Biden: The "Anti-Frailty" President
Biden was elected as "mourner-in-chief," but he leaves America a coarser place
It will be common to remember Joe Biden as an uncommonly weak president. And, of course, there is truth in that. But reflecting on the forces that doomed his presidency, it is not Biden’s weakness that stands out, but his delusional revolt against weakness. As I write in my latest NY Mag column:
If one looks for it, the compulsion to flee from weakness, disavow that which is fragile, and compensate with bluster and strength is everywhere in his record. What he could not abide in himself he also turned against in the world. Biden was the anti-frailty president.
The piece looks at how Biden’s “revolt against vulnerability” played out in three key episodes: the fight over his economic agenda, the scheme to conceal his enfeeblement from the public, and (most damningly) the war in Gaza — with some apposite insights from Shakespeare and Freud along the way. It is strange to remember that Biden came into office with a mandate (of sorts) to acknowledge and console our collective fragility — our ever-present susceptibility to affliction and unforeseen want — and that, briefly, he seemed like a decent man for the job. (Remember the “mourner-in-chief?”) But that all came to nothing. Worse than nothing:
In the end, the hope that Biden’s personal frailty and traumas would lead him to a special respect for our entangled needs, for the suffering of children and their mothers, has proved naïve, ridiculous, bitterly ironic. This should have been expected. It is not power but a premonition of feebleness that ignites Lear’s fateful wrath. “It is their despair, their helplessness,” write Phillips and Greenblatt of the tragic heroes, “that has called up in them the faux potency of an irredeemable murderous rage.”
As Lear laments, “They told me I was everything. ‘Tis a lie.” So long, old man.
It's interesting to think about this in light of the many decades over which we, the public, have built our understanding of Joe Biden. Some people liked him, some people didn't, but aside from partisan differences and particular hang-ups, basically no one, from what I can remember, thought he was a particularly impressive or in any way unique politician; he was a lifer, like Bob Dole. Then circumstances made it reasonable for Obama to tap him as his VP, and it made sense: suddenly Biden could be understood as both cool (thanks to the Onion) and old school, the wise pol who was also progressive in the way the technocratic Obama wasn't. Our alientated, story-hungry public made up stuff so that he could be made fit for his moment, and Biden and his people anxiously abetted in that process, and of course much of it was true. Did he believe his own press releases? After Clinton's loss in 2016 he clearly did, even as Obama and others warned him not to make his own bitterness and self-righteousness (not that Obama has entirely clean hands in that regard either) his driving motivation, and after anti-Sanders paranoia opened the field, he could come up with another story about why he was the man of the moment--and once again, we story-craving folk bought into it. I know I did, as much as I knew much of it was false; he's our Konrad Adenauer, I told myself, a wise old boring Catholic who is going to pull us away from our flirtation with fascism! I honestly still believe, all evidence to the contrary, that there was a real chance that that story, the mourner-in-chief one, could have been true, up through the 2022 midterms. That should have been his moment to declare victory: that in a still deeply divided country, he'd led his party to a better position than anyone thought possible, and now, with anti-Dobbs victories at his back, it was time for him to step down, pass the torch, etc. But of course, in the end, he wasn't an impressive or unique politician, he was an ordinary one, and what ordinary president would ever do that?
Isn't the most prominent thing about Biden his ambition? He was from hunger, from way back. He wanted to be president so bad he shouldn't have been allowed.