The Conundrum of Joe Biden: Why Did So Many People Hate Him?
Among the many puzzles of this most mystifying of campaigns, in which a Nazi sympathizer, racist, misogynist, nativist, transphobe, and overall psychopath is still a possibility to win the presidency, there is one the solution of which may go some way toward explaining why the nation, or at least 47% of it, seems to have gone off its rocker. And that puzzle is the antipathy toward Joe Biden. Even before his cognitive decline was apparent, and despite a slight uptick in his favorability rating after he withdrew in an act of great self-sacrifice, Joe Biden was and is something of a pariah – the least liked president in some time. He should have been coasting to victory before leaving the race. Instead, he was almost a sure loser.
The antipathy to Biden is an instance of where the current mood and the historical verdict are likely to be very badly misaligned. And my strong feeling is that history’s verdict will be the correct one. Biden, by almost any metric, has been a good president, a very good president, and many in the commentariat, who have criticized his obstinacy when he was still clinging to his candidacy, nevertheless called him one of the greatest presidents of their lifetime, as consequential as any since Lyndon Johnson and his Great Society, and even drawing comparison to Franklin Roosevelt. Historians have already ranked him the fourteenth best president, and that is likely to climb as his presidency recedes into the rearview mirror. (Heck. There is even nostalgia these days for George W. Bush.) Biden’s accomplishments, which I need not list here, are extraordinary, especially considering Congressional paralysis and political polarization with which neither Franklin Roosevelt nor Johnson had to contend.
Biden inherited a national wreck. Donald Trump had done immeasurable, and quite possibly irrevocable, damage to the country: what he did to the sense of American community, what he did to American values, what he did to American institutions, what he did to shred the Constitution with the aide of his confederates on the Supreme Court, which no longer seems very supreme, what he did to regard for law, what he did to cosmology, epistemology, and history, which is shatter all of them, and what he did in engineering a coup against the government, which no previous president would have ever thought of doing. He is, as I say here repeatedly, likely the single most destructive force in modern history since Adolf Hitler.
And then there is Joe Biden. Biden protected the country from the covid pandemic both medically and economically. In addition to his substantial material accomplishments, he restored a sense of order to the nation, and a sense of decency to the national soul. He promoted bipartisanship when he could. His election may very well have saved democracy, though we still have to wait and see if that will hold. He has made mistakes of judgment, but his motives and his character are peerless. He is the personification of decency.
And yet, Americans generally regard Donald Trump much more highly than Joe Biden, which isn’t just a matter of comparison between two very different personalities, as every campaign is, but a matter of comparison between two very different Americas – two very different moral systems. That is why the Biden conundrum is worth investigating – because it enables us to better investigate our own pathologies, and how we got to this awful place where we may well become the very sort of horrendous country against which we had waged wars.
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Why did, and do, Americans dislike Biden? The pundits have told you that it is basically the economy that sunk him. Despite the fact that unemployment, which soared at the outset of covid, was tamed during the Biden administration, and despite the fact that inflation has steadily declined to the point where it is now a tweak above the Fed target of 2%, and despite the fact that the Fed has started cutting interest rates, we are daily reminded - daily - that the public is snarling at their economic distress. (This narrative is so persistent that even Democrats have bought into it.) Every Republican commercial I see attacks the “Biden-Harris economy,” as if we were slogging through another Great Depression. So does every article on the election. Trump has the economy going for him, the pundits continue to announce, forgetting that the economy Biden was handed wasn’t all that great to begin with.
And if you put this in a historical context, it makes even less sense. Ronald Reagan’s numbers were worse in 1984 than Biden’s are now. Early in his presidency, Reagan presided over the most severe recession since World War II, and over high inflation (4.1%) and high unemployment (7.2%), not to mention high interest rates that reached 20%, when he ran for reelection in 1984, and yet he won in a landslide. And though Americans under Reagan were suffering from the double effects of unemployment (10.8% at its height) and inflation (10% at its height), and though they were unhappy about it early on, they harbored little animosity toward him during that campaign. Nearly half, 48%, still expressed optimism about the eventual recovery of the economy, as opposed to 70% just this past July who said the Biden economy was getting worse rather than better – patently false - which gives some credence to Biden’s own admission that his administration had done a poor job of selling his economic success. But only some credence.
