An Accident of History: The Tragic Error That Was the Biden Presidency

Biden’s farewell address from the Oval Office (White House)

I launched this humble project called Due Dissidence on March 17, 2019 - the same day it was reported that Joe Biden would be running for President. Of course, Biden’s announcement - like everything that came after it - was an accident. At a dinner in Delaware, he blurted out, “I have the most progressive record of anybody running for the — anybody who would run.” It wasn’t until April 25 that he’d make his ambitions official.

Then, in early May, I published the first blog post on my newly acquired wordpress website. Its title: “Joe Biden and the Insufferable Weakness of Democratic Voters.” In it, I argued that the real obstacle to progress within the Democratic Party wasn’t their corrupt leadership, but rather the utter lack of independent thought amongst the rank and file primary electorate. So crippled with fear of a second Trump term, and so reliant on MSNBC anchors and WaPo columnists to shield them from such a horror, I knew that all it would take for Democrat voters to march in lockstep into voting booths across America and pull the lever for Joe Biden in state after state was the command from high ranking party members and their media mouthpieces that they do just that.

I predicted, regrettably, but accurately, that despite whatever momentum the second Bernie Sanders campaign would accrue, that all of it could and would be undone the minute a Chris Matthews or a Joe Scarborough emphasized to their viewers that Biden, not Bernie, was the more “electable” general election candidate.

Lo and behold, the Democratic primaries would play out in exactly such fashion. Bernie would rally a grassroots army of over one million volunteers to victories in the first three states, which prompted the party establishment to bend the base to their will with remarkable speed, tact, and precision. In South Carolina, James Clyburn would break his promise not to endorse a candidate and announce his support for Joe Biden days before the vote, throwing him a campaign-saving lifeline and allowing him to fight on. Barack Obama would then arrange for Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar to each drop out endorse Biden before Super Tuesday, and leave Elizabeth Warren in to siphon progressive votes away from Sanders. In the meantime, Anderson Cooper would bait Bernie into litigating Fidel Castro’s Cuban literacy program on 60 Minutes, which gave the media all the material they needed for a full week of hair-on-fire alarmism about how Bernie could never win a general election.

And of course, according to the DNC’s plans, the remaining 46 states worth of Democrats would fall almost completely in line behind Biden, who would end up winning 42 of the remaining statewide contests and cruise to the nomination.

On paper, it was a landslide for Biden. But anyone paying attention knew that he had run an abysmal campaign thus far, and that but for having been bailed out by a party establishment with a psychic grip over their pitifully subservient voters, he’d have likely crashed and burned before the fourth state on the primary calendar.

Given his paper tiger of a candidacy, Biden’s defeat to Trump in the fall of that year seemed as predictable to me as his manufactured rise to the nomination. But then, of course, out of nowhere - and by nowhere I mean a lab in Wuhan, China - came the coronavirus pandemic. It was the yet another deus ex machina that swooped in and save Biden’s ass when he needed one most. The virus - and the apocalyptic conditions imposed on the public in response to it - was enough to scare the American people as straight as the Democratic base had been after Bernie won Nevada.

By November, enough Americans were convinced that corrupt bureaucratic neoliberalism was a surer path back to normalcy than whatever circus analogy they could think up for Trump’s presidency. And so, by January 2021, the old guard was back in charge, with Uncle Joe carrying the torch of an establishment political class that had been wounded, but not quite killed.

Recounting Biden’s path to the presidency is critical to understanding why he’s now handing the White House back to Donald Trump, who this week begins his second term more popular than ever before. The 2024 campaign would pose the ultimate question, which of the previous two elections - 2016 or 2020 - was the anomaly, and which was the sign of things to come?

Was 2016 a fluke year in which through a confluence of improbable occurrences, populism was able to break through in a way unique to that moment in time, and 2020 a return to an ever-enduring normalcy? Or was 2016 rather the permanent collapse of the long-cherished “center,” and the subsequent 2020 election the dying gasp of an obsolete world order given undue oxygen by a cataclysmic global emergency which, for merely a brief moment, frightened people back into the arms of the familiar?

For a while there in 2024, it seemed like an open question. On the one hand, the Biden years were an unmitigated disaster; a true horror show defined by crippling inflation, Orwellian censorship, apocalyptic warfare, and, to top things off, the most sinister and sadistic genocide of our lifetimes, courtesy of our “key ally” in the Middle East. On the other, the 2022 midterm elections were bizarrely affirming of the status quo despite having taken place amidst widespread angst and palpable resentment over the unforgiving post-pandemic economic landscape. Democrats, led by Joe Biden with an approval rating of just 44%, had by far the best in-party midterm showing since at least 2002, when George W. Bush’s favorability numbers were north of 60% . Much of the Democrats’ uncharacteristic success that year was attributed to the clown car of Republican candidates - largely handpicked by Trump himself (Dr. Oz, Herschel Walker, Blake Masters, Kari Lake, etc.) - whose eccentricities made electing them a bridge too far even for such an enraged electorate.

And so the question of who would prevail in 2024 was really a referendum on the staying power of 2016 versus 2020. Which was the canary in the coal mine, and which was the waking dream?

On election night, we got our answer.

As it turns out, the realignment of 2016 was real. The GOP has since become more working class and racially diverse, as the Democrats have become richer and whiter. The collapse of faith in our institutions was here to stay. The pandemic was initially effective in strengthening the establishment’s hand, but in the long run, would only further undermine their authority. Biden’s failure to deliver even the crumbs off the oligarchs’ table proposed in the Build Back Better plan was a final assurance that the neoliberal promise of reconciling capitalism with social welfare had always been a lie. Biden’s refusal to negotiate a peace between Russia and Ukraine - which would have averted the bloodiest conflict on European soil since WWII - was widely understood as a cynical ploy by the US and an increasingly discredited NATO alliance. Biden’s unwillingness to exert any pressure whatsoever on the Israeli government to end its merciless massacre of a colonized population in Gaza delegitimized the entire “woke” project - itself a tool of neoliberalism intended to smooth over the brutalities of capitalism and imperialism.

And now, just before leaving office, Biden’s banning of TikTok, the app through which the most grassroots anti-genocide media was disseminated, is among the most egregious acts of state censorship in generations.

That’s the legacy of Joe Biden.

The man that Democratic voters chose to stem the tide of an ascendant populist right would end up empowering it beyond what any of them thought possible.

Therefore, history will note the election of Biden - not Trump - as a freak accident of circumstance. The 2016 election, in which the Democratic Party brass made left populism impossible and right populism inevitable, will mark what could very well be the final turning point in American political history.

Biden’s victory in 2020 will be viewed as such an aberration that the election may as well have been stolen, as Trump insists it was to this day. The Biden presidency is among American history’s greatest accidents, and will be remembered accordingly. Because of the damage he’s wrought, we’ll be reeling in the ruins of his tenure for quite some time. But decades down the road, when we look back on Trump’s second term, it’ll feel as though he never left.