Jolt to our ailing democracy

This is bigger than Joe Biden

The president’s decision to withdraw from the 2024 race is a jolt to our ailing democracy.

by Zack Beauchamp

By dropping out of the 2024 race, President Joe Biden did what we all want our politicians to do: He put his country over his career. Knowing that his party had lost faith in his capacity to beat Donald Trump and that a second Trump term would threaten democracy itself, he chose to do the right thing and step aside.

Of course, it took him a long time to get here. While it’s only been 24 days since the disastrous debate with Trump, we don’t know how long Biden had been in decline prior to that. The earlier that clock starts, the worse it reflects on Biden and his team.

But ultimately, the story isn’t really about Joe Biden as a person. It’s about what he and his party did — and what their actions tell us about the state of American democracy.

And what they say is surprisingly hopeful.

In a country where many think politicians won’t do the right thing, Biden did (even if he exhausted all other options first). In a country where political parties seem to cower in the face of their own leaders, one party managed to challenge and push out a candidate whose campaign served neither party nor country. And in a country where polarization seemingly ground everything to a standstill, democracy showed it’s still capable of surprising us.

Biden’s announcement, and the Democratic effort to push him into it, shows America’s institutions might not be as broken as many think.

Biden (ultimately) does the right thing

For years, voters have been telling pollsters that they thought Joe Biden was too old to serve a second term as president. The race remained competitive because voters were similarly wary of Trump, but there was clear unease about Biden’s future.

Biden could have chosen to listen to those fears. He could have stepped aside before the primary elections, or encouraged an open convention back when the New York Times’s Ezra Klein sounded the alarm bell about age in February. But he didn’t.

And then the disastrous June debate happened, and the chorus became deafening. Poll after poll found that large majorities of Americans — and even majorities of Democrats — had concluded that Biden wasn’t competent to serve a second term. (This speaks to the absurdity of the narrative, popular among some Biden dead-enders and bad faith right-wingers, that the push against Biden is undemocratic or even a kind of coup.)

Biden was not just heading for defeat. He and his party were confirming nearly every negative stereotype the voters had about the political system: Politicians were selfish, aged fools unable to act in the public interest; political parties were creatures of a corrupt elite entirely out of touch with the public.

In stepping aside, Biden flips the script. He showed that, when push really came to shove, there was something more important to the president than power: the fortunes of the party and the fate of his country. Even if the actual sequence of events followed the apocryphal quip that “Americans will always do the right thing, only after they have tried everything else,” he did, ultimately, come to the right conclusion.

It’s enough to make even the most jaded observer a little more optimistic about American democracy — for at least two big reasons.

First, it shows that there can still be standards in politics.

American politics isn’t just made up of two parties, wholly owned by party elites, locked in a mortal and uncompromising struggle to the death. At least one of our parties is capable of policing its own: challenging an incumbent president and, ultimately, convincing him to step aside. The contrast with the GOP’s behavior after Trump’s many scandals — from the Access Hollywood tape to the January 6 Capitol riot — is unmistakable.

Second, Biden’s departure shows that unexpected things can still happen.

This is hard to prove, but I think so much of the polling showing public distrust in the American government is rooted in a sense that it’s stuck: that what’s happening right now isn’t working, and that no one is capable of doing anything surprising to right the ship. But a president abandoning a reelection campaign is nothing if not surprising.

Politicians like Trump, in both the United States and elsewhere, thrive on the notion that the system is broken and nothing can be done to fix it. This is a problem not just because those specific politicians are dangerous, but because distrust rots democracy’s foundations.

By showing that the system doesn’t only throw up unappealing options — that politics can be more than just a contest between two unpopular older men — Biden and the Democrats just did real work at repairing those foundations. They showed that a central promise of democracy, that it can self-correct after even grievous errors, remains intact.

Fully repairing American democracy will take a lot more work than this, of course. The problems run much deeper than the 2020 election.

But this is a big step in the right direction. And as a result, I’m feeling something that might seem unusual in the oft-gloomy world of American politics: hope.