It wasn’t the economy that was different in Reagan’s time, I think, so much as it was the American people who were different. America was once a more hopeful country, a country that felt it could wrestle every problem to the mat, but that optimism they expressed during the economic depths of the Reagan administration clearly has disappeared. Americans have lost confidence in themselves and their future, and, thanks in no small measure to Reagan, who bashed government at every opportunity, and to forty years of subsequent Republican assaults, in government itself.
But the economic pessimism of the last few years isn’t only a kind of national depression in a country that had survived so much worse, including the Great Depression and World War II and the Great Recession. It is also a kind of national self-indulgence in a country that has had it pretty good since the end of the Great Recession – maybe too good. When covid disrupted everything, including the economy, Americans couldn’t tolerate the bump of inflation, even though just about everyone who wanted a job had one, and even though the nation skirted another recession. (Even now, 40% of Americans in a recent Pew survey fret about jobs when we are basically in a full-employment economy.) And even as Americans gripe about the cost of things, consumer spending has risen. It doesn’t make any economic sense. What makes even less sense is that most Americans tell pollsters that their own financial well-being is good; it is the national well-being that isn’t good. Even the apologists for disgruntled Americans, those who tell us to feel their pain, have a hard time parsing that one. You could say, though no one dare say it, that Americans have been spoiled.
So let’s just dismiss the whole economic dissatisfaction explanation as something of a media and Republican hoax. And let’s dismiss as well the caterwauling over immigration (Biden has effectively capped border crossings) and crime (yesterday’s FBI report shows violent crime down significantly) – basically, let’s dismiss all the Republican criticisms of the Biden administration. As I have said many times before, the economy, immigration, and crime are excuses, not reasons. Americans dislike the economy because they dislike Biden, not the other way around. And the proof is how many Americans have warmed to the economy now that Kamala Harris is the Democratic nominee and not Biden. In most polls now, she is single digits down from Trump on who is better suited to manage the economy, which is very good news for Democrats.
Even so, against all reasonable evidence, Republicans view the economy as something close to the Great Depression, immigration as an invasion, and crime as a rampage. These views have nothing to do with reality; they have to do with hatred of Democrats, which is endemic not to Biden alone but to our political environment. Republicans would hate any Democrat. Only ten percent of Republicans thought the economy was excellent or good in a Pew survey last May, even as inflation was rapidly cooling. To be fair, this kind of proxy, hating the economy because the party you opposed was its steward, held for Democrats, too, most of whom had a less than enthusiastic view of the Trump economy. We once opposed the other side; now we loathe them.
To read these, whether Republican or Democratic, as actual feelings about the economy or immigration or crime, as the media typically do, and not as expressions of larger political dissatisfactions, is just wrong-headed. For the fact is that for all the professions in those focus groups and diner interviews of voters who say that they want to know more about Kamala Harris’s policies, policy really doesn’t matter much anymore. There was certainly a time when it did. There was a time when political philosophy mattered too – a time when Democrats represented the urban working class and advocated government assistance, and Republicans the small-town business class and advocated government neglect.
Though philosophical remnants clearly remain, I don’t think they have much to do with how voters vote. It is the rare voter who knows anything about policy, and to impute Biden’s unpopularity to the economy or to immigration or to crime is to write an old story – an obsolete story that might have been accurate when one’s life was deeply affected by factors like the economy or social policy. But most people are buffered from those now. Thanks largely to Democratic contributions like social security, unemployment insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act, the Occupational Health and Safety Act, the Clean Air and Water Act, business regulations, and a hundred other laws, actions, judicial decisions, and edicts, Americans are no longer at the mercy of deleterious forces they cannot control – which was the whole point of the liberal agenda. The really deleterious forces today are the Republicans and Donald Trump who want to end most of these protections and throw Americans back on the mercy of the markets, not to mention, but I will, the establishment of a dictatorship.
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In order to begin to understand the disaffection toward Biden, one has to understand that what matters now, what determines votes, is the national psychology, the mood, the nation’s emotional temperature, the terrifying sense of impending social change, especially among white uneducated men who are Donald Trump’s base and shock troops. They feel a storm brewing, and they feel it will blow them down.
