Almost by definition, Sleepy Joe can’t be too woke.
Almost by definition, Sleepy Joe can’t be too woke.
T here are serious disadvantages to being a really old president. Three-quarters of Americans think Joe Biden is too old to effectively serve in our nation’s highest elected office. Sixty-nine percent of Democrats said he was too old, in a poll taken last August.
But I’ve started to think that Biden’s age presents him just as many advantages as disadvantages. Namely, Joe Biden is just too old to be a tribune of the young progressive Left. A man with the nickname “Sleepy Joe” can’t be too woke.
A major shift happened on the left in the last years of the Obama presidency. Ta-Nehisi Coates’s 2015 book Between the World and Me set a tone for a post-Obama re-radicalization of the Left on racial questions. College DEI admin positions multiplied, and “wokeness” bloomed in corporate and media life. The careers of “anti-racist” gurus like Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo soared. This reached its crescendo intellectually in the 1619 Project, which recast America’s founding and legacy as nothing more or less than one of white supremacy, and politically a year later in the protests after George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis. The message of this movement is that America’s founding is something to be ashamed of, and its domestic politics are irremediably corrupted by racism.
A second shift may be happening now. When people look back on the political years of 2023 and 2024, I suspect that the cascading change of attitudes around the conflict between Israel and Hamas will be the most politically consequential development. Suddenly, the United States’ intellectual class is far more critical of Israel than France’s is. The most influential section of the American Left — educated white progressives — have had their opinions on Israel utterly transformed and shifted. They are now routinely applying absolutely radical forms of critique against Israel, condemning it as a settler colonial state, or an apartheid regime. Meanwhile, in France, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s once-trendy anti-Zionism has marked the communists for political death. Leftist demonstrators are disrupting the traffic in major U.S. cities while chanting the slogans of Hamas or expressing sympathy with Yemen’s Houthis. This is a return to late-’60s radicalism that sees American foreign policy as a chief force for evil around the world.
Joe Biden’s primary political value to Democrats is that nobody could believe he shares the views that emerged out of either of these two eruptions of progressive critique. Although his administration has tried to maintain some distance from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Biden has emphatically and repeatedly voiced his support for Israel, even going so far as to say, “I’m a Zionist; you don’t have to be a Jew to be a Zionist.” In saying this, Biden is putting himself on the side of 80 percent of Americans and against the small, noisy, but hugely influential and institutionally empowered progressive minority that sees Israel as an oppressor nation.
As for the racial reckoning of the last decade, it missed Joe Biden. He couldn’t stop talking in cringe-inducing racial clichés about the black United States president in whose administration he served. He may employ and empower some radical ideas through his policies and his administration, and for that, Republicans will try to hold him to account. But it will be in vain.
It is very difficult to associate Biden with that radicalism when it is so evident that the last racial-attitudes software update was uploaded to his brain in a 1970s Knights of Columbus cookout. Biden still talks in the racial and ethnic clichés of an America where his voters had little portraits of JFK and John XXIII hanging above their kitchen tables. The Irish are known for whiskey and hating the English. And Italians for pasta and organized crime. And it’s great in Joe Biden’s America when so many black people are “clean” and “articulate,” and you put on “a slight Indian accent” to go into 7-Eleven or Dunkin’ Donuts.
Biden is a man out of his time. That may hurt him among the most progressive voters. But it’s going to reassure the vast majority of Americans. He may be losing his mind, but his character and prejudices are still recognizably loyal to this nation, its institutions, and its traditional allies.