I understand that it is natural at this moment of transition from one administration to the other to reflect on the past. On that level, I get all of the “legacy” talk that has been swirling around. However, I have to admit that it strikes me a bit early to be doing serious retrospectives of a given presidential administration in its final week. Of course, a legitimate retort to that observation would be to note that perhaps such assessments aren’t all that serious.
I would also note that there are two intertwined issues in these conversations: the policy outcomes and the political ones. Policy legacies, which to me are the way we ultimately need to assess presidencies, take time to understand and analyze fully. Political legacies, if taken in terms of wins and losses are more immediate. Did a president win two terms? Was the president succeeded by a co-partisan? What about Congress? And so forth.
At a bare minimum, it seems that most of the answers to the question, “What is Biden’s legacy?” is very much wrapped up in the fact that the next president is not a Democrat.
This is fair, I suppose, insofar as winning re-election (or seeing a co-partisan succeed you) is an important political goal and is seen to reflect whether one’s performance in office met sufficient public approval.
And, I get it: there is a reasonable counterfactual wherein Biden stepped aside from running for re-election earlier and that that would have somehow changed the outcome. But, of course, there is no way to know for sure. Moreover, I would again share this graph:
Given this stunning (indeed, unprecedented) anti-incumbency mindset globally, it seems that we were destined to have the Democrats lose. But, maybe two years of campaigning by Harris, or a full primary process would have made a difference, but I have doubts it would have been enough to overcome to post-pandemic/economic backlash that wracked the globe. Of course, we will never know.
All of that is background to a reaction to this piece in The Atlantic: How Biden Destroyed His Legacy.
First, the title struck me as extreme (“destroyed” just seems a bit much), although it did its job and got me to read the piece.
Second, as one might guess, the issue was, ultimately, the fact that the Democrats lost the White House. Specifically the following:
As clearly as any recent president, Biden proposed the standard for judging his performance. From the time he began running for office, he presented himself as democracy’s defender at the republic’s moment of greatest peril. Battling autocracy was the stated rationale for his foreign policy—and the same spirit infused his domestic agenda. He said that he’d designed his legislative program as a demonstration project, to show that “our democracy can still do big things.”
When Biden issued his public warnings about the system’s fragility, he tended to deliberately avoid mentioning Donald Trump by name, but the implication was clear enough. The inability to stave off a second Trump term, and the stress on democracy that it would inevitably bring, would be the gravest catastrophe of them all. By stubbornly setting off on his reelection campaign, by strapping his party to his shuffling frame, he doomed the nation to realizing the nightmare scenario that he’d promised to prevent. He created the ideal conditions for Trump’s return, and for his own spectacular failure.
Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.’s obituary will be stalked by the counterfactual: What if he hadn’t made the selfish decision to run for reelection? What if he had passed the torch a year or even six months earlier? That makes for a grim parlor game.
Several thoughts occur to me.
First, I am struck by the fact that the blame for Trump should be laid at Biden’s feet. On the one hand, I get it. Biden himself, as noted in the quoted text, made defeating Trump the measure of his presidency in many ways. But Trump is far more the legacy of the Republicans (and specifically McConnell and McCarthy, not to mention Republican voters) than it is Joe Biden’s. I guess I am struck by the frequent attempts to make all of this the Democrat’s fault. If only they had had this candidate or that message!
It just seems worth pointing out that Democrats didn’t nominate Trump and Democrats did not elect him.
Second, I think there is a real and deeper way in which a critique of Biden’s legacy on the broader area of democracy protection, and even protection from Trump, is legitimate. The appointment of Merrick Garland/the far too lackadaisical approach to dealing with the January 6th Insurrection was a mistake (or a serious thereof). There was violence deployed in the cause of disrupting a constitutional process to elect the president and we kind of shrugged it off in a way that was inadequate. And that is a legacy we are very much dealing with.
The Democratic Party, as a whole, did not take the fortification of democratic processes seriously enough when it controlled the federal government in Biden’s first two years. That, too, is a legacy we are dealing with. Granted, there was a pandemic and its economic consequences that needed addressing (not to mention people like Joe Manchin), but the lack of much in the way of legislation in this realm was a failure.
But, of course, I think this fits into a broader problem: a lot of people, including pundits and politicians, talk about democracy and the threats thereto without really much understanding about what it actually means. And hence, we get little action. That is another legacy will will continue to live with.
At any rate, I am less concerned, ultimately, with Biden’s “legacy” as I am that a plurality of the country voted for Trump, that he continues to be normalized, and that we are about to have a cabinet full of unqualified cronies running the government.
And that, I would note, is the legacy of Trump and the Republicans and while we can blame Joe Biden for not stopping it, the voters and the Republican Party own the responsibility for all of this, yes?
BTW, I would recommend reading the whole Atlantic piece. However I will warn some readers who insist that Biden’s incompetence had been hidden from us in a conspiratorial manner will be disappointed. The reporter fully acknowledges Biden’s age-related problems, but instead noted the following.
All that said, I have never seen evidence that he made bad decisions because of his age. I’ve never seen evidence that his aides were actually dictating policy without his consent. At worst, his flagging energy undermined his credibility as a leader and projected weakness to his adversaries, at home and abroad, although those cautious tendencies arguably predated his decline.
