Joe Biden was an argument for electoral reform
Impossible choices are a failure of the system
I am certainly not of the view that all politicians are the same; indeed it is one of those opinions, such as expressing doubt as to whether Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, that instantly lowers my opinion of the person saying it. To be concrete, in my ex-wife and I’s long fight with the Home Office, my own former MP Meg Hillier was a model of support, regularly writing letters to assist us in advancing our case. ‘They’re all the same’ is the mantra of people who don’t really have time to follow politics, which is to be clear no form of insult, and in fact more likely praise, but at the same time not a form of ignorance to be paraded as a virtue.
Nonetheless, there is a related position which is much more defensible, which is getting to a situation in an election where there is no good option.
This is particularly prevalent in electoral systems, such as the UK and US, which present a binary choice between two potential winners. That is why I would make the argument that the recent US face-off between Biden and Trump, and the subsequent further behaviour of both, constituted in part a powerful argument for electoral reform of the system which provided them.
As is common for British people interested in politics, I am extremely informed about the minutiae of the American political world. It is safe to say I am probably more up on the details of the special election in Florida's First Congressional District than most Americans are on, say, the recent Runcorn by-election. Tho I would also argue that there are more directly transferable lessons from the elections of other continental democracies to UK elections – the UK and US having a common language imports a false sense of commonality here – like so many I find the sheer spectacle of American politics difficult to resist.
Plus there’s no doubt that one of the reason that so many European political junkies track every detail of proto-fascism in the US is for vicarious thrills, coupled with a certain European Schadenfreude. If America going to eclipse us in material wealth, the European observer nods to themselves, at the very least they can prove themselves to be capable of fascism like the rest of us, or at least only now finally getting round to embracing the kind of militaristic politics which Europe managed to move beyond at the cost of a mere sixty million dead.
What inevitably strikes even a detached observer of the European scene is that Americans are capable of a level of partisanship quite alien to most European democratic cultures. Europeans vote for many different parties, but rarely show any particular enthusiasm in doing so. Perhaps this is because Americans are just more enthusiastic about things generally. Have you ever been to see a movie with a group of Americans? It's like Christmas.
In term of partisanship, there are certainly MAGA Americans all in for Trump, the kind who go all misty-eyed talking about the President's ‘4D chess’. The kind who post adoring memes of the Donald looking almost Christ-like. But Europeans generally find out their information about the US from American liberal media. And American liberals can also be all in for their political ‘team’ in an almost child-like manner.
This is the ‘mimosas with Chad and Pete’, White Dudes for Kamala, Pussy-hat-hung-on the-fridge seam of American liberalism, and speaks of a culture of myth-making around political Goodies and Baddies, a big country where people are seeking a common side. It is very difficult for me to imagine someone on the British left summoning up this level of enthusiasm for say, British Health Secretary Wes Streeting, except possibly and even then not definitively Wes Streeting.
There is though one political figure who received exactly this type of adulation in their lifetime, namely Jeremy Corbyn. More on whom later.
This liberalism as fandom was in part why it became so difficult to bear witness to a fairly simple and evident truth, namely that Joe Biden was no longer up to the (apparently rather demanding) role of being US President. I can give myself some credit for having pointed this out ahead of schedule, but really no praise is due; it was merely stating something extremely obvious to someone whose brain hadn’t entirely been fried by American partisanship. It was there in the little hints, such as the way the guy kept actually falling over.
In part, this reluctance came from that very American reluctance to accept natural limits and restrictions on human existence; that a guy in his '80s might slow down a bit, for example, even if they don’t want to. American culture often seems to have trouble accepting or even acknowledging the inherently unpleasant aspects of life.
This refusal to be beaten has formed a pretty positive part of the American story, and creates the nation which gets people on the moon, tries to wipe out cancer, or offers the largest humanitarian aid drop in history, because why accept things being as they are? But there remains some points beyond which no negotiation is possible, and cognitive decline in a man Biden’s age is unfortunately one of them.
