Last Night in Historical Perspective
In Which I Once Again Succumb to the Temptation to Write About the Topic du jour
Programming note: I have been hard at work on a long and substantial essay on topics which are more along my usual line; I am hoping to have it up on Thursday, July 11 (and only that late because July 4 seems such an inauspicious day to post an essay). I had no plans to post anything before then, and had planned to spend today working on that essay. But last night’s debate (which I could only watch a few minutes of before leaving to look for something less upsetting, like videos portraying the gleeful torture of cute puppies), and above all the reaction to it, set me off. So I am once again breaking my goal of not putting up anything that couldn’t just as easily go up a week or a month later or earlier,1 and I am writing about contemporary politics—with the frankly insufficient excuse that there’s a lot of history in here, too. Forgive me: it was so delicious, so horrific, and so cold. So here it is.
Lincoln is, by all-but-unanimous consensus among historians, the greatest U.S. president of all time. (The top three are always Washington, Lincoln, and FDR, with the other two duking it out to see who gets silver and who gets bronze, but Lincoln's gold is never really in doubt.) He deserves the title: his magnificence in holding the country together, pushing the end of slavery, and prosecuting the war are impossible to gainsay. That is not to say he was perfect; but he was the best we have had, and he came right at the moment we most needed it.2
But he did get something wrong—something which I have rarely seen him criticized for.3 It wasn't enough to undo his legacy, or even deprive him of his well-earned gold medal, but it is a very significant black mark on his record that he ought to be more widely criticized for. That error was picking Andrew Johnson as his vice-presidential candidate for his reelection campaign in 1864 (he had a different vice president, Hannibal Hamlin, during his first term).
Lincoln's choice was not crazy politically: you can see why he made it. Remember that in 1864, including at the moment of the nominating conventions, it looked very plausible, arguably even likely, that Lincoln could lose—and if Lincoln lost the election, the war would have almost certainly been lost along with it. The Democrat, George McClellan, was running on the idea of a cease-fire and negotiation; while he claimed he would negotiate a restoration of the Union, it is hard to imagine that fighting, once ceased, would have been resumed, and equally hard to imagine any negotiations coaxing the south back willingly. To pause the fighting was to lose the war.4
And remember, too, that the cause of ending slavery, which to us seems like the most noble war aim that the Union fought for (and one of the most noble that was ever fought for), was not why a large percentage northern war supporters actually supported the war: the were in it to save the Union, full stop (a cause which, for most people these days, seems quite trivial next to ending slavery). The war took a major dip in support with the Emancipation Proclamation.5 So Lincoln wanted, with his VP pick, to reach out to those supporters, the ones who were in it not for ending slavery, but for the Union. So he picked Johnson.
Johnson was a southerner; he was the senator from Tennessee when the war broke out. When Tennessee seceded from the Union (as part of the second-wave, post-Fort Sumter secessions that added four of the eventual feleven states to the Confederacy (most significantly Virginia)), he stayed in the Senate, decrying the secession as illegal—indeed, he was the only southern senator (or congressman more broadly, I believe) to stay in Congress at that point. As a southerner, he was a Democrat—the Republicans were at that point exclusively a northern party—and he was basically pro-slavery. But he was anti-secession.
So from the point of view of a VP to run with in 1864, it highlighted the non-anti-slavery argument for the war: that secession was illegal, the Union was noble. It made a certain amount of political sense—particularly when it looked like Lincoln might lose the election (and the war) otherwise. But of course, as a choice to actually succeed Lincoln as president, he was a disaster: if something happened to Lincoln—early in his term, say—the reconstruction of the country would be lead by a Democrat (the minority party in the victorious north) and a pro-slavery politician who was a southerner, and of course very sympathetic to the white people (including the slave owners) of the South, even if he wasn't willing to commit treason over it. He was, in many ways, the worst possible person for the job—that is, the worst person of all those who were truly possible (obviously Jefferson Davis would have been even worse, but he wasn't actually possible). Fortunately, at the time that the VP was chosen, Lincoln was still relatively young at 55 years old (he would be 56 by the time of his second inaugural), and in good health, so there was no chance of anything going wrong and making the-worst-possible-person Vice President Johnson the president, right?
