The List #65: Empire! The Variety Show

Pay no attention to the curtain behind the man.

Our discussion this week about the fiasco surrounding Joe Biden’s cancer diagnosis, and the retrospectives on his cognitive decline, reminded me how bizarre the Biden years were for an American who grew up knowing who was in charge. You may not have liked the Bush or the Obama or the Trump presidency, but you knew it was Bush, or Obama, or Trump you didn’t like. That’s kind of the point of elective government, or at least it was supposed to be.

Yes, we’ve been passing off accountability since the New Deal to an ever-more inscrutable farrago of faceless agencies. But we’ve also been so degrading the power of Congress—or snacking on popcorn while they so degrade themselves—that if there was any one pair of feet we could hold to the fire, it was the pair beneath the Resolute Desk.

Not so the Biden presidency, the ugliest aspect of which was its strategy of waving an increasingly dissociated senior citizen around like a human shield to deflect the voters’ righteous anger and make them morally queasy, not to mention confused, about expressing their frustration. Something was extremely grotesque about the whole situation, but it was hard to specify just what it was or which individuals were to blame.

In this respect Biden’s tenure vaguely resembled the most absurd and venal days of the Roman Empire, when freakish weaklings were often propped up to distract from deep structural collapse. Reading the chronicles of those farcical days, when horses were floated as senatorial candidates and boy-kings succeeded madmen, can be instructive. Plus, as almost everyone who wrote history at the time observed, it’s weirdly comforting to find precedents for even dark times.