Plus we weren’t talking about you know, whether Biden could go on doing, say, a weekend shift at Target. We were talking about giving him probably the world’s hardest job. Even in China, where the old are venerated, after Deng Xiaoping left office the highest title he retained was Honorary President of the Bridge Association.
The other reason why people were reluctant to point out the evidence of their own eyes is that openly criticizing Biden was to be seen to strengthen President Trump. For sure, Biden’s own decline did not serve to make Donald Trump any more suitable a candidate for a return to office, but this is also because these are two completely unrelated states of affairs yoked into a phoney comparison by the electoral system.
Of course, the partisan stymieing of criticism of Biden was a complete own goal, as it only served to make Trump more credible by leaving him able to point out an extremely obvious truth: His opponent was in clear decline. In a kingdom of liars, the man who tells a single truth is King, even if he calls everything else absolutely wrong. Trump, in calling an old man old, was offered a chance to attain air of honesty which was completely unmerited.
After all, says the voter, who can clearly see Biden, rasping and shuffling, is past his sell-by date, if Trump is being honest about this, maybe he’s being honest about the rest of it too?
The person who can violate an unsustainable cover-up attains an air of credibility, no matter how cock-eyed the solutions they propose are. We’ve seen this again and again when liberalism squares up against populism in recent years; whether on trans women in sports, Islamism, or those ‘mostly peaceful’ riots, the populist right attains the credibility simply of being able to point out the problem, even if its solutions are, as I believe, completely cockamamie. And the reason liberals can't seem to call a spade a spade seems to me at core a simple one; they are frightened of giving offence.
As a British voter, I can however offer an analogy to the Biden/Trump situation, when a binary electoral system failed to provide a suitable choice.
At the 2019 UK election, the only two realistic candidates for Prime Minister were Jeremy Corbyn or Boris Johnson. On one hand Boris Johnson, deceitful, ill-disciplined, cavalier with policy solutions and motivated only by being liked. On the other hand Corbyn, ideological, blue-eyed about dictators and martyrs, and committed to an opposition to Zionism which led him time and again into the company of some very dubious characters indeed. The answer to which of these men should have become Prime Minister was 'Neither’.
And yet of course to vote against one was to enable the other. Was one the lesser evil to facilitate this? No, they were just different type of evil; as a voter of Jewish heritage, Corbyn was unconscionable for me, but it didn’t mean that I thought Johnson should be in office. Particularly if there were a crisis during his term, for example a major global health event.
There was no good choice between retrograde Bennite socialism with a dollop of Millennial snark or giving the keys to the car to a man as profoundly lacking in good or indeed any character as Johnson. I resented, above all, being forced to even engage with this as a choice at all, like a waiter endlessly questioning me as to whether I want the broken glass or the shit, and responding to my enquiry about another choice with… ‘Well, the shit is soft.’
During this time, I was of course told again and again by those on the Labour left that there was no serious problem with antisemitism in the Labour Party, a mark against which was trying to make Jeremy Corbyn Prime Minister in the first place.
Certainly these people seemed very confident that they understood antisemitism better than Jews did, aided by the small minority of antizionist Jews who told them exactly what they wanted to hear. This was the point, of course, where we entered into an endless and pointless discussion as to whether Corbyn was personally antisemitic or not, where the point was what making defence of Corbyn's record a purity test was allowing to happen on his watch. The Jews, put simply, had become the Labour left’s enemy.
At the very least, and even with the most charitable reading of Corbyn’s record, the nomination of Corbyn and all that followed showed that that antisemitism was no longer a dealbreaker for Labour. If you objected to antisemitism, a force which has millions of Jewish bodies to its name across history, you had to overlook that to vote Labour. No minority community should be asked to make that kind of calculation for the greater good. And this is why talk of Corbyn as ‘the lesser evil’ was so misguided; if I were from a Jewish community, was there any greater evil than him and the antisemitism his support increasingly enabled? All we could talk about with Johnson and Corbyn were different flavours of evil1.
