As Joe Biden departs the White House, his physical and mental fragility is matched by pessimism about the robustness of his legacy. Democrats are still ruing the pain not just of defeat to Donald Trump, but the other consequences of Biden’s lateness in leaving the fray which denied the party the opportunity to build a new momentum with a strong candidate nominated through election and dissociated from the White House.
Is Biden forever to be defined by “Trump’s America”, or will history be kinder in affording him more agency? It is of course very early to put his presidency into historical context and his legacy is also about the future, given that we must wait to see whether Trump wreaks the carnage promised, and what his presidency might do to America and its international relations.
In 2020, Biden was successful in winning the Democratic Party nomination partly from a caution that a more radical alternative (Bernie Sanders) would make it easier for Trump to triumph. The vision stuff could be parked as the focus was on doing all to prevent a return of Trump. As Georgetown historian Michael Kazin put it in his 2022 book What it Took to Win, “for Democrats, the election of 2020 spelled relief instead of deliverance from the dilemma of how to build an enduring new majority”.
There were promising signals at the outset of Biden’s presidency, helped by the COVID-19 pandemic, that there was an appetite for unapologetic State intervention to promote the common welfare
That dilemma was ultimately of more relevance, despite the tone from some of Biden’s relieved biographers, including Evan Osnos of the New Yorker, in his overly reverential Joe Biden: American Dreamer (2020). He suggested “the circumstances of a life in full and a country in peril conspired to put Joe Biden at the centre of an American reckoning . . . at the very moment his country was lying spread-eagled before the eyes of the world, Biden had arrived at his season of history.” The framework around such accounts was a moral one; the idea, articulated by Franklin D. Roosevelt, that “the presidency is not merely an administrative office . . . it is preeminently a place of moral leadership.” Biden, as Osnos characterised it, “for a people in mourning . . . might offer something like solace, a language of healing”.
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But such a depiction was not matched with devotion to sustaining an alliance of motivated Americans with a common purpose, and oiling an electoral machine to prioritise protecting democracy and its institutions from the MAGA assault on them. Biden focused too much on his personal narrative. This was, as Oxford political historian Adam Smith put it, “a store of politically useful wisdom” for a time, but was one which did not age well as America’s fault lines widened.
Biden always displayed a malleability about ideological positioning, but such pragmatism in a time of extremes was a weakness, as was the party’s increasing reliance on elites. The celebrity endorsements were a crude and patronising reminder of that, as it also contradictorily clung to outdated notions of it as the party of the “working class”. Not enough was done to counteract the sense of “the people versus the elites”, as Democrats championed too many causes deemed “progressive” but regarded as irrelevant by its traditional support base.
Jimmy Carter told Americans in 1976: “I’ll never lie to you.” His promise did not deliver a second term, but he had a long road ahead to enhance his stature. Biden, aged 82, has no such route. The vanity, stubbornness and secrecy of Biden and those around him about his decline also contradicted the idea of “moral leadership” as did failure to aggressively face the fascist threat. Instead, there were reticence and tiptoeing around the party’s less important internal divisions.
Biden always displayed a malleability about ideological positioning, but such pragmatism in a time of extremes was a weakness
Biden’s disastrous foreign policy choices have also tarnished his legacy, including his refusal to take on the excesses of Binyamin Netanyahu and the Israel Defense Forces. That Netanyahu has opted for a ceasefire because he fears Trump is a further indictment of Biden and his facilitation of war crimes in Gaza. Alongside that, he caused little discomfort to Putin, but much to Zelenskiy.
There were promising signals at the outset of Biden’s presidency, helped by the COVID-19 pandemic, that there was an appetite for unapologetic State intervention to promote the common welfare. During the 2020 election campaign, Biden had compared his task if he won with that of Roosevelt in 1933 and his New Deal legislation. Subsidising the Green economy was bold and necessary and there was much infrastructural investment, health insurance subsidies and a revitalisation of the manufacture of computing chips, but the balance between stimulus and fanning inflation was lost.
To be fair, it is to Biden’s credit that, in the words of the founding editor of Politico, John Harris, he “doesn’t fit the contempt industry very well”. But he and his party did not do enough to understand or prevent Trump and his craven cronies making that industry a winning political asset.