PATRICK LAWRENCE: The Wreckage Biden Leaves

A lightweight when it came time to prove himself as a statesman and a leader, the White House has simply defeated him.  

“BIDEN DROPS OUT OF 2024 RACE” was the banner headline across The New York Times’s digital front page Sunday. How could I not think back to Aug. 9, 1974, when the Times fronted its editions with “NIXON RESIGNS” — same font, same type size, all caps?

Richard Nixon resigned from the presidency in disgrace. Everyone knew this, even Nixon, and there was no pretending otherwise. Nixon seemed to try his best under the circumstances: “HE URGES A TIME OF ‘HEALING,’” was the subhead on the Times’ news report. 

Maybe Joe Biden did his best, too, by the time he announced Sunday morning he would not run for reelection this November. But best or otherwise, Biden made the absolute worst of his circumstances.

He could have stepped aside weeks ago, even months, with grace and some semblance of dignity. Instead, he insisted he “wasn’t going anywhere,” sheltering in a state of full denial until he was forced from office looking like a foolish old man who simply gets in the way of things.

“America has never been better positioned to lead the world,” Biden wrote in the letter to “My Fellow Americans” he published on social media Sunday. If I were Ronald Reagan I would shake my head derisively and say, “There he goes again.”  

Biden will end his days assuming, as he does here, that he can utter the most preposterous bunkum, contradictory to perfectly visible realities, and it will be accepted as true because he has said it. The Man from Scranton, authenticity beyond his reach and ordinary honesty foreign to his repertoire, got away with this chicanery for decades while he served in the Senate. 

But the White House has simply defeated him. A lightweight when it came time to prove himself as a statesman and a leader, he never should have walked its halls as anything other than a visitor.  

Of the many large truths worth noting about the Biden presidency, the most important in my judgment is that he has turned, error upon error, misjudgment upon misjudgment, stupidity upon stupidity, a gradual but long-evident erosion in American power, prestige and reputation into a precipitous collapse. There are a few things to say about this straightaway.  

Crumbling Imperium 

One, the decline over which Biden has presided was inevitable. Biden accelerated the deterioration of America’s power and standing — “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up,” as Barack Obama once said of him — but he is not altogether to be blamed.

The American imperium, a century and a quarter, or eight decades old, depending on how one dates its emergence, was from the first destined to crumble, and it is the lot of those living to witness this fate as it unfolds. This is the reality of our time. No one who achieves the White House will ever repudiate the empire, and no one serving as president can salvage it, either.  

Two, America will never climb out of the depths to which Biden has led America. The great varieties of damage he has done are irreversible. This is as true at home as it is on the foreign side. There is no building back better, just as there is no making America great again. Let us not waste our time with this kind of thinking. Let us leave all that to the nostalgists. There is only building anew. 

Finally, and related to the above point, it is important to view the imperium’s collapse positively. Failure — many failures — will be necessary before it becomes possible to begin realizing a post-imperial, post-exceptionalist America dedicated, at last, to the human cause. 

It will not be easy to live through the interim to come — Biden and the incompetent people running his regime have made it hard enough living through 2024. But amid the ruins a certain opportunity falls to those Americans who refuse the prevailing nihilism in favor of the immanence of a future that departs from the past and the eternal present in which the imperium confines us. 

The wreckage Biden leaves behind as he does us the favor of getting out of our sight is very formidable. I do not mean to suggest otherwise.

Liberal Authoritarianism

Biden took office four Januarys ago — remember the inauguration, with that dreadful poet and Garth Brooks bursting out of his jeans? — droning on and on about his dedication to national unity. Forget it. That was one of his more outsized Bidenisms. Joe Biden has put this nation so at odds with itself that he and his flaks have resorted to blaming it on the Russians, the Chinese and lately even the Iranians. 

It is on you, Joe, with your failure to address even a single civil, sympathetic word to those who do not accept — this another of your legacies — the consolidation of a liberal authoritarianism that (I predicted this years ago) will be harder to dislodge than anything Donald Trump ever puts in place. 

