Biden Will Go Down History as a Failure

I just heard that Joe Biden’s days are counted. As a fellow human being, I feel deeply sorry for him.

Compared with Donald Trump—a con man who puts his own vanity above the interests of the United States, a habitual liar, fraudster and sexual predator—Biden is, by any reasonable standard, a decent man.

Being a decent person does not mean going through life without any moral failings. Take some of history’s most revered figures: Confucius, Gandhi, Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, Mother Teresa. Bring them into the twenty-first century. Give everyone around them a smartphone and the ability to expose their misconduct instantly on social media. Strip away the institutions that once carefully protected their reputations and replace them with today’s ravenous, all-seeing media. We would undoubtedly discover plenty of ugly episodes: moments of selfishness, cruelty toward assistants or servants, misuse of official resources, jobs handed to relatives and friends, capable officials attacked or dismissed because of personal grudges. Then, they would no longer look quite so immaculate.

But there would still be a world of difference between these flawed human beings and men like Vladimir Trump and Vladimir Putin.

Confucius, Gandhi, Churchill, Roosevelt and Mother Teresa possessed a genuine sense of right and wrong, and a genuine sense of honour. They aspired to high moral standards. They wanted to be good, and wanted history to remember them as such. Most of the time, they tried to follow their consciences and put something larger than themselves—their country, their people, their cause—ahead of their own appetites.

Of course they sometimes failed. When self-interest entered the equation, desire could distort their judgement. A leader might convince himself that sending a military aircraft to pick up a friend for his birthday celebration was somehow justified. At other times, he might simply succumb to temptation and later feel ashamed of it.

Before the internet age, institutions were much better at hiding these human failings and preserving their immaculate public image.

In comparison, men like Vladimir Trump and Vladimir Putin are different in kind, not merely in degree.

They do not aspire to moral integrity at all. Moral integrity is simply not the standard by which they judge themselves. They know when they lie, cheat, abuse power for personal gain or prey upon others. They regard people capable of genuine self-denial and sacrifice as incomprehensible fools. Trump reportedly looked at the graves of American soldiers who had died for their country and said, “I don’t get it. These losers. What are they in for?"

To them, the ruthless pursuit of wealth, power, pleasure and personal glory is not a regrettable human weakness. It is how they believe the world is supposed to work.

In this fundamental respect, Biden belongs to the first category, not the second.

He has a conscience. He has a sense of right and wrong and a sense of honour. Throughout his life, he tried to restrain his own appetites, put his country above himself and do what he believed was right.

But the desire to do good is not enough to make a great statesman.

Great statesmanship also requires extraordinary judgement and insight.

History is littered with leaders who desperately wanted to do good but lacked the wisdom to understand the consequences of their actions. Such leaders can be far more destructive to a nation than a lazy, pleasure-seeking king.

Consider James I of England. He showered royal favour and titles upon his male lovers, lived extravagantly and perpetually struggled with royal finances, resorting to increasingly creative ways of raising money. Yet England remained prosperous under him.

His son Charles I was almost his moral opposite. Charles was personally disciplined, faithful to his wife and deeply religious. He sincerely wanted to serve God and his country. What he lacked was judgement. And the result was catastrophe: England was plunged into a devastating civil war, and Charles eventually lost his own head on the scaffold.

Biden suffers from the same fatal weakness: not wickedness, but a profound failure of political judgement. And after he became president, that weakness produced consequences for America and the world that were immense and, in some respects, disastrous.

When Biden first ran for president, he was already 78 years old. Faced with doubts both inside and outside the Democratic Party, he presented his mission as essentially one thing: defeating Donald Trump. At that moment, he was probably the Democrat best equipped to do it. He presented himself as a transitional figure—a man who would defeat Trump, serve his term, and then pass the torch to a younger generation.

But when the time came to let go, he could not. He succumbed to the seduction of the Ring of Power, reinforced by the ambitions of his wife, and insisted on running again. He was forced out only when the presidential debate made his decline impossible for the country to ignore.

By that point, there was barely enough time left to conduct a genuine Democratic contest for the nomination. Even so, the party might still have found a younger, energetic candidate with broad appeal who could take the fight to Trump.

Instead, Biden immediately threw his weight behind Kamala Harris, effectively foreclosing a competitive nomination process.

Harris then chose as her running mate a thoroughly mediocre politician who presented no danger of overshadowing her.

And then came one of the most astonishing acts of political incompetence of the entire campaign.

Harris was asked what she would have done differently from Biden.

This was perhaps the most predictable question imaginable. Yet, she paused long and said:

“There is nothing I can think of.”

Forget all her other mistakes. That answer alone was enough to end the Democrats’ chances of defeating Trump.

It was the political equivalent of walking into a job interview, being asked, “Why do you want to work for our company?”, thinking about it for a while, and answering: “I don’t know.”

It was an unforgivably elementary mistake.

Biden’s two disastrous decisions were certainly not the only reasons Donald Trump was able to return to power. But they were surely among the most important.

And in the two years since Trump’s return, America’s international prestige, strategic position and soft power have crumbled.

Biden cannot escape his share of responsibility for that outcome.

That is what makes his story so tragic.

Here was a politician who spent a lifetime trying to serve his country, restrain his own appetites and do what he believed was right. Yet at the very end of his career, when history demanded one final act of self-denial from him, he failed.

Sadly, for that reason, Joe Biden will go down history as a failure.