“You start popular and inexperienced, you end unpopular and experienced,” Tony Blair apocryphally said of the life-cycle of politicians. Now, because the United States keeps electing geriatrics to high office they end up unpopular, experienced and incapable of the task.
This was an obvious occupational hazard when electing Joe Biden to the presidency at age 80 – even before his infirmity became so apparent, and long before his recent cancer diagnosis. Donald Trump will be 82 when his term ends. This will make him the oldest president in the US’s history. In a political system that centralises so much power on the whims of one man, you have to think about these things: the entire fortune of a nation – and with it, the direction of the world – can change with a nasty fall or late-stage diagnosis.
With Biden, it was not his physical body that precluded him from running for the presidency again, but his mental acuity (or lack of). Had the Biden camp successfully managed their campaign of concealment and obfuscation when it came to his cognitive decline, and Biden himself had somehow managed to sneak the presidency from Trump in spite of all the polling telling him it was unlikely, however, he may well have died in office anyway. Friendly or not to Biden’s school of politics, a leader dying in office is an unmooring event for a country and everyone in it. And it is – where possible – probably best avoided.
That comes with the cold and some-might-say ageist argument that there is a time when people need to acknowledge they are no longer able to perform at their best.
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Tennis players face a similar calculation. And Andy Murray made the same mistake: refusing to depart from the game despite multiple surgeries, serious pain and a slew of losses to players he once would have beaten. A new biography of Rafael Nadal similarly traces his decline, as his injuries eventually eclipsed his determination to win. Biden’s will for power, self-belief and commitment to shoring up his legacy ultimately had to succumb to the material facts of his age. His defiance in the face of the inevitable will shape his reputation, long after he is dead.
Meanwhile, Quentin Tarantino – a long term fan of boxing and related films – determined when the human prime was from observing the sport. He saw how these men lost when they got older, how they just didn’t have it any more. For most, this comes in their 30s.
The director then resolved only to make ten films: he would be too old by the 11th, he wants a tight body of work and he doesn’t want a bad film to spoil the reception of his entire career. He understands – in a way that Murray and Biden didn’t – that people will remember how you left with grace just as much as they remember how you performed at your peak.
The difference with Biden, however, is that the stakes were much higher. This was not a case of a lost Open or a bad film, a singular reputation sadly tarnished but no wider effects. As the world reckons with Trump and entire continents are restructuring their political alignments, the long shadow of Biden is impossible to ignore.
The Economist recently made a convincing argument about Nigel Farage. He has had three close encounters with death: a car crash, a cancer diagnosis shortly afterwards and an aeroplane crash 25 years after both. He might be on the brink of rerouting British politics forever, as the Conservative Party spirals into total irrelevance and Reform is cannibalising its corpse. The problem with Reform, though – the precarity baked into the DNA of the party – is that Farage himself is primarily responsible for the movement’s success. He is, simply put, extremely popular. If he goes, the movement goes with him – or so The Economist contends.
The Great Men of History thesis is unfashionable but not a totally useless tool of analysis. Just look at Farage and then look at Biden – his personal decision to defy infirmity led us to this treacherous political moment. Pedants will turn around and bark at you about “structures” and “trends” and “systems” and how all of those forge societies’ direction of travel. Sure. But so do individuals, per se. If Ruth Bader Ginsberg had resigned from the Supreme Court at the right time, women across the United States would be facing a rather different lot.
The problem with Great Men of History is that, like all men in history, they die. And with them, the political or cultural universe they created. It’s a burden that shouldn’t be worn lightly and should never be sublimated at the altar of self-belief or personal interest in power. Biden was not a great president but it is hard to argue that he was a bad man. His determination not to withdraw was a serious miscalculation. But Great Men are often defined by those.