As I said, this was, I think, Lincoln's one genuinely horrific mistake. Oh, he made others; you could criticize his conduct of the war in various ways, I'm sure—but that he won. Here he lost. Call it bad moral luck if you like, but putting Johnson one gunshot away from the presidency did an enormous amount of damage to the country as a whole. Would we have really created the biracial society that some radical Republicans tried for if Lincoln had lived? Impossible to know, although I myself rather doubt it. But if the Civil War was one of the most crucial moments in our history, then its aftermath was too—and the party of Lincoln managed, over twelve years, to lose in peace most of what they had won in the war.6 Having someone who wasn't the worst possible person in the job of president for just-short-of four crucial years right at the end of the war could only have helped; we'll never know precisely how much.
Leaders have a lot of tasks, but one of the most important ones also seems to be one of the hardest: to plan for when they are gone. I hardly need to cite the literature on the fleetingness of life, since it's pretty much all literature, give or take. It's a familiar point no one should need driven home. But the sort of ambitious, self-regarding person7 who becomes a leader—and while it's true that "some
have greatness thrust upon 'em", it's very rare to achieve leadership at scale, certainly at presidential scale, unless you want it, and think yourself highly capable, if not the best possible person for it. So leaders, naturally, have trouble imagining themselves not leading. Power, once grasped, is hard to give up—and almost equally hard to imagine having snatched from you. A great many people have trouble envisioning and taking fully on board their own mortality, but if you are in charge of something big—like a country, say—it is imperative to push through that feeling and make contingency plans. Not to do so is a major failure of leadership—one which ought to count as a very black mark on even a very great leader. Like Lincoln.
It's a common failing. If you listen to Mike Duncan's superb History of Rome, the problems of Imperial succession was the weak point of the empire, and lots and lots of emperors blew it (and really you only needed one). Alexander the Great conquered the world, and then saw (or rather necessarily didn't to see) his empire fall apart in his absence. FDR, like Lincoln, did a superb job guiding America through one of its very few unquestionably just wars, getting us all the way before, like Moses, dying at the very edge of what had been so long sought; and like Lincoln (although not nearly as drastically) his vice president was ill-prepared to tackle the world the war had created. In our day, Ruth Bader Ginsberg has become a shorthand in our day for a person who all-but destroyed her own legacy in refusing to recognize her own mortality.
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A common failing—but, importantly, not a universal one. To see a counter example, we need only look at the third of the American trinity of great presidents, Washington. Washington's two most consequential acts, arguably, both involved giving up power. First in 1783, when he was the leader of a victorious army of rebellion, many expected—a fair number even wanted—him to use that power to take command of the country. As some historian (I have lost the reference) wrote, "He could have been King George instead of President Washington." But, of course, he didn't. He talked down the rebellion of his officers, resigned his commission, and returned to his farm.8 And he retired so hard (in the parlance of our times) that it took everything James Madison had to drag him out of retirement to chair the Constitutional Convention in 1787 (Washington thought it would look bad if he returned to public life after swearing it off, and Madison had to persuade him that abandoning his country in its hour of need would look worse.)
And then, of course, Washington left again, at the end of his second term. (He wanted to leave after his first term, but a number of his advisors, including again Madison, talked him out of it.) This, too, was a crucial moment. He could have won reelection. He could have stayed until he died. And remembering that the idea of an elected chief executive was more or less unheard of at the time,9 it might well have set a precedent that the President would always be reelected in perpetuity, and serve until death—making it the elected monarchy that many of the constitutions authors, not unreasonably, feared it might become.10 But he didn't: he retired, and in doing so set a very different precedent of serving only two terms (broken heretofore only by F.D.R., in a then-controversial but retroactively unquestionably correct move) one which helped establish the peaceful transition of power (another grand American tradition, broken heretofore only by the criminal who is currently the odds-on favorite to become the next President of the United States), one that helped make government of, by and for the people an imperfect but real thing upon this earth.