Does Biden think all his talk of “domestic extremism” was just easy propaganda? In every mention of it — and in all the regearing of federal institutions to suppress it — this regime dismissed a proportion of Americans the size of which we will see when the ballots are counted Nov. 5. 

Thank you for the polarization, Mr. President. It will take a philosopher-king to repair it, and America does not produce these anymore, if ever it did. 

Biden’s evident determination to destroy what may have remained of a coherent national polity extended quickly after he took office to corrupting the judiciary in the service of the liberal authoritarian cause. I count this among his regime’s gravest transgressions.

The Trump trials have proven farcical abuses of special prosecutors and the courts, it should now be obvious. But let us not miss the extent of the damage done. Trump will come and Trump will go. How, and by whom, can the judicial system be restored to independence and Lady Justice to her blindness?

There is the presidency itself. The overpromoted Biden leaves it discredited in two ways. One, he has imported his grubby, infra-dig corruption into the White House. While various House committees have gathered enough hard evidence of this to warrant an impeachment trial, the practiced small-time grifter will get away with it because the judiciary has in effect succeeded in letting the clock run out. 

Two, our well-bribed Zionist president has let the Israel lobby, notably but not only the American–Israel Public Affairs Committee, so far into the political process it is hard to tell where AIPAC’s influence ends and the legitimate deliberations of government begin — such as these deliberations may still proceed in the White House and on Capitol Hill.

The parting shot in this line: Bibi Netanyahu, now subject to a requested arrest warrant at the International Criminal Court, will address a joint session of Congress Wednesday.  

Further in behalf of terrorist Israel, Biden has purposefully instigated a climate of delusional anti–Semitism that resembles nothing so much as the Red-under-every-bed paranoia of the 1950s. Monomanias of this kind have consumed America periodically since the Salem witch trials, and the syndrome proves as destructive now as it has on all previous occasions. 

Yes, Mr. President, America has never looked better as the leader of the world. 

Cold War II

Biden’s record on the foreign side speaks for itself. He leaves the U.S. stuck in a proxy war with Russia from which there is by design no exit, even as Ukraine is condemned to self-destruction and its people to a criminal, Nazi–infested dictatorship in Kiev. Cold War II now lies before us, by the look of it stretching out for decades. 

Across the other ocean there is the new Cold War’s second front. Relations with China lie in ruins, having been run into the ground by patently incompetent amateurs whose sole qualification for office is their yes-man loyalty to a leader even stupider than they are.  

Worst of all, of course, is the spectacle of America’s direct participation, well beyond mere support, in the final stage of a terrorist state’s genocide of the Palestinian people. This will leave a scar on the United States of America that no future leader will ever be able to erase.   

When Rachel Maddow, with this record fully in view, hails Biden as “a master of foreign policy and has been for decades” — this after his post–NATO press conference two weeks ago — it is time to get sober. Biden’s original sin on the foreign side is that he has brought no imagination to the White House when imagination was vital to the moment. I grow sick of those who insist on pretending otherwise. 

If there is room for amusement as Joe Biden wanders in a daze off the stage, I found some in the boastful passages of his letter declaring he will not run again. He lowered drug costs for the elderly, he passed a gun law, health care for veterans will now cover exposure to toxic substances: All worthy, all of it. But isn’t there a question of magnitude here? 

Put Biden’s list of accomplishments against his true legacy, and it reads like an upside-down confessional: Well, I have made a mess of America and the world, just as Barack Obama warned I would, but I have some incremental odds and ends over here to brag of. 

And now Biden and the Democrats, having rendered the party disgracefully undemocratic, will force the nomination of Kamala Harris as his successor. We will have to see what comes of this, but there are only two outcomes now in prospect. Given either Donald Trump or Harris will serve as America’s next president, it seems to me those who vote are left to choose between two disasters. Maybe it was fated to come to this.  

I have compared Biden’s exit with Nixon’s, not Lyndon Johnson’s. The latter, who announced 56 years ago he would not seek re-election, had it disastrously wrong in escalating America’s aggression in Southeast Asia. He knew this, he knew he had divided the country, and so stepped aside just short of disgracing himself and his office. Biden already has, as Nixon did.

Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for The International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon.  Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored. 

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