Biden Is Out. Is This What Moving Toward Stability Feels Like?
The past month has been overwhelming to live through — it can feel like a person’s mind is getting stretched and flattened by what’s happening in American politics and the world. One unbelievable event follows another, culminating in Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw from the presidential race.
Things have been changing so fast that no one can really make sense of the time we’re living in and what this chaos means: Are things breaking apart, or is this a difficult period that precedes more stability?
We can see the fragility in the systems that govern our lives. A man was killed and Donald Trump nearly killed onstage — the latest horrific event in a decade’s worth of grinding, destabilizing political violence and mass shootings. If a 20-year-old with a gun can get this close to a presidential candidate surrounded by Secret Service agents and cameras, in an era of militarized security and preparation, there’s an unavoidable tenuousness to everything in our society. And in the aftermath of that shock, there was no firm foundation to fall back on. We are still in a month when a software update crashed systems around the world and the Supreme Court delivered a ruling that granted the presidency a set of powers untouchable by criminal prosecution — and people are still trying to piece together how much that might or might not reshape the future of American politics.
Few things recently have been more of a strain to live through than the uncertainty surrounding Mr. Biden’s presidency and the nature of presidential power. The June 27 debate clarified that Mr. Biden’s age had gotten away from him, and from a lot of people — that the situation hadn’t been entirely understood or appreciated, in the accounts of unevenness and the bad moments that followed. It was a collective experience, either affirmation of people’s fears and worries, or a shock to the system.
It has been destabilizing to realize over the past decade how much individual decisions affect our political institutions. Nobody could persuade Ruth Bader Ginsburg to retire from the Supreme Court if she didn’t want to. Nearly every day of Mr. Trump’s presidency was like this, a battle between individuals who reshaped politics and American life, but especially in the aftermath of the 2020 election when he could not accept that he had lost. The smooth transfer of power depended, actually, on the person relinquishing it — and the entire country has suffered for that, every day since.
This is one reason Mr. Trump’s promises of retribution over the last year — the realization of how much one individual’s decision can matter — have worried so many people about a second term.