There was the argument to go elsewhere and vote third party, but again this was only possible on a individual constituency basis, and there wouldn’t be a sufficiently bold break away from the main parties to make this move possible without, once again, enabling one of the two duds. In my constituency, I could vote for the Lib Dem candidate without much damage, but elsewhere it would have only served to strengthen one of the two principal candidates who I had already rejected.
The central truth here is that if the main parties put forward Corbyn and Johnson, it is they who have failed; they have not properly exercised their vetting procedures, and it is unfair to then make the electorate responsible for cleaning up the mess. If a binary system has provided not one but two unsuitable candidates, it is already too late to come to a good outcome.
Neither a evidently declining Biden or an energetic but ever-more unpredictable Trump should have become US President for a second time. All that can be said there is that the evils they represented are different in nature; decline against chaos, powerful advisors against frightened ones, censorious hyperliberalism against putative authoritarianism. And in a winner-takes-all system, you could not vote against one without endorsing the other.
Of course, Biden was removed and was replaced by Harris who was, if not a stunning candidate, by no means one beyond the pale. Her commitment to democratic processes alone was a decisive argument in her favour. By then it was too late, and the damage of that failing to tell the truth about Biden, and which the electorate had already figured out, was done; Kamala lost in part because lying about an obvious state of affairs, which the electorate had itself long figured out, made them look just as deceitful as Trump.
Interestingly parts of the States, such as New York City or Alaska, are introducing ranked choice voting. There has of course been conservative pushback; nonetheless this idea, of at least having some kind of nuance in how voters express their preference, can only be a positive step away from a system which presents tautological match-ups.
Personally, tho it is never accurate make procedural explanations for political outcomes - voters find a way to work within the systems they have, from vote swap sites to detailed constituency polling - I ascribe a surprising amount of my own country of the UK's malaise down to its crude electoral system. It certainly led in part to the explosion of the Brexit vote which the former Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell saw as effectively a giant by-election. UK voters, frustrated by the Labour-Tory duopoly, took the opportunity to embrace the disruptive and radical.
What needs to happen in situations like Biden vs. Trump or Johnson vs. Corbyn is for the electorate to have a quick and efficient way to endorse another candidate without enabling one of the main bad choices. To have the possibility for political innovation, a new party or credible independent ticket say.
Or at least limit the power of the unpalatable, via for example a coalition; Johnson or Corbyn would have been bad but at least less bad at the head of a minority administration. If extremists are going to enter power, at least make them do so in coalition. And I don’t make this argument because I think electoral reform would benefit my own political tendency; don’t be surprised if the next elections sees an enormous Reform surge and Labour still returned with a workable majority. That won't be good for the country either.
Voters should be trusted by being able to genuinely communicate ‘None of the above’, or Anglo-American politics will remain a place where it becomes taboo to point out that the Emperor has no clothes and even more, as in the Biden case, that the Emperor is by now looking very creaky indeed. Bad voting systems eventually drive everybody, electorates, commentators and the politicians, into the particular madness of trying to find good answers to questions which have themselves been incorrectly phrased.
Let’s say you make can openers, and have an election between one generally extreme, vile candidate and another who is OK but is absolutely committed to the destruction of the can opener industry. Perhaps moral philosophy would have us say ‘Well, even it’s bad for me I’ll vote for the greater good’, but it’s quite a burden to ask someone to vote to directly destroy their own livelihood.
As with all such arguments about how to manage excessive partisanship, I tend to think the solution is to reduce partisanship. Rules aren't going to save us from ourselves.
Joe Biden's senility is a big deal in terms of "optics" but it would probably not have been a big deal in practice. Reagan was famously senile at the end, and his team managed. Biden's team would have managed.
If Americans reduced our media consumption, that would be a good start to reducing the importance of "optics" and intense partisanship.