Biden's personal narrative of weathering tragedy and loss happened to sync up with the awful experience of millions of Americans in 2020, in a way that (from a campaign's point of view) was serendipitous. But I think the idea of a mourner in chief speaks to something bigger

Eventually someone is going to have to break the news to people that the American empire is crumbling and it's not 1945 or 1991 anymore. Trump is obviously a symbol of lashing out at the evident fact of decline, which, ironically, his own bizarre and erratic rule rapidly hastened

Biden is not the one to break the news, because Americans aren't quite ready for it. It's going to be hard to process when we have no choice but to admit that it's true. But Biden does kind of seem like a manifestation of our own recognition that something big has been lost

I cringe every time I hear someone say "America is the most powerful country on Earth" or the US president is "the most powerful man in the world," not because I don't love this country, but because it seems so half-heartedly reflexive, stale, and untrue when people say it

The Biden story keeps sticking in my mind because of its mythic qualities. Americans tend to view the quadrennial elections as operatic, gladiatorial narratives of good and evil, where the soul and future of the nation is on the line. And mythic bios are a big part of it

Jimmy Carter, the pious peanut farmer from Georgia who came from outside of DC to clean up the dirt of Watergate. Reagan, the funny granddad who could take us back to the 50s. Clinton, the smart, sweet-talking hillbilly who became a Rhodes scholar, the Man from Hope

Daddy Bush was a CIA psycho so I don't know what to say about that. He didn't really have a personal political narrative. But his son was seen as a drunk party boy who cleaned up and was saved by evangelical religion

Obama, probably the most mythologized US politician since Lincoln, had an almost biblical quality as the son of the woman from Kansas and the man from Kenya, a prophet who came out of nowhere to bring peace and reconciliation (didn't work out)

Trump has been seen as the caustic New York business guy who, despite being rich, speaks blue-collar truths, overturns the chess board, and points out things other cosmopolitan elites were ignoring. His own mythology is evident in his horse-blindered throngs of adoring stans

Trump is also, weirdly, a subset of a very specific kind of NYC political character - a rich guy (like Bloomberg) who implicitly or explicitly conveys that I'm above "the interests" and can't be bought because I'm rich

The fact that Biden is the one to come and be the guy who puts the chairs up and turns the lights out on 50 years of neoliberalism is a perfect irony. He was more implicated in all of it than Trump was, in a real way

I hope that some day, when we do have to admit that the empire is over, we’ll be able to have a reckoning like Germany eventually had after WWII where we acknowledge and are chastened by all the things we’ve done all over the world, because we see that we’re just another country

If America’s historical reckoning with slavery and the Confederacy is any indication, then we probably won’t be able to do this. But things might be very different in a future where we realize that we’re not the most important, exceptional, god-kissed country on earth

As for Biden, it's kind of a situation where: if you win the election, everyone thinks you're a genius, and if you lose the election then everyone thinks you're an idiot & a sap. Biden's mythic narrative seems to have clicked. They were able to make him seem like a decent person

They were never able to make HRC, Kerry, Gore or Dukakis seem like lovable, authentic people. Maybe that's the aforementioned success bias. But it seems kind of true.

I oppose a huge part of what Biden has ever done in his career policy-wise, so he was not my favored choice. But I honestly do feel sold on the humanness of the story. It doesn't mean someone is right or good. It just means you can recognize the pain and that registers

In fact, Biden's presentation is almost exactly the opposite of Dukakis, whose fate rested on a question about whether he'd want the death penalty for someone who raped and killed his wife. Being a stand-up guy, he said a solid "no." But people saw him as unfeeling and unreliable

Dukakis (from my point of view) obviously gave the right answer to the question, which should have been seen as a commitment to principle. But that's not how people read it. They saw him as cold. The circumstance is obviously different now, but Biden is very emo

American democracy: "the operation was a success, but the patient died"