Can Democrats transcend Joe Biden? It would help if Joe Biden could transcend Joe Biden.
If you want to despair for the Democrats and need one more superfluous reason, I recommend to you my colleague Jamie Weinstein’s excellent interview on The Dispatch Podcast with former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu. Landrieu seems like a decent enough guy for a politician, but he is plainly delusional—and I mean Baghdad Bob-level willful denial of reality—in the matter of Biden’s disability while serving as president. He goes through all the usual stages of horsepucky—from I was there, and that’s not how it was! to Jake Tapper is just trying to sell books! to Why are we even talking about this?—that one reliably hears from people who know that they are full of it but cannot quite manage to tell the plain truth to others or, more importantly, to themselves.
Biden could, if he had the patriotism, decency, or even the constructive partisanship to do so, release his fellow Democrats from the political bell jar in which they have isolated themselves. It would be a simple thing—which is not the same as an easy thing.
Permit a small detour that will take us where we are going:
Ask any emergency-room doctor—or the sort of man who sends a lot of people to the emergency room—and he will tell you: Human bodies are frail, and it doesn’t take much to hurt someone pretty badly. You don’t need a gun or a great deal of physical strength—a 120-pound woman can gouge someone’s eyes out as effectively as a 250-pound man. The barrier is psychological, and the disinclination toward physical violence is very strong among most normal people. That’s normally an excellent thing for our species, but it also is the reason both men and women sometimes allow themselves to be victimized when they could have physically defended themselves.
There are other normal psychological limitations that are probably healthy from an evolutionary point of view but bad for the individual, and these help to create the category of “simple hard things.” Losing weight, for example, is not particularly complicated for most people—a calorie deficit will do it—but most people (myself included) find it very difficult, again probably for reasons rooted in evolution: Both our bodies and our behavior are the products of evolution that happened in an environment of radical scarcity rather than our current environment of radical abundance.
It is easy to play it way too loosey-goosey with evolutionary psychology, but there are probably very good reasons, stretching back into the shadows of pre-history, for what might otherwise seem like irrational psychological limitations that undermine our happiness: the crippling anxiety many men suffer at the thought of asking a woman out of a date, phobias involving ancient threats (water, spiders, lightning), which are more common than phobias involving deadlier modern ones (guns), etc.
Human beings are intensely social animals, and social exclusion in the ancestral environment would have amounted to a death sentence. (Solitary confinement in prisons is strongly associated with higher mortality rates.) To stand in front of the clan and make an embarrassing confession does not come easily to us. The face-saving reflex is not only vanity—it is a survival instinct. But human beings have been an extraordinarily successful species in part because we have achieved a level of social cooperation exceeding that of any other animal—we have learned to thrive together by occasionally trading off some narrow individual interest in the service of the common good.
Imagine hearing this from Biden:
“My fellow Americans: In a career as long and as varied as mine, you make a lot of decisions, some of them good, some of them decisions that you wish you could go back and change. I made my share of mistakes in politics, and the worst of them was denying the plain truth that everybody could see—that my age and my health were undermining my ability to do the job of president during my term, much less to run for a second term—and also expecting everybody around me, my loyal colleagues and my fellow Democrats, to deny the plain facts, too. My main agenda in running in 2020 was to keep Donald Trump from being reelected to the presidency, because he is an extreme and unique threat to our institutions. I succeeded in doing that in 2020. And I screwed it up in 2024. The presidency has a way of seducing you, and I probably am even more vulnerable to flattery and to being made to feel important than the average politician is—and that is saying something. It was the worst mistake of my career in public service. I’m saying so now because I want to set the record straight, but also because I don’t want my fellow Democrats to be hamstrung going forward by defending something we all know to have been a terrible mistake. Our country and our party desperately need to move forward, and it will be easier to do so without the burden of defending my worst failure.”
If Biden won’t say it—and he almost certainly won’t—somebody will have to show some leadership and say it for him. Democrats will not get over Joe Biden’s selfish stupidity until they can tell the truth about him. Everybody will feel better once the simple, hard thing is done.
