An ageing Joe Biden is the perfect emblem of American decline.
It is perhaps the strangest spectacle in history. The most powerful country on the planet, whose economy and, looking at it from a long historical perspective, whose porous society remains the envy of the world, is seemingly set to make a choice between two possible leaders: a man facing four criminal indictments with sociopathic tendencies, and an octogenarian with rapidly declining faculties.
In this country, where any civilian can buy a weapon of war and murder their fellow Americans in great numbers, where another person can then deny it ever happened on Twitter/X, and where civil society bears the afflictions of war—murder, rape, violence, and predation in all forms—freedom is tipping over into its opposite, posing a greater threat to liberty than ever before. Here, 280 million adults watch helplessly as their future is being decided by two men who, by even the most generous standards, seem to have lost touch with reality.
Once, this nation was a vibrant cauldron of change, where popular uprisings achieved significant milestones: women’s suffrage, empowerment of unions, the creation of a social safety net, civil rights for minorities, and a successful exit from the Vietnam War. But now, Republicans are too afraid to renounce Donald Trump as their standard-bearer, and Democrats are too afraid to ask Joe Biden to step aside.
The future of the nation is being determined not by the will of the people, but by subterranean currents of power, threats, promises, and money. The result is a situation where the most powerful country in the world seems stuck in a political quagmire, forced to choose between two flawed leaders who are emblematic of the decline of American political life.
