Joseph R Biden has the weight of the world on his shoulders. These words are as true of him as they have ever been of any mortal soul. Until his term ends, he will be alone with the gravest decisions that have ever confronted an American leader. Things might have gone very badly for Abraham Lincoln, but the varieties of loss and destruction now possible if the systems of order fail are great beyond imagining.
The design of our government poses one human being against all our troubles, however difficult or threatening. This is only truer now that this president has to deal with an opposition committed to seeing him fail – or be perceived as failing, which for most purposes is the same thing. Our champion in the present trial-by-history is a fine old man of truly vast experience who may or may not show signs of aging which may or may not reflect on his judgment and competence. I am a few days more than a year younger than Biden, so I am sensitive to the association of age with cognitive slippage and less inclined to credit it than the generality of people seem to be. Old as I am, I remember that the press ridiculed Eisenhower for supposedly being inarticulate. No doubt Biden remembers this as well.
A habit of ridicule has regularly displaced or distorted press coverage of other presidents. So he could no doubt dismiss it, if it were not so effective at undermining him, at a time when, for example, he is trying to keep the western alliance together in the face of aggressive pressure from Russia. Biden has entered office at a time of unprecedented turmoil, and yet he is judged by the press as if these were normal times and he were simply a dubious claimant to the role, dubious not because there is any doubt about his character and intentions or his remarkable range of experience, or about his win at the polls, but because he is old, and tomorrow he will be older.
Of course most of his colleagues, US senators and congressmen, are in his age cohort, and the figures of brash relative youth among them seem to look for guidance to Rupert Murdoch, who is 91. Biden has to deal with the fact of succeeding Donald Trump, who is a few years younger than him but still old, cosmetics notwithstanding.
The press has become accustomed to covering a man who writes his own headlines, the more bizarre the better from the point of view of clicks or circulation. Trump was and is such a rambunctious presence that any normally courteous person might seem to recede by comparison. He deals in ridicule and he is ridiculous. So he has pulled political discourse so far into the depths that the words ‘political discourse’ hardly apply. If Biden is to restore normalcy, he has to rise above all this, which will mean he is at great risk of being overshadowed by it. He must resist the impulse to defend himself by reference to his predecessor, even though he has to contend with the turmoil he created and the shambles he left behind.
Facts should not be dismissed as excuses. They have a legitimate claim to acknowledgement. Biden is trying to shore up democratic government in the United States, which is threatened in ways and degrees none of his predecessors could have foreseen. He has the pandemic to deal with. The economy is robust, but inflation is rising. And there is the matter of the obstructionist Congress, many of whom are ready to oppose a policy because it would be popular and effective, many of whom are simply doing as they are told, defeating the president the people have elected. Any Democrat holding the office now would be frustrated, prevented from acting on the agenda he offered to the voters, on the basis of which they would have chosen him.
An article in Time magazine that marked Biden’s first year in office is titled ‘Big Promises, Bad Outcomes’. The failed promises include to ‘Fix Democracy’. In 12 months he should have repaired our political system, which has been allowed to decline over many years and is now under direct, calculated assault from outside and inside our government. He, alone, cannot fix it. Any grownup should know this. Unreasonable expectations simply find failure where there is difficulty and a need for thought, patience and collaboration. They pass among the press for tough-mindedness. In fact they only demonstrate a failure to acknowledge the gravity of our situation.
Biden’s long institutional memory, his lifetime of watching presidents come and go, might have made him aware of a recurring pattern in our politics. When an administration with a liberalizing agenda comes into power, obstructionism asserts itself, the agenda is curtailed at best, blocked at worst. So the faction called ‘conservative’ has succeeded in fixing the terms of American life into the indefinite future.
Over time American identity, like American law, is established by precedent. We find out who we are by seeing what we do – within the constraints of the constitution, which is, on principle, open to interpretation. Precedent has gone very wrong. This can happen, as when the US supreme court ruled against Dred Scot. For some time our politics has given us a narrow, arid conception of what is possible, which is now thought of as ‘American’. As a nation, we don’t do much. This is consistent with a recently authoritative view that economics can and should make most of our decisions for us while government stands out of the way.
This order of things has produced profound global discontent. It is so unpopular and unpopulist that it is no longer an effective rationale for obstructionism, which has fallen silent, putting aside talk of M&Ms, civil war, socialism and the like, because it no longer needs a rationale. It can hope to make the Biden presidency fail simply by sitting on its hands. What the consequences of an ineffective presidency will be for the world is no concern of theirs, apparently.
In post-war history it is true that Democratic administrations propose reforms, Republicans quash them, and the conclusion drawn from this is that the reforms were radical, not acceptable to the American people. Harry Truman’s Fair Deal, modeled on Roosevelt’s New Deal, would have made racial discrimination in employment illegal. The powerful opposition at the time, largely Dixiecrat, were “conservative” in the matter of discrimination and segregation, so the experience of another generation was added to the towering social cost of injustice. Truman did manage, by executive order, to make discrimination illegal in the federal government and its contractors. But America was still defined by obstruction, by discrimination. The good impulse toward justice was as ineffectual as obstruction could make it.
President Truman proposed a national health system, as his Democratic successors have done. It was lost to Dixiecrat and Republican opposition, as were many worthy and forgotten reforms. President Obama finally succeeded in contriving a system of wider access to medical care that could withstand determined and continuous attack and Biden has broadened it. But a true national system of health care has assumed the character of a negative definition of America. It is preeminent among the things we don’t do. This despite the fact that it has been on the agenda of a series of Democratic presidents, who, as Democrats, enjoy the distinction of having been elected by majorities.
Largely because obstruction sets the agenda for the press, it is by now fully institutionalized. Has the President failed? Can he possibly recover? The right answer is always, probably not. Are Americans disappointed? Not, of course, in the bloc that put policies that would have improved their lives and their children’s lives out of their reach. Journalistically speaking, It all rests on the shoulders of a man old enough to remember when America was defined by the Marshall Plan and the GI Bill, by generosity, reform and a positive view of the future.
Marilynne Robinson is an American novelist and essayist. Her latest book is Jack