These men aren’t necessarily economically fragile. Polls show that Trump’s voters were not lower middle class, much less poor; those groups vote Democratic. But these men are very definitely socially fragile, as I have written here previously, and it bears repeating again and again because when the history of this bizarre and dangerous period is written, perhaps the most dangerous period ever, I am fairly certain it will be written as the revenge of the white uneducated middle class against the social and cultural dynamics that they saw as working against them – as working to disempower them from the world they knew, the world they liked, the world they governed: a world where women were subordinate, where Blacks and Hispanics knew their place, where sexuality was entirely binary and neither gays nor transgender Americans had any claims or freedoms, where the family was traditionally a man and woman, where Christianity was all but officially the national religion, where immigrants were European, where the values of masculinity prevailed, and where compassion and empathy were all but discarded. In short, a world where white men had primary status, and no one dared threaten it.
It is white male status anxiety that has rocked America. It is white male status anxiety that has revolutionized this nation in the last nine years since Trump rode down that escalator. It is white male status anxiety that has put Trump in the position of possibly winning an election he should have no chance at winning. And it is white male status anxiety that was directed against Joe Biden and everything for which Biden stood. White male status anxiety undid him.
One could say that poor Joe Biden is collateral damage for the revenge that white men seek against social change. The country may never have been materially stronger than it is now or spiritually weaker, and there is a cause-and-effect relationship between the two. Americans had always been promised that in their plenty, in their success, in the nation’s own fulfillment, they would find contentment. That really was the American Dream. But we now know white men didn’t. Instead, they saw a country that seemed to be moving away from them, both demographically and culturally. Their control was loosening. They felt dispossessed. They felt angry. They felt anxious. They felt insecure. They seethe with grievance. And they want revenge. And they blame Biden for not arresting that change – for actually fomenting it.
Joe Biden never got this. Joe Biden was a throwback. He had satisfied Americans’ material needs but not their psychological ones. Joe Biden was hopeful. Joe Biden believed in America, not as hellscape but as promise. Joe Biden truly thought that Americans could accomplish anything if they put their minds to it. White men wanted Biden to channel their frustrations, to provide them with therapy that would make them feel potent again – dominant again. But Joe Biden wasn’t equipped to do that. He was a good, decent, honest man, who would never have targeted immigrants or minorities or women or the gay community. And that has been his problem.
In effect, Joe Biden was an anachronism – out of phase with his times, especially once Donald Trump loosed the white anger that had been percolating for years. If presidents are fashion as much as they are leaders, if they embody the mood of their country, Joe Biden was simply out of fashion. He was too nice, too optimistic, too generous, perhaps too good for this new, more hateful America.
And Biden was an anachronism in another sense. Even as Americans came to expect more of their presidents, they came to like them less – which also was a cause-and-effect relationship. Americans, accustomed to the world of celebrity, wanted their presidents to be celebrities too, through whom they could live vicariously, and they were nearly always disappointed when they weren’t. Biden wasn’t equipped to do that either. He was never a star like Franklin Roosevelt or John Kennedy or Reagan or Barack Obama. He never captured the American imagination. He never seemed to stand astride the world like some colossus. Like Harry Truman, who he resembles in many ways, he may have been better than life, but he wasn’t bigger than life. He was Tom Hanks, not Tom Cruise.
And this played into another perceived deficiency of Biden’s. He wasn’t vigorous; he was a quiet presence – a reticent presence. When pundits kept prattling about his age, even before his cognitive issues became evident, this sense of his obsolescence may have been what really generated the criticism. It wasn’t that Biden was biologically too old and senescent, even if he was. We’ve had old presidents before; think Dwight Eisenhower or Ronald Reagan. It was that he was culturally too old. (I think this was a major reason why so many Democrats soured on him too; they didn’t think he had what it would take, the adeptness, to beat Trump, whom they hated more than they loved Biden. I know I speak for myself here.) Put another way, he was poorly cast.
Perhaps above all, he didn’t read the room. When Trump threatened democracy, Joe Biden largely based his campaign on encouraging Americans to protect it from him, not realizing that Americans didn’t care much about democracy any more, certainly not as much as they cared for retribution. When Trump spewed hate, Joe Biden insisted that it was not who we are, without realizing, unfortunately, that it is exactly who we are, or at least what 47% of us are. Joe Biden just couldn’t understand that in America now grievance, among nearly half of his fellow citizens, was more powerful than hope. I suspect he didn’t want to understand it. When he won in 2020, it was largely, I believe, because of Trump’s woeful response to covid and a general sense of Trump fatigue. Even then, it was fairly close. He won because of Trump’s inadequacies rather than his own, albeit substantial, strengths.
