Is Gambling with Joe Biden Too Dangerous?

A Potentially Existential Question

Psychiatrists, scientists, and scholars in general are encouraged and trained to practice and educate outside of politics.  This arrangement holds only insofar as the political class is enlightened and knows to reach out for consultation from independent scholarly sources when appropriate.  Problems arise when the political class is too uneducated to seek consultation, uses pseudoscientists for ulterior ends, or shuns all science and facts to ensure the profit of special interests.  Under the latter circumstances, politicians themselves can become dangerous, and scientists who remain in the sidelines become irrelevant at best and complicit at worst.

Barry Goldwater is said to have been a great statesman, but would he have remained one, had he been elected president in 1964?  It is not inconceivable that psychiatrists who spoke up in his era were responding to ominous signs, such as his support for the Klu Klux Klan and his statements such as, “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice!”  The extreme umbrage he took at these psychiatrists, enough to sue Fact magazine into bankruptcy, actually gives away his limitations and possibility that he could have deteriorated, had he been granted greater power.  Indeed, he may have remained a great statesman precisely because he was denied the chance to be president.

The American Psychiatric Association (APA), by responding to the apoplectic outrage of a powerful political figure, became an outlier of all medical and mental health associations when, in 1973, it added a totally superfluous “Goldwater rule”—superfluous because it simply restates for public figures what applies to everyone: that psychiatrists are not to diagnose a person without a proper examination and not to publicize the diagnosis without consent.