Three Big Lessons From Biden Stepping Aside
It Turns Out We Have Power
Biden’s Big Decision
As I’m sure you know, President Joe Biden engaged in a heroic act of service Sunday and decided to end his candidacy for President, vigorously endorsing his Vice President Kamala Harris.
For a man who has spent his life serving and fighting, and succeeding by ignoring everyone else’s tendency to count him out, this had to be a heroically humbling and painful personal decision.
But he acted out a core teaching of his Catholic faith–which in its better moments calls its followers to embody its self-sacrificing leader by always putting the good of others first. I will say that bearing witness to this was a deeply moving experience, and I am sure many of us will never forget where we were when we heard the news.
After working out my own feelings about this, which involved goosebumps, a few tears of relief, hugs with those around me, and a long run on the Burke, plus just living family life for the rest of the day, I have a few reflections that I believe are important to take with us.
We have agency, and our voice matters.
When you heard leaders say “it’s Joe Biden’s choice” –they were, of course, literally correct. He had earned the votes; it was his to decide. Much of what was agonizing about the last few weeks was our sense that we couldn’t do anything about it.
But as it turns out, we could.
A man known for fierce stick-to-it-iveness was swayed. Swayed by leaders and friends pushing him behind the scenes, and eventually in public. Swayed by party and public discourse and polls, donation boycotts and letters to leaders and to newspaper editors and everywhere we could make our voice heard.
And it worked! True, it worked because we were trying to bend the will of a decent man–not a narcissistic would-be autocrat like Trump. But be that as it may, at this extremely consequential moment, even when our votes were already spent, and we had less power than usual–our collective effort did this.
It should be said that while the choice was formally Biden’s, we also previously exercised our power by choosing a nominee and President who would respond to the people and who would put country before his own interests. At each stage in this journey, we have had some modicum of power to exercise, and on this particular issue, it has turned out to matter a great deal.
We often feel powerless. But this is a reminder that together we have power, and we need to use it.
And by the way, this is a good time for a friendly reminder that we have a ton more agency here, locally. Our money goes much farther, as does our attention, time, volunteering efforts, and persuasive conversations with friends and family.
Please go use that power!
We have a real political party.
In my previous post, I highlighted Ezra Klein’s comment that the “Democratic Party is acting like an…actual party? Quite a thing to watch.”
Until recently, this was far from certain. In a worthy effort to democratize our parties by defanging institutions like superdelegates, we have pushed the power of parties aside, and some of this vacuum has been filled with the power of Presidents and other celebrity politicians.
Whatever the tradeoffs from decisions like these, they combined with changes in media and careerism and cowardice and turned the Republican Party, the party of–Eisenhower, Reagan and Romney–into a fire-breathing neo fascist movement hellbent on denying facts and overturning elections.
As recent days unfolded, and most of our politicians toed the line, many Democrats wondered and worried whether careerism and cowardice were going to lead our own party into a kind of parallel perdition involving putting up a candidate we all knew couldn’t win, and perhaps watching him take the House and the Senate down with him. Such a course would turn over the country to a deranged lunatic with a newly minted messianic complex and armed with Presidential immunity and Project 2025.
I was sick about this. Would we fail to take the steps to maximize our chance to preserve basic freedoms? While we Democrats didn’t risk embracing a would-be autocrat like Trump, we still risked taking a path that seemed obviously to make it quite likely we would end up electing that same would-be-autocrat. Those aren’t morally equivalent courses of action, of course. But if a lack of courage led to the same outcome, there would still have been plenty of moral blame to go around.
But it turns out our people were doing the work in private, and their work was bolstered by sustained grassroots efforts to drive more politicians to make bolder public stances, and that happened too. It is true that plenty of the electeds were just responding to shifting incentives–politicians are not generally the heroic among us! But still, some exercised real, costly courage. And watching party leaders like Patty Murray or Nancy Pelosi exercise such deft leadership alongside others doing their party by making more straightforward calls—the whole thing turns out to be pretty inspiring.
Our Leaders Are Different Than Theirs. “America First,” But For Real
Donald Trump cries “America first” when in fact his entire electoral enterprise is driven by self- aggrandizement, narcissism, nepotism, and abuse of people without power.
Those he fawns over, like Xi Jinping of China, Vladimir Putin of Russia, Victor Orban of Hungary–grab and cling to power through murder, terror, lawlessness and ceaseless lies. They muzzle speech, compromise their courts, cheat in elections and erase people’s rights. During his last adminitration, Trump did his sorry best to mimic them, and more upsettingly, has shown up with an actual plan to pull it off this time.
But Joe Biden just showed us what it actually means to put America First.
His entire life’s work was spent in service, through grueling years of horrendous personal loss alongside career setbacks. Nevertheless, he fought his way forward and he ended up delivering the most progressive domestic agenda in modern history, while managing a 50/50 Senate that relied on a coalition that included compromised narcissists like Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema on our side.
Yes, Mr. Biden faced tremendous pressure to step aside and our power did a great deal to force his hand. But the nomination was his. Had he exercised the full extent of his famous stubbornness, he could have continued. He could have clung to power and a comfortable story about himself.
Instead, he has found his way to a humble, self-sacrificing decision in a few short weeks. Anyone struggling as a caretaker to a loved one in decline can tell you that this pacing is remarkable for someone giving up something like the keys to their car. Biden gave up the keys to the country.
Joe Biden put our future first–the future of freedom and the rule of law first, fidelity to the constitution, our most vulnerable, and to the people he has served his whole life first.
And it is a testament to us that our party picked a leader that would do this.
This is America First.