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But one candidate, his inadequacies notwithstanding, has understood the discontent: Donald Trump. Trump was culturally attuned to the moment. He was the woman-hating manosphere before there was a manosphere. Psychologically fragile himself, a man constantly trying to assert his power as weaklings often do, he understood those white male grievances from the inside. He shared their hatreds. He focused them. He gave voice to them. He was their godsend. And it had absolutely nothing to do with the economy or any other policies, except insofar as those could be weaponized against this changing America. Trump got it all: the victimhood, the animosities that he kept milking, the self-aggrandizement, the misogyny and racism and homophobia. Trump got it. And above all, he got the desire to blast the whole system to smithereens because it had failed him and them – those aggrieved white males. Trump wasn’t a man so much as he was a brand. And what he was selling, uneducated white males, and quite a few white females, too, were buying. He was selling hate.
But if Biden’s inability or unwillingness to read the public mood pointed the way to his own political demise, it also points the way to Kamala Harris’s potential victory this fall. To be sure, Harris has had to navigate a treacherous road, and pretend that things aren’t as good as they are, which means she has to obfuscate at times to satisfy the national narrative Republicans promote. But Harris has assets that Biden simply did not have. She is young. She is forceful. She has star quality. She exudes joy to parry Trump’s gloom. She doesn’t warn us, so much as inspire us. And while, as a Black woman, she is unlikely to garner many votes from those status-anxious white men who tremble before women and Blacks, she knows how to read a room, and in her room, there are a whole lot of aggrieved women, a whole lot of educated men and white-collar workers, a whole lot of young people, a whole lot of Black and Hispanic Americans – all of whom fear those angry status-anxious whites, and who fear what Donald Trump will do to appease them, which is anything.
And I submit that there are more of us in that room than there are of them.
What the Biden story tells us, sadly, is that character isn’t enough, goodness isn’t enough, community-building isn’t enough, respect for our laws, our institutions and our Constitution isn’t enough, and even success isn’t enough – not in these times, not with these people, not with this political polarization. The politics of hope proved to be insufficient against that overwhelming grievance. But the politics of joy might be just the weapon we need to gain the affection and attract the votes that Joe Biden couldn’t. There is a terrible virus in America. It helped kill Biden’s presidency. Donald Trump spread it. Kamala Harris might be the one to eradicate it.
Bogus Polling: It is worth noting that while Kamala Harris maintains a thin lead in the polling, and even a lead in Nate Silver’s model, which gives her a 57% chance of winning at last glance – Nate Silver! Who seems to be on Trump’s payroll! – there is a glitch in the system as the estimable Simon Rosenberg has pointed out. Rosenberg has cited a plethora of pollsters flooding the system and getting lumped into the polling aggregates. One of them, AtlasIntel, issued polls for each of the seven swing states this week: and had Trump leading in all of them. Holy cow! Read his Substack: https://mail.yahoo.com/d/search/keyword=hopium/messages/ADkKGSQGd004ZvmSfgRs0K6L1qw
Here is the trouble, as Rosenberg so ably puts it. These aren’t real polls, even if the aggregators treat them as such. These are Republican/right-wing polls, skewed polls – polls seemingly designed to be skewed - which means they are another devious way that Republicans try to tilt the perception in favor of Trump, and try to demoralize Harris supporters among you. Rosenberg calls them “narrative polling” because they are not intended to provide a sense of where the race is at; they are intended to game the aggregators and create the narrative that Trump is winning, when he isn’t. If anything, the inclusion of these bogus polls should boost our spirits. Kamala is winning, and these polls – Rosenberg cited nineteen of them – only suggest that her lead is larger than the aggregators are saying.
In short, there is no telling how low Republicans will stoop when they are desperate. And they are desperate. That is good news.
Notes
https://www.npr.org/2024/02/19/1232447088/historians-presidents-survey-trump-last-biden-14th
https://www.yahoo.com/news/why-bidenomics-falling-flat-voters-122500228.html
https://www.pewresearch.org/2010/12/14/reagans-recession/
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/05/23/views-of-the-nations-economy-may-2024/
https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/07/economy/us-economy-personal-finance/index.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/09/26/biden-record-republicans-improvements/
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/migrant-crossings-plunge-near-level-lift-biden-border-crackdown/
https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/30/politics/us-crime-statistics-fbi-2024/index.html
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1184428/presidential-election-exit-polls-share-votes-income-us/
https://apnews.com/article/harris-trump-economy-poll-inflation-dc80ac9e5d7da42900762910d5f0a283
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/25/opinion/trump-maga-sources-support.html
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