In doing so, Washington was self-consciously following the model of the Roman dictator11 Cincinnatus, who resigned the office immediately upon his solving of the crisis that had led him to receive it12—and who was widely enough known in early America that cities were named after him. And Washington's much-maligned successor, too, played his part, leaving (granted, in a huff) when he lost his bid for reelection, in only the second contested election the nation had held, and the first in which the incumbent lost. He, too, resigned his part when he might have tried to fight, and helped the union immeasurably in so doing. In modern terms, we might contrast Justice Ginsberg with Justice Breyer, who did his duty and retired at a time when it would do some good. Nor is standing down the only way that this challenge is met; Rome's famous "five good emperors" were good because they, four times, did a good job picking their successor. So this is not an impossible standard by any means. It's a hard one—but leadership is hard, and we shouldn't pretend that this is one of the challenges.
Biden has already twice failed the test we might reasonably call the Lincoln test (after the American who most disastrously failed it), but which I will instead call the Washington test (after the American who most consequentially passed it with flying colors).
The first time was picking Kamala Harris as his VP.
As with Andrew Johnson—to whom she should in no other respects be compared, and should she become President there is every reason to think she would do a perfectly fine job, and is very, very far away from the worst person possible13—Harris made political sense at the time. 2020 was the summer of George Floyd, so picking a person of color made a lot of sense (particularly since Biden was an official Old White Guy); many Democrats were still deeply upset by Clinton's 2016 loss, so picking a woman made sense; Biden was among the most centrist candidates in 2020, and he wanted to reach out to the left without reaching so far left as to pick Warren or Sanders, and that made political sense, too. So she was a reasonable pick.
But she turned out to be a bad one—not because, as I said, she would do a bad job (I don't think she necessarily would, and certainly she, like any Democratic office holder picked at random, would do far better than Trump), but because she is widely seen as unpopular and likely to lose if she runs, and since being the VP is a big leg up on being the next candidate, she is unofficially first in line should Biden decide to step down, just as she is formally first in line should he have to do so. Unquestionably racism and sexism play a part in why she is so widely disliked; I don't have an opinion as to what else there is to her poor reputation, although I've seen good arguments that the very qualities that made her such a good prosecutor and effective senator make her a bad chief executive. That said, she seems like a fine generic Democrat to me. But either way, given the penalty for failure in an election at this point is an unimaginable horror, one that might well include the end of the Republic, she was simply too weak a choice to make.
Biden, in short, made a reasonable pick for 2020, but not one who set up the country to be in a good situation if he died, became incapacitated, or simply was too old to run again in 2024—not, to say it one last time, because she wouldn't do well, but because she would leave us all-too-vulnerable to the horror that awaits us should the Democrats lose. And this means he failed the Washington Test: figuring out and preparing for what would happen once he could no longer be in the scene.
The second, and to my mind far, far more disastrous time that Biden failed the Washington Test was in the period between Wednesday, November 9, 2022 and—oh let's say the end of January, 2023.
Everyone expected the Democrats to lose big in 2022, and they didn't, so Biden understandably felt proud and encouraged, and any potential rivals to his renomination were presumably scared off. But he still should have known—ought to have known—must, on some level, have known—that he was not up to doing the job for another six years. I am not saying he should have resigned. But (and I think this feeling is fairly universal among Democrats at this point) he ought to have, at some point in that period (probably January) announced his intention not to run again. Said that he would finish out his term, and then let another president take over. This would have given the Democrats plenty of time to hold a normal primary, and pick another candidate by the means that have been standard throughout my lifetime.
But he stayed—and now, like Lincoln, he may do horrific damage to the causes he has thus far so nobly advanced. I have seen many people try and blame others for this—the possible candidates who didn’t run,14 or even the Democratic primary voters. But the truth is that the person who had to act then was Biden. Others could try to persuade him, but he was the one who had to do it. He failed; and with it he may have lost not only the election but the country as well.
Biden has been, to my mind, a superb president in a very difficult time. He has not been flawless by any means—there's a lot to criticize on his approach to Israel/Gaza, for instance; arguably he waited too long to shift from working to avoid a recession to working to stave off inflation; he shouldn't have approved that Alaska oil pipeline; and other things—but he has been more effective, and gotten more done, than Obama did with far bigger political margins. He got us out of Afghanistan, a totally necessary step which got him a lot of flack but which took political courage and was the right move. He has stewarded an economy which by many standards (unemployment, e.g.) is among the best we've ever had. He got the single biggest bill addressing climate change ever through the U. S. Congress—including the Senate, where he had only a 51-50 vote margin. He has restored our reputation around the world, and helped rebuild alliances which were justifiably damaged by the election and presidency of Donald Trump.
