say. But more importantly, it is psychological poison. It disempowers minorities, robs us of agency, encourages fatalism, and stirs endless resentment. Even if it were true that America were an eternal white supremacist nation, as Biden seems to think, believing that will sap you of optimism, self-confidence, direction, and self-esteem. Which will perpetuate everything you say you oppose.

This vision of America has been imposed most thoroughly on the generations educated in the last decade, especially since 2020. And we can see the results: a huge increase in depression, anxiety, and mental illness among the young, especially the young women who form the core of the social justice cult. Everyone under 30 is more depressed than in the past, but leftist women, and “non-binary” Americans, are in a class of their own. From Greg Lukianoff’s latest essay:

57% of very liberal students in our study reported feelings of poor mental health at least half the time, compared to just 34% of very conservative students … 41% of very liberal males report feelings of poor mental health more than half the time, compared to 60% of very liberal females, and a whopping 70% of very liberal non-binary students.

This makes a huge amount of intuitive sense. Wokeness tells you the world is evil and hates you. It tells young women that they are permanent victims of patriarchy, even as they now way outnumber men in higher education, and have never had such levels of income, status, and success in the workplace. It tells minorities that majorities are always to be suspected, and always wish to annihilate you.

Wokeness also tells young gays and trans people that they are under “unprecedented attack.” Unprecedented? Seven decades after the Lavender Scare, three decades after the AIDS plague ended, eight years after Obergefell, and three years after Bostock, HRC announced last year: “We have officially declared a state of emergency for LGBTQ+ people in the United States for the first time.” For those of us who lived through AIDS, and won the civil rights we had long wanted, this isn’t just absurd; it’s offensive.

And when it comes to race, perhaps no passage captures the fatalism of the successor ideology as well as Ta-Nehisi Coates addressing his young black son:

The terrible truth is that we cannot will ourselves to an escape on our own … You have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heels … The plunder of black life was drilled into this country in its infancy and reinforced across its history, so that plunder has become an heirloom, an intelligence, a sentience, a default setting to which, likely to the end of our days, we must invariably return. … The struggle is all I have for you because it is the only portion of this world under your control.

Marinate in the idea that you have no control over anything but resistance to your own eternal oppression and — guess what? — your mental health will understandably suffer. Lukianoff again:

In practice, intersectionality is a combination of two cognitive distortions: overgeneralizing and blaming. It also arose from a perspective in which the world is utterly dominated by impersonal forces, against which human beings are simply objects that are acted upon rather than people with agency. Within this framework, individuals understandably don’t really feel like they have an internalized locus of control — or an ability to guide the course of their own lives.

Believing you have agency to change your life — what I always took to be a defining character of American democracy — gives you direction and energy; it allows you to see beyond your own self-pity toward helping others; it helps you moderate the ups and downs of life; it gives you a sense of control over your destiny, things you can do to improve your life.

I believe this not simply as an abstract idea, but because it has been the story of my own life. I have almost always been a minority in every part of my life. I was an English Catholic among Protestants and atheists; I was a gay man among Catholics; I was deemed a naive subversive by the religious right and an Aunty Tom by the queer left; I was an immigrant among Americans; I am a conservative among gays; I am a gay man among conservatives; I was openly HIV-positive when almost no one else was (and was threatened with deportation solely because of my HIV status for two decades); for 15 years, I was for marriage equality before almost anyone else was. I may be cis, white, and “privileged,” but I do know something about the psychological challenges of being in a minority.

And at every step of the way, I could have seen myself as a victim — of anti-Catholicism, xenophobia, homophobia, HIV-phobia, right and left intolerance — with little control over my life. And I would not have been entirely wrong. I had some truly grim moments when it felt as if the world had conspired to make my own complicated, authentic life impossible. But I soon realized that capitulating to those odds was a psychological dead-end, could consume and define me, and lead to resentment and bitterness, and self-fulfilling failure.

So I learned to internalize the great Eleanor Roosevelt’s dictum that “no one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” That’s also why I argued for placing marriage at the center of gay rights — because it was something positive we could actually do, live out, and prove ourselves with. And what actually is the alternative anyway? A lifetime of grievance, anger, and empty performative “activism” that does nothing but perpetuate its own marginalization and make you miserable.

The happiness gap between right and left is growing for all these reasons. And the misery seems disproportionately young and female — the demographic that has succumbed most completely to the cult. (If you check out the anti-Israel protests, it’s extremely pronounced.) Lukianoff’s data are echoed in a recent Finnish study that found that the more someone agreed with the statement “Other people or structures are more responsible for my well-being than I myself am,” the more likely they were to be unhappy: “People on the left endorsed this item (around 2 on a scale of 0 to 4) far more than people on the right (around 0.5).” And women were far more likely to hold this sense of powerlessness than men; and among women, “female liberal adolescents [were] experiencing the largest increases in depressive symptoms.”

