Joe Biden is too old for the Presidency.
There is no public evidence that he is, as Yascha Mounk has asserted, senile — at least if “senile” means demented as opposed to just elderly. Videos that purport to show him wandering off, disoriented, turn out to be deceptively edited; and why would deception be necessary if he’s so self-evidently out of it?
But the aging brain undergoes changes even in the absence of dementia. It becomes less supple and nimble, and slower to absorb new information. We all lose our train of thought once in a blue moon, or have trouble retrieving a word or name that we know we know. With age, those blue moons occur more frequently. These symptoms of an aging brain also come and go: late in the day, or under high stress, or sometimes for no particular reason, the aging brain may be less capable than at other times. And even in his heyday, Joe Biden, like FDR, was characterized more by a first-class temperament than a first-class intellect.
So maybe President Obama was right that Joe Biden just had a bad night. But that can’t be the end of it. The Presidency is not a beginner or part-time job. Our Presidents need to be on top of their game even — especially! — at times of high stress, or off hours.
It gets worse. Whatever the true condition of Joe Biden’s brain — and no one who is not in daily contact with him is making more than an educated guess — it will not improve spontaneously. A second Biden term would begin more than 6 months from now, and end in over four and a half years. If Joe Biden is still alive at that point, he will surely be further diminished from what he is today.
If this were an ordinary election — if Joe Biden were running against a Reagan, or either Bush, or a McCain, or a Romney — then that would be the end of it. It would be said that Joe Biden had underestimated the progressive toll aging would take when he committed to seeking a second term some eighteen months ago, and that the Democratic Party miscalculated in putting its faith in his self-assessment. The Republican candidate would be elected. That Presidency might work out well, or poorly, but probably not disastrously; either way, the voters would have a chance to reassess in four years.
Democracy can be hard to love. It only occasionally puts the best available candidate in charge, or leads to the best policies — certainly from the point of view of an individual voter, or faction. We don’t always get what we want. Some will always be tempted to do away with democracy’s annoying process, all the elaborate rigamarole and restrictions and rules, some of which really are archaic artifacts that no longer make sense today (looking at you, Electoral College!), and just install a leader who will do the right thing.
The catch, of course, is that there’s no consensus as to what’s the right thing. Democracy’s great virtue, which fully eclipses its drawbacks, is that it provides rules to resolve conflicts without violence, and a check on truly bad performance. Mediocre leaders are re-elected often enough, and capable ones turned out. But do a really bad job, and you’re far more likely to be turned out than not. The system is never entirely stable, but its instability is bounded, as long as the rules are respected.
That is what John Adams meant when he said that we were to have a government of laws, not of men. It has nothing to do with any particular policy; it comes before policy. For democracy to survive, voters must reject unconditionally any candidate who threatens to undo it, regardless of whatever else they think of the candidate’s proposals. We know what happens when the concept is discarded in the interest of some supposedly larger goal: making Germany great again, say. Taking away democracy’s ability to self-correct ends in disaster.
There is no sign — none — that Donald Trump understands the concept of a government of laws, much less respects it. The idea may exceed his powers of comprehension. The man has never seen the law as anything more than an impediment to his goals. To vote for him is to abandon the bedrock that has made our system of government work, however imperfectly, for 235 years.
And that means that conscientious voters must vote for any candidate opposing Donald Trump’s bid for the Presidency, no matter how inadequate that candidate is in other respects. I have no idea if Joe Biden will or should be replaced on the Democratic ticket. This year, voting against Donald Trump, no matter who is running against him, is imperative for the preservation of the Republic.
Suppose for the sake of argument that Joe Biden really is senile, or will become so during his second term. We’ve survived disabled Presidents. Woodrow Wilson was completely out of the picture for the last 18 months of his Presidency, felled by a stroke. Ronald Reagan, never a detail-oriented leader, was so addled and forgetful during his second term that members of his Cabinet narrowly avoided invoking the 25th Amendment and replacing him. These things are bad — we really should avoid them — but the wounds they inflict on the nation are survivable. The system self-corrects, eventually. The wound heals. Electing a leader who has contempt for the whole concept of law is not a survivable wound.
The purveyors of polls and focus groups claim that this is not a winning argument, that voters are bored by talk of democracy being at stake. But winning or not, it’s true. It may be that, having lived for generations in a rule of law society, people take its benefits for granted. They are guaranteed to miss them when they’re gone. One is tempted to respond, paraphrasing Trotsky: you may not be interested in tyranny, but tyranny is interested in you.
If we survive this election, there will be an opportunity for reckoning, to figure out how we got into this mess, and, more important, how to get out of it and do better. The current gerontocracy will be gone soon no matter what, to be replaced soon by a new generation of leaders, some good, some bad. But tear the whole structure down in favor of a strongman, and it won’t soon be rebuilt. And we will have squandered the gift our ancestors gave us, too often paid for in blood.