But he needs to go. Needed to go, a year and a half ago; but since he didn’t he needs to do the second-best thing and go now.
Everyone is now saying it. There are exceptions—people who are trying to blame the moderators for not fact-checking Trump (doubtless true, but not the central problem), or who are, sometimes in so many words, accusing those thinking he should leave of being "bed-wetters" and "pussies", or who are simply doing a Groucho Marxist "who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes" defense of last night. (This last includes the historian Heather Cox Richardson, whose newsletters I have read with admiration and profit for many years, but who seems to have talked herself into optimism that seems, to me, entirely wishful thinking.) But the exceptions are, I think, a minority. The sentiment this morning is widespread: Biden has shown he is not up to the job—at the very least, not up to the job of running for President, even if you think (as many of these people do, and as I do myself) that he has been doing a very good job of being President. Even places which, in my own private mediaverse, have been the epicenter of scorn for those who suggest maybe Biden should step aside are showing some doubts.15
Is it too late? The only truthful answer is that we don't know. His stepping down at this point would be a big gamble. But so would his staying in the race. Those arguing for his stepping aside have never denied the risks of his doing so; the only question has been whether it was a better bet than his staying. And for a lot of people the evaluation of the odds shifted pretty irrevocably last night. Biden failed the nation in not stepping aside a year and a half ago; but better he does it now than not at all.
Would Trump be worse? Of course, a thousand times worse than Biden at his worst, worse, even, than Biden if he were to become truly incapacitated. If Biden is the candidate one ought to vote for him: even if he is not up to the job, the people he puts in place (and the people they put in place) will do a better job than Trump will do. But the question is not whether Trump would be worse than Biden, but whether Biden would do worse than someone else at staving off Trump. I no longer find the people saying "no" to that question even remotely convincing.
Did Trump win the debate? Trump lied in his usual blatant and non-stop fashion last night, and that ought to have been the story of the night. The fact that it wasn't is a testament to how badly Biden has failed the Washington test—how badly he did. NY Times columnist Carlos Lozada said "Trump won… by forfeit", which I suppose is true. What I will say is that Trump demonstrated yet again what he has demonstrated ten thousand times before, how utterly unfit for office he is, and that Biden, alas, demonstrated that he is not up to the task of defeating him.
Will the new nominee have to be Harris? I don't know; maybe. We'd have to see. But I do think that Harris, if she could win, would be perfectly fine—an average Democrat, basically, with all the flaws that entails, but nothing like the horror of even an average Republican, let alone the worst of them all. And at this point it is hard to imagine that Harris would have worse odds than Biden at beating Trump—and might well have better. If it is in some way possible to create a competitive test and have Harris compete against other wanna be candidates, then that would be preferable; but it may not be possible. And in that case, Biden should still step down.
Biden now faces his last Washington test. It may be too late: it may be that his stepping aside will cause the Democrats to lose to Trump, and—just as a Lincoln loss would have caused—to lose the country with the election. In which case the blame falls, as centrally as blame in a multicausal and complex world ever does, on Biden himself. But it may not be too late. And it is time to take the gamble.
Of course it is out of our hands. It is even out of the hands of the Democratic party leadership (who have no formal power here) and the convention delegates (legally obliged to support Biden unless he releases them). The only person who can do this, now, is Biden himself. Oh, sure, there are people who can influence him—his wife, presumably, his chief advisors, whomever they are, probably other Democratic leaders (it would be a very good time for Obama to step up, certainly)—and there are people who can influence them, and so on, to say nothing of a general climate in which they will be forced to see this as the best bet of all the terrible risks we now run.
