Why did everyday people rationalize Joe Biden's bait-and-switch?
The Democrats breaking their promise of $2000 checks was obvious, so why would people pretend it didn't happen?
On the last episode, I documented that Joe Biden was on the cusp of making himself a liar (again), by proposing $1400 pandemic-relief checks after he and Congressional Democrats offered US adults a $2000 check. In fact, Kyle Kulinski did me one better and spotted that Democrats had actually set themselves a time limit for those $2000 checks, and failed to meet it:
None of this was hard to prove. Looking at public statements was all it took.
Speaking of the public, I turn now from deceptive politicians and those holding them to account, to members of the public who not only defended the deception but lied themselves. They claimed that everyone always knew that the promised $2000 was meant to include December’s $600, or that Biden never suggested $2000 on top of $600 — claims so implausible, and so easily shown to be false, that I’m content to call them lies.
Why were these random people so keen to compound the lies?
Simple partisanship is surely one reason. Looking at the Twitter streams and bios (for example) of the $1400 check’s defenders, they tended to identify with Biden and Harris and the Democratic Party, and oppose Trump and Republicans. Partisanship makes it tempting to mount knee-jerk defenses of the leaders of one’s favorite party. Tellingly, some Biden-defenders conceded that they’d welcome more Democratic relief cash even as they insisted that Biden wasn’t reneging or lying, admitting that their only disagreement was about Biden’s supposed probity, not the idea of the $2000 checks themselves.
One staunch Biden supporter gave the game away by declaring that “all that matters in this instance” was Biden’s status as president-in-waiting.
Another account, with the bee emoji in handle and yellow avatar circle beloved by the “KHive”, accused AOC of being dishonest “as always”, before spamming Russophobic conspiracy junk:
(It goes on but surely that is enough.)
Other responses included the array of $1400-defenders citing Bernie Sanders’s acceptance of $1400 checks as a rebuttal to critics of the $1400 switcheroo. Wielding Sanders’s concession as a rebuttal like that was an obvious non sequitur; whatever Sanders said can’t negate or disprove the fact that other Democrats promised $2000 beyond December’s $600. Pointing at Sanders made no logical sense.
But while it made no logical sense, invoking Sanders’s position as a trump card made rhetorical sense. Yair Rosenberg of Tablet helpfully illustrated how that worked by sprinkling Sanders references into a Twitter thread defending Biden:
Left-leaning progressives trust Bernie Sanders more than Joe Biden, and that’s common knowledge. So one way that invoking Sanders is useful is that Sanders serves as a more trusted face for Biden’s turnaround. It’s easier to sell something to a mark if they trust the salesman.
A second way that invoking Sanders is useful goes deeper: centrists can use Sanders as a cudgel to bash left-wing progressives as incoherent, bad at politics, and ungrateful. After all, if Bernie Sanders is willing to accede to Biden’s bait-and-switch, and you like Sanders and were fine with Sanders’s $2000 proposal last year, how can you complain about Biden’s $2000-as-$1400 now? You must be some sort of idiot or ingrate!
Again, the left-bashing line makes no sense in light of the facts, or basic logic, but it has surface plausibility if you don’t know (or deliberately suppress) the inconvenient facts about what Democrats promised in the earliest days of 2021. And surface plausibility is all that’s needed to justify punching left.