I suspect that the trans explosion in this very demographic is related to this: indoctrinated into believing that being a woman is to be oppressed, to be merely “a hole,” some came to believe that becoming a man was one way out. What a tragic end for feminism: injecting yourself with testosterone because the patriarchy always wins.

And once you become ever more attuned to and aware of how society is rigged against you — the definition of becoming “woke” — you can see it everywhere. Nick Haslam, a professor of psychology, argued in his 2020 paper “Harm Inflation” that the cultural left has increasingly “broadened [the meaning of ‘trauma’] to include adverse life events of decreasing severity and those experienced vicariously rather than directly”; and that “‘abuse’ extended from physical acts to verbal and emotional slights.”

What Biden did at Morehouse, and what his administration has done in every way imaginable, is to uphold this view of the world. From its crude race and sex discrimination to its support for critical queer theory and transing kids, it is spreading a message that not only holds minorities back; it tells them that the country they live in — the freest and most diverse in human history — is defined by hatred of the black, brown, gay, queer, and trans populations, and was really founded in 1619 to oppress, and not in 1776 to liberate.

My entire adult lifetime has proven this wrong with respect to gay men and lesbians. The transformation of American culture, society, and law on this question shows how ready Americans are for change, if they are engaged respectfully and reasonably and in good faith. And it is simply absurd to describe the country that elected a black man twice for president, and whose immigrants are overwhelmingly non-white, as somehow a form of “white supremacy.”

It is therefore in no way surprising to me that, for members of minorities like me who do not share this dark worldview, the Democratic Party is increasingly seen as out of touch, disempowering, and condescending. And it will be the most startling proof of this if Donald Trump wins an Electoral College landslide, largely because a rising percentage of minority voters — sick of woke pessimism, fatalism, and despair — want to start afresh and control their own destiny.

We minority members are doing what we always have in this blessedly tolerant and open country. We are getting on with our lives with confidence and personal optimism. And for all the attempts to hold us back, on right and left, we’re winning.

New On The Dishcast: Bill Maher

Bill needs no introduction, but he’s been the formidable host of HBO’s Real Time for 21 years now, and before that he hosted Politically Incorrect, which ran from 1993 to 2002. He has a new book out, What This Comedian Said Will Shock You — a collection of his best editorials on Real Time. Also check out his podcast, “Club Random,” which he recently expanded into a pod network, Club Random Studios. Bill manages to do all of that and still perform standup on the road.

Listen to the episode here. There you can find two clips of our convo — on Bill not caving to political correctness after 9/11, and the two of us debating the credibility of the Gospels. That link also takes you to a ton of commentary on last week’s episode with Oren Cass on Republicans turning left on economics. We also hear from readers on my proposed “Independence Day for gays and lesbians,” and I respond throughout.

Money Quotes For The Week

“This is wildly irresponsible, even for professional troll like Marjorie Taylor Greene. FBI knew Trump wasn’t there. It was all coordinated with Secret Service in advance. This is deeply dangerous bullshit,” – Jonah Goldberg on MTG suggesting the FBI was set to assassinate Trump at Mar-a-Lago.

“We need shrinks and cult experts to explain this,” – Nicole Wallace on Haley bending the knee to Trump.

“I think there’s just generally a view that, as people get closer to voting and have to go through that process of deciding who they’re going to get behind, Republicans lose ground and Democrats gain ground. And this has been particularly true after Dobbs. The whole political landscape in America changed fundamentally with Dobbs. And so any comparisons to 2016 and 2020, for example, I think are not valid because I think everything changed in 2022,” – Simon Rosenberg, Dem strategist, in a car-crash interview, full of serious cope.

“My condolences to the family and friends of the helicopter,” – Eli Lake on the death of Iran’s president, the Butcher of Tehran.

“Iranian President Stoned To Death By Mountain,” – The Onion, back on form.

“How sad to see the great Morehouse College embrace the war criminal and genocide enabler Joe Biden as an exemplar of peace and justice! … Martin Luther King Jr. is turning over in his grave because of this flagrant violation of his precious legacy!” – Cornel West, Moore Award Nominee.

“Police favorables are back to 75-19 … No movement has ever failed harder than the ACAB left,” – Swann Marcus.

“The human mind is not, like ChatGPT and its ilk, a lumbering statistical engine for pattern matching, gorging on hundreds of terabytes of data and extrapolating the most likely conversational response or most probable answer to a scientific question. On the contrary, the human mind is a surprisingly efficient and even elegant system that operates with small amounts of information; it seeks not to infer brute correlations among data points but to create explanations,” – Noam Chomsky.

“To hold our tongues when everyone is gossiping, to smile without hostility at people and institutions, to compensate for the shortage of love in the world with more love in small, private matters; to be more faithful in our work, to show greater patience, to forgo the cheap revenge obtainable from mockery and criticism: all these are things we can do,” – Hermann Hesse.

Hathos Alert

Donald Trump is blown to smithereens by Bill Maher in Pizza Man. The falling T!

