An All-Too-Rare Example of Political Courage
A brief reflection on President Biden's decision to leave the 2024 presidential race.
“Does character in public life still matter?”
That’s the rhetorical question President Joe Biden posed when he addressed the nation last week about his decision to withdraw from the 2024 presidential race. It’s a perennial concern, one that’s preoccupied philosophers, politicians, and ordinary citizens alike for millennia. The greatest philosophical minds of the ancient Greek and Roman world dwelled heavily on it, as did America’s own Founding Fathers and so many others over the centuries. They all believed that, for better and for worse, character did matter in politics and public life—but they were none too confident that good character would prevail in the long run, or even in the short run.
That’s what makes Biden’s choice to give up his bid for a second term all the more noteworthy—and all the more praiseworthy. Contrary to the churlish sniping of self-satisfied journalists and know-it-all pundits who loudly proclaim that Biden either shouldn’t have run in the first place or dropped out earlier, it’s not as if this decision was either obvious or easy. It’s no secret that political leaders and elected officials possess sizable egos, or that any person who seeks the presidency must by definition have a sense of self-regard as enormous and dense as a supermassive black hole. To set the immense ego and overweening ambition required to run for president aside on any grounds whatsoever—much less the reasons Biden gave in his address—runs against the warped grain of what most Americans expect from their politicians in general and presidents in particular.
More to the point, though, Biden’s decision goes directly against the cynical, jaundiced tenor of our times. American public life wasn’t in great shape before Donald Trump barged into it back in 2015—indeed, the very notion of public service has long been a punchline—but only an individual as amoral and stupendously self-centered as Trump could have exploited and corrupted it as thoroughly as he has over the past decade. It will likely take decades to fully repair the damage Trump has done to the fabric of American society. As both candidate and president have implanted, his actions and rhetoric a corrosive nihilism and meanness in the heart of our public life, a cancer that only grows larger every day he remains front and center.
Still, it’s easy to find countercurrents in American society that speak to a lingering appetite for basic decency, hopefulness, and human connection—no matter how far we may seem from it at the moment or however cringe it may seem to the coolest among us. Witness, for instance, the enormous and ecstatic crowds that greeted Taylor Swift as her Eras Tour crisscrossed the nation last summer. The hunger for a more optimistic and high-minded public life exists, even if it’s languished largely uncultivated and untapped to date.
In that respect, President Biden’s choice not to seek a second term may have done more than reset the 2024 presidential race and rejuvenated his own political party—it could be the first step toward a wider reset for our politics and public life. There’s no need to inflate the significance of this act or make effusive claims about the purity of the president’s motives to acknowledge this possibility. It's never easy to put the common good first or, more precisely, disentangle its pursuit from any given politician’s personal ambition. Few political leaders actually are indispensable, after all, but just about every elected official of a certain stature remains convinced of their own indispensability right up to the end.
But in pulling out of this year’s presidential contest, Biden displayed a degree of political courage and self-sacrifice that seems so rare as to be effectively extinct in our jaded era. Whatever one thinks about the sequence of events that led to his decision, President Biden demonstrated by example that politics and public life can, in fact, be an arena where we can define and advance the common good rather than a realm of personal ambition and venal rent-seeking. It’s an act of renunciation that deserves commendation, no matter how or why it transpired.
If nothing else, though, Biden has provided a clear and direct rebuttal to the cynical, paranoid style of politics that Trump and his acolytes constantly drip into the veins of our public life. It’s hard to know if this moment marks the beginning of the end of our decade-long national nightmare or merely a brief interruption on our continued descent into purgatory; in any event, we’ll find out soon enough in. But we can’t say we haven’t seen a better way to conduct our shared public life and change it for the better—and it’s up to us to take the first steps, however tentative, down this path.
Does character still matter in public life, then?
Perhaps it still does—and as a result, there may still be at least some hope for us yet.