Joe Biden certainly understands the nature of the hurdles in front of him. Since his election victory in November, which was officially confirmed the following month, Biden has struck the right note every time his country has needed him to. Not by calling for the defenestration of Trump and not by waving pieces of paper, threatening force or through political rhetoric. No, the 46th president of the United States has worked his way into the news feed largely by being calm and collected. He, at least, knows the way forward right now involves the most fragile volte-face in US political history.
Of course, it wasn’t meant to be this way, but then liberal America has been saying this for more than four years now. Belonging to a country that was having its own existential crisis – Brexit, remember that? – looking across the Atlantic actually became something of a respite, light relief from our government’s own inability to reach agreement both at home and abroad. We looked at the Trump administration with the widest of eyes, aghast that such a freak show had been allowed to happen. And that was the thing my US friends appeared to say every time I saw them, every time I spoke to them. “How could we have allowed this to happen?” they said, as though saying it out loud made it somehow better.
This self-retribution lasted a good while, until my friends started drawing up lists of the young and the mighty who were going to take Trump on at the next election and wipe the floor with him, who were going to present such powerful agendas that there would be no way anyone from a red state (which Democrats persist in calling flyover states) would be able to resist. The future was coming, I kept being told, and that future was to come in the shape of (deep breath) Pete Buttigieg, Alexandria Ocasio- Cortez, Kamala Harris, Michael Bloomberg, etc…
Every week it seemed there was another left-field, rich, “previously unheralded” potential candidate, one who was apparently gifted with such surface smarts and gravitas that the American public couldn’t fail to elect them.
Didn’t happen.
What we ended up with was the old, moderate guy and while many US Democrats I know are embarrassed about having such an unremarkable politician as their president, the relief that they are no longer steered by an irrational narcissist kind of puts their disappointment into sharp contrast. “It’s OK. We’ll take the old guy over the nutjob.”
From the very start of the primaries, many Democrats started prioritising electability over personality and while there was a massive surge from voters on the left, advocating the most unlikely party candidates, there was always a quiet, almost hushed understanding that Sleepy Joe might win out. Of course, he wasn’t the sexy candidate, but he was well-known and generally perceived as a moderate, not to mention experienced. Initially it was difficult to evaluate the extent of his popularity and then, of course, there was the distinct possibility that the Democrats were simply scaring themselves into voting for the “known”, by getting behind a white, moderate male in response to Hillary Clinton’s embarrassing loss back in 2016.
Of course, although more moderate presidential candidates generally tend to do better in US elections, the ascendency of Trump made forecasters think those days were perhaps behind us, but the support of Biden has perhaps shown everyone there were enough voters frightened by Trump’s puerile belligerence to embrace a quiet American.
What Biden semaphored was not just his electability, but also his deep understanding of the rules and a belief in the Constitution. The new president has a real reverence for US democratic institutions, not treating them as playthings in the seemingly arbitrary way Trump did.
So far, there hasn’t been a big Biden moment. Trump denied him his moment when he won the election – primarily due to his refusal to admit defeat – but perhaps the one great thing we can say about Biden is that he doesn’t live for big moments. He’s had enough of those in his life, both good and bad, and his ambition now is to simply sit down and steer his country back to the place it was when his predecessor got his sweaty, greedy little hands on it.
What he does next is of colossal importance but, as Michael Wolff explores in his piece on Biden in this issue, his decisions will not be based on playing to the gallery. “Among the many perplexing
things about the new political world for some former Trump White House staffers is that Joe Biden has largely picked noncontroversial people to fill the places in his administration,” writes Wolff. “It is not only that this gives the Trumpers few issues to get their teeth into – that is, in right-wing parlance, to weaponise the Biden team – but it seems mystifying to them that there might be a political strategy and world view that does not court and thrive on conflict.
What, after all, is the point of politics?” Over the next few months, we shall all
find out. British GQ Magazine
Dylan Jones, Editor

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