Dissents Of The Week

A reader writes:

Is the “LGBTQ” coalition really “sacrificing gay kids”? Statistics are very hard to come by in this debate, so it’s useful to at least share what statistics we have.

According to the census, there are approximately 50 million Americans age 6 to 17.  For argument’s sake, let us assume that between two and ten percent of them are gay/queer/gender-non-conforming or whatever label you like. That’s between one million and five million kids.

According to Reuters/Komodo Health, about 4000-5000 minors are receiving hormone treatment and about 1000-2000 are getting puberty blockers. The number having top surgery is 200-300, and I can’t find any stats on other kinds of surgery, which suggests it’s rare or non-existent. As a percentage of gay kids, it’s de minimus. So if gay kids as a class are being wiped out by ideology and medicine, there’s very little evidence of it in the actual stats. Whatever the merits of the Cass Review and its recommendations, it applies to a vanishingly small number of children.

Sure, a lot of queer kids and adults are choosing different ways to describe themselves other than “gay,” but what’s wrong with that? Objecting to labels like “non-binary” is just a cranky way of denying the lived reality of other people, in exactly the same way as people objected to “gay” in the 1970s.

Balancing benefit against harm is the tricky balance that every medical decision should hinge upon — including medical treatments for trans children — but to unilaterally deny such treatments to any child under any circumstances to prevent the “elimination of gay kids” is hyperbole and hysteria, given the statistics.

Where on earth did you get the idea that I wrote that “gay kids as a class are being wiped out”? I didn’t. The truth is: we don’t know how many gay kids are being transed in America today — but we do know the number is not zero. The increasing number of detransitioners prove it — as does the bulk of the evidence in the Cass Review. That’s all that matters. So, yes, the LGBTQ+ coalition absolutely is “sacrificing gay kids.” And it’s a massive scandal.

As for the size of the cohort, the number of gay kids put in religious-right conversion therapy camps is also small compared with the entire population. Does that mean that gay people should not try and protect children from it? At least some of that psychological damage can be repaired later in life. But nothing can repair the permanent destruction of a child’s entire reproductive system before they have even had an orgasm. Why are you so blasé about this? Why are you seeking to downplay it?

As for your other point, I don’t care what gay adults call themselves, but the idea that children have spontaneously adopted the term “queer” is absurd. As for “non-binary,” please. It’s simply a way to convey androgyny — which we’ve always had. But it defines androgyny reductively and biologically! And every “non-binary” in gender is still binary in their sex. Because they are members of Homo sapiens.

Another reader has a belated dissent over my column from three weeks ago:

When I watched the video you referenced of the protestor saying “I want to suck Osama’s dick,” it was patently obvious to me this young woman was trolling the right-wing interlocutor’s inquiry (“Do you love Osama bin Laden?”). That woman was mocking the interviewer’s own hatred for her. You didn’t pick up on the irony?

No I didn’t. Many more dissents — over my conversation last week with Oren Cass — are on the pod page arriving in your in-tray shortly. As always, keep the criticism coming: dish@andrewsullivan.com.

Mental Health Break

A skeleton and his crew make some mochi:

In The ‘Stacks

• With an election called for July 4, Sunak is surely toast. He hasn’t even been a good technocrat, says Sam Freedman. The last 14 years have been a “continual drift away from conservatism,” argues Ed West.
• Trump’s promise to deport 15 million migrants is mad.
• His veep search is narrowing. Coulter opts for the Ohio hillbilly.
• Bill McKibben prods Biden to campaign more on the climate. His policy wins keep piling up.
• “Presidential debates have outlived their usefulness,” writes McWhorter.
• Jeff Maurer gawks at the latest GOP nutter running for Senate: “Before he was a right-wing maniac, Royce White was a BLM organizer.”
• Jeffrey Cieslikowski frets over the Online Harms Act — “Canada’s assault on free speech.”
• Teixeira, Chait, Yglesias and Silver tackle the left’s “epistemic closure” — which was worse on the right in 2010, as Daily Dishheads will recall.
• Drezner dissents over Leonhardt on “neopopulism.”
• Joe Klein wonders, “Is neoliberalism over?”
• “Competing with China requires more trade,” argues Yglesias, “not less.”
• Jon Gabriel looks at what libertarianism misses.
• Linker interviews the author of Liberalism as a Way of Life.
• Why did the Tuskegee Airman, oppressed under the law, fight for America?
• Ed West asserts that mobile phones are “the greatest law enforcement tool in history.”
• “Revenge is a dish best served with humor,” says Sasha Stone about Nellie’s new book on the NYT.
• Taibbi launches a new series, the Censorship Files.

The View From Your Window Contest

Where do you think? Email your entry to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Please put the location — city and/or state first, then country — in the subject line. Bonus points for fun facts and stories. Proximity counts. The deadline for entries is Wednesday night at midnight (PST). The winner gets the choice of a View From Your Window book or two annual Dish subscriptions.

See you next Friday.