This article is taken from the August-September 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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Since Jude’s prescient piece was filed for the August print issue, Joe Biden has withdrawn from running in the forthcoming Presidential election

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Well, the cat is out of the bag, I guess. President Joe Biden, leader of the free world, an American immortal in the divine company of Martin Van Buren, Grover Cleveland and Jimmy Carter, is a bit of a drool case.

This isn’t news to a lot of people — for example, to the press of the American right, or to various foreign observers with use of their eyes. (The Saudis rendered a somewhat mean-spirited display last April with a television parody of Biden’s doddering.) The man’s catastrophic 27 June debate dragged the matter out of the fever swamps of the partisan press and into the chilly, clinical operating theatre of our national discourse.

The United States’ mainstream media have been working overtime to make amends for their lapse, reporting hourly some fresh piece of gossip from panicking aides and Democratic insiders. The coverage has centred on the gruesome details of the president’s condition, and the hysterical commentary on it has run in a single track: Biden must renounce the Democratic nomination because he cannot win the election, and (this part is always quieter) he cannot govern the country.

This is a bad problem, because that eternal heel, Donald Trump, is his opponent. If elected, the theory goes, the irascible New Yorker will sell Ukraine, Poland and Latvia to Russia for cents on the dollar, put the kibosh on democracy as we know it, and say rude things on the television. In this sort of punditry, “fascist” still makes regular appearances, although it gets less of a workout than it did in 2016 or 2020; the preference now is to talk about democracy.

The American press doesn’t have a corner on this line of rhetoric; the Guardian serves as a reliable transatlantic “amen” corner for our native liberals. (Not that it’s all courting American approval and no national interest — a recurring Trump idée fixe is putting an end to Europe’s 75-year free residence under America’s military skirt.) “The Democrats are caught between Scylla and Charybdis. Whatever their choice, they must grasp the wheel before it is too late,” the editors of that worthy publication opine. “If the vessel founders, it is not merely the party that is in danger, but American democracy itself.”

To cut the turgid stuff: if Biden gets out of the way, everything will be, if not hunky-dory, less certainly catastrophic in re “American democracy”.

The problem is that this is bunkum. Let’s briefly tease out the premise of these fine editorialists. Per their tacit admission, a clique of uncertain size, comprising Democratic grandees and high-ranking officials, has for uncertain time been hiding the president’s incapacity and, to uncertain degree, running the country without supervision. (These things are uncertain because nobody has bothered to report on them.)

This clique has necessarily been covering up its own activities and decision-making processes, as well as whatever disasters the president is getting up to behind the veil of secrecy. This is a shadowy operation — although, considering what a staggering thing it is to keep the downward slide of the most famous, powerful man in the world out of his own nation’s headlines, it must be a very large one — and it plans to stay that way.

Mine is a liberal outlook, and if the word “democracy” fills people with the lofty sentiments usually associated with phrases like “Remember the Alamo!” and “Frodo Lives”, so be it. It’s a free country, for now, more or less. I won’t even engage in pedantic quibbles about nomenclature. But I do not think it is a quibble to suggest that rule by secret camarilla is not exactly democracy as generally understood.

There is the nut. It is not just that the president is himself coming to rest in senility, although that is unpromising. It is that the group around him — many members of which would have a say in whoever might replace him — have perpetuated a titanic fraud on the American people. They have done so with either the complicity or the wilful, culpable ignorance of the largest organs of American mass media. Do you want these people in charge? Do you think they won’t do it again?

I am not, personally, all shot up about democracy as a good in itself; some very fine things have been accomplished under appalling despotisms. I would not buy a car designed in Greece, and I’m dubious about political systems originating in the same. It would be ungrateful and unpatriotic, however, to deny democracy its good points. One of these is transparency. It is not terribly difficult to figure out what a democratic state is going to do, since (in theory) the combatant politicos and their gangs have to scream and pull each other’s hair before a decision is made.

This is of particular importance in foreign affairs. Outfits operating along totalitarian lines are less transparent to other nations, and it is here that guesswork and bad facts enter the pure geometry of international relations. States act rationally, but they don’t always perceive correctly.

In a world where there are about ten countries running around with nuclear weapons and different, occasionally orthogonal interests, errors on the world stage are dangerous; opacity is dangerous. Do you think you know what’s going on in North Korea? Would you want to make policy based on your guesses? The American-Soviet red phone system was necessary to avoid catastrophic mistakes arising from the external inscrutability of Soviet decision-making (and, as the United States entered the era of the heroic executive, the external inscrutability of American decision-making.)

On the other hand, to take an example from the storied chronicles of democracy, the American invasion of Iraq (an opaque dictatorship, it might be observed) was preceded by a great deal of warlike hooting and more or less public deliberative activity in the legislature. It was a bad decision, as some at the time could see, but it wasn’t exactly a surprise to the onlookers when the bombs started dropping on Baghdad. Each nation had ample time to orient its own policy toward the emergent reality.

Were I now watching Washington from a far-off capital — somewhere outlandish like Rabat, or Astana, or London — I would be quite nervous upon discovering that power is being wielded by a deliberately obscure and unknowable privy council. At least I can check up on what the kooks in Congress are doing on C-SPAN and X. That seems like two black marks for the Democrats — one for brutally ravishing the democracy everyone loves so much, and a second for making the world a little less predictable, and so less safