In the summer of 2018, my wife and I invited over an old friend of mine and her husband for lunch, both of whom had worked in the Obama administration. Biden’s announcement that he was going to run for president in 2020 was still about 10 months away. But it was no secret that he was burning to enter the race, having been pushed aside in 2016 for Hillary Clinton by the Democratic establishment. As we stood in our kitchen talking about who might make a viable Democratic nominee, I brought up Biden. The two of them burst into a chuckle and shook their heads. “Oh Joe,” said my friend pitiably, the way you might react to the mention of an amiable acquaintance, whose relentless ambition, combined with their constant setbacks and failures, makes them both endearing and immune to respect.
The pandemic unlocked the door to a Biden presidency. But it was the Machiavellian congressman from South Carolina, James Clyburn, who pushed it open by virtually forcing Biden to promise to pledge in an impending debate – in exchange for Clyburn’s vital support – that he would appoint the first black woman to the Supreme Court. Clyburn got his promise, along with Biden’s unexpected claim that he had already “pushed very hard to” successfully get a black woman appointed to the court (which of course had not yet happened). Trump blustered his way out of the White House. Biden flubbed his way in.
America seems shocked by Biden’s departure from the presidential contest. But his race has been finished for weeks; Trump had been given enough rope to hang Biden’s candidacy ten times over. What the country should have expressed a collective shock over, in order not to repeat the mistake, was the fact that Biden became president at all. That he did speaks a great deal about the decaying nature of a Democratic establishment that will certainly replace Biden with Kamala Harris, a proven washout in her bid for the presidency, and perhaps the most unpopular vice president in recent times, with Harris’s staff at one point describing the atmosphere working for her as an “abusive environment”.
Biden was always a placeholder, a presidential candidate who could well have been pushed out of the Democratic primaries in 2020 if it had not been for Clyburn’s masterful intervention. What Biden offered in 2020 was, above all, a return to the everyday mediocrity, mendacity and conformity of politics that norm-shattering Trump had replaced with sheer spectacle – behind which the same old mediocrity, mendacity and conformity flourished, but with an air of electrifying novelty. Trump was a businessman. Most American presidents, and politicians in general, are lawyers. Biden is trained as a lawyer. Lawyers and businesspeople have two distinct ways of telling lies. Lawyers weave a narrative pitched to the emotions. Something that will move a jury and/or a judge. Businesspeople tell brazen untruths without catering to feelings or to the appetite for a pleasurable tale. Something that implies irresistible aggression behind it.
It wasn’t, though, simply a return to the usual soiled currents of politics. Biden had brought liberalism into its Mannerist phase. His staged and super-accelerated “idealism” was a thin caricature of the liberal idealism that had dragged America into Vietnam and Iraq. His rhetoric about stopping Putin in Ukraine was stirring, inspiring and devoid of honest levelling with the public about how the war was proceeding, what its economic costs were, and when and how it might end. On Gaza, Biden waited days after the campus protests erupted to issue a statement that said nothing meaningful to anyone about anything. On the import of a world order coming apart: zero. President Trump was an isolationist in act (though push never really came to shove). President Biden has been an isolationist in the head.
Some attempt has been made to secure the legacy of Biden’s economic “populism”. But there was no populism, aside from lots of populist rhetoric, lots of populist-sounding promises, and lots of money thrown at voters in the form of one aid package or another. Rather there is the Mannerist performance of the greatest hits from Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon B Johnson’s Great Society. But there is no redistribution of wealth, which is the essence of a true populism. After the energies of Occupy Wall Street petered out, to the relief of establishment figures, the Democratic Party diluted the adversarial energies of Occupy and included some populist material in Hillary Clinton’s 2016 platform, namely some stuff about antitrust legislation. Bowing to the Democratic establishment, as always, Biden took that up with force.
Yet with rare exceptions, antitrust lawsuits do not touch the lives of ordinary people in significant ways. Trump’s much-vaunted antitrust promises went, predictably, nowhere, but Biden’s antitrust lawsuits against, for instance, Ticketmaster and Visa for its payment processing network are not exactly the war on poverty. What does lift people up and protect them is high taxes on the wealthy, the redistribution of which has the effect of lowering prices on precious goods, and relieving financial pressure on people who are not wealthy.
Biden, however, more or less maintained Trump’s tax cuts on the wealthy. It is true that he had to deal with an adversarial Congress, but FDR had to contend with a conservative Supreme Court and Johnson faced powerful opposition in Congress. Biden could have dramatically challenged the Republicans in public to live up to their populist rhetoric about raising taxes on the rich, but he never did. Populism-spouting Trump himself had slashed taxes on the rich. Biden simply replaced Trump’s empty belligerence with weak political manoeuvring and empty piety. The result was the same. In both cases, the country waited for someone better to come along.
It has been said that the secret of George HW Bush’s success was not his political vision or talent, but the fact that he wrote plentiful and effective thank you notes. Biden sends out stimulus payments with the expectation of a national deluge of thank you notes in return. It is telling, and depressing, that Trump’s malevolent public expression and compulsive lying found its counterpoint in Biden’s endless desire to please and compulsive lying (for example, Biden once said he had graduated in the top half of his law-school class when he, in fact, graduated 76th in a class of 85). If Trump and Biden were a married couple, Trump would be the spouse offending everyone, and Biden would be the one running around apologising for Trump and offering everyone a canapé.
His apologies extend across his record. Biden now sees the draconian crime bill he supported in 1994 as “a mistake”; the same with voting for the Iraq War; he has expressed his regrets to Anita Hill for her treatment during the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court confirmation hearings. In government, he pursued legislation that would forgive student loan debt on a massive scale, an apology of sorts after he backed a 2005 bill that stripped students of bankruptcy protections. “This legislation breaks the bond that unites America,” said Senator Edward Kennedy at the time. “It sacrifices Americans to the rampant greed of the credit card industry.”
He has always turned in the wind, or else evaded it altogether. He received five deferments from the draft during the Vietnam War, while an entire generation was killed in South-East Asia. You might say that while Trump created a crowd, which then became a mob, the wishes of a particular crowd at a particular time created Biden. For all his old-fashioned airs, Biden is the first crowd-sourced president. He had discovered the joys of people-pleasing when he was vice president. After voting for the Defense of Marriage Act – affirming that marriage can only be between a man and a woman – in 1996, Biden shocked Democrats, as well as Obama, by saying on television in May 2012 that he was comfortable with same-sex marriage. Obama, who had not yet come out for gay marriage, had to spin around and promptly agree.
Whatever Biden’s motives for such a dramatic declaration, he became a hero among the gay and lesbian community. It was the only community that he did become a hero among, until, at Clyburn’s behest, he began to surf the wave of woke politics. He never forgot the heroic feeling and was loath to let it go. It was always a perplexity that Biden never used the power of the Oval Office to address American concerns over what you might call the militarising of social groups along racial, gender, and sexual lines. Here is why: he loves the adulation of such groups too much, despite the fact that they represent a fraction of the country. The blarney he likes to purvey about the eternal wisdom of his father, and his grandfather – did he grow up in Scranton or Plato’s Republic? – is like some projection of how he fantasises people relate to his own parables of practical wisdom. It is the ego-ideal of the crowd-sourced mediocrity. Mediocrities never willingly step aside, or admit defeat.
“I think I have a much higher IQ than you do, I suspect,” Biden snapped, during his run for president in 1987, at a voter who questioned Biden’s academic credentials. Or as Trump tweeted in 2013: “Sorry losers and haters, but my IQ is one of the highest – and you all know it! Please don’t feel so stupid or insecure, it’s not your fault.” There was never as much of a divide between the ultimate effects of Trump and Biden’s characters as liberals made there out to be in 2020. And now Democratic elites will anoint Harris their nominee, even as MAGA elites anointed Trump – in both cases over the heads of American voters. Whoever wins, the country will still be waiting for a real leader.
[See also: The Democrats’ post-Biden gamble]
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