It's hard to give up power. I can't say this from personal experience, but imaginatively I can see it must be true, and it is almost as widely bespoke as is the fragility of life. And it's hard to accept that one is now old, not up to what one used to be and wishes still to do. That I have seen, and felt, and it aches to think it. But some things are too important, and those who promote themselves to lead owe it to those in their sway to force themselves to do tough things. Updike referred to quitting as "the little death that awaits athletes";16 quitting public life is all that, and more, especially here, when it is so clearly related not to any little death but to the big one. It is hard to see the end in view. But sometimes people must rise to the occasion. Greatness is thrust upon 'em, and they must meet it.
"Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it": Shakespeare wrote this too; in its original context it was about a man at his execution. Were Biden to leave now, and leave well, and be succeeded by a Democrat who had put Trump out of political life forever, we might amend it to say that Nothing in his career became him like the leaving it.
It would be a great legacy for a man who is arguably one of our better (if not one of the three Great) presidents—and a far, far better legacy than staying and letting the country fall into ruin upon his departure.
Let's go, Biden.
Time to end it.
* I wanted a footnote on the caption to the photo (on the words “one of these things is not like the others”), but the !@#$% Substack editor wouldn’t allow it, so here it is, for anyone who happens to find it:
“One of these things is not like the others” can, of course, usually be read in multiple ways. In this context: one of the four is a painting, not a photograph; one of the four is black and white, not color; one of the four is and was utterly and obviously unfit for the office of the President of the United States; and one of the four is the current and not a former President.
And not on my usual day at my usual time, to boot!
If this were a fantasy novel, he would be waiting, like Arthur at Avalon, to return in our hour of greatest need.**
** Sometime this afternoon would be good.
I can't actually think of any example, but I suspect I've seen it and forgotten, so I won't claim to have originated the thought; but I certainly know it is not common.
Lincoln, wiser than I, did not quite despair of the war if he lost, but he did see that McClellan would lose it if he won. His determination, in that circumstance, was to win as a lame duck. He wrote in August, 1864:
This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so co-operate with the President elect, as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his election on such ground that he can not possibly save it afterwards. (Quoted in James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 771.)
Whether he could have done so is, thankfully, something we will never get to know.
The major exception, of course, was among Blacks, and this was not at all a minor exception: one of the largest consequences of the Emancipation Proclamation in military terms was the enlisting of Black troops that it made possible—troops who, in the end, provided the margin of victory. Unlike picking Johnson, issuing the Emancipation Proclamation was the right call, not only morally (where it is so obvious as to turn any attempted argument for it to stuttering), but practically, too. Another example of Lincoln's genius.
Although, crucially, not all—the preservation of the Union and the end of slavery they kept, even if they kept far too little else.
Yes, Lincoln, like a number of other leaders, had many moments of great despair and self-doubt; but moments are not the whole, and I think the point is true on the whole, not at every moment but on balance.
To his slave plantation, yes: I didn't say the fucker was perfect, just that he was good at leaving. And he was probably the best president we could have started out with. That this is true while he was simultaneously an enslaver is less a contradiction than a condemnation of our country and its past.
Which is not to say it was brand new—there were elected rulers and monarchs before this—but it wasn't a possibility that seemed to any of the political elites of Europe (the point of reference for the early United States) to be alive before the U.S. tried it.
If it does become it now, does that mean they were prescient? Or does a solid track record of more than two centuries mean they were wrong, even if what they feared comes to past eons beyond their imaginations took them and in ways they never dreamed?
At the time "dictator" was not, as it is today, an all-too-often merited slur, but an actual Roman office, into which people were put by Senatorial vote when an emergency required a single, unhindered commander.
Not, as the legend goes, after a mere day in office, but after 15. He was in fact dictator twice (as I said, it was an actual office in the Roman Republic); his second dictatorship lasted 21 days.
Who is, coincidentally, also a person in the race and who actually is at the moment the odds-on favorite to win.
Who, as Ezra Klein rightly noted last night, faced a very big collective action problem.
In the spirit of LBJ’s famous reaction to Walter Cronkite’s broadcast about Vietnam in 1968, we might say, If Biden’s lost LGM, he’s lost the Democratic party.
It’s in his classic essay “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu”, about Ted Williams’s final baseball game—but not, interestingly, in the version online at the New Yorker. I read Updike’s essay in his collection Assorted Prose, where it is in the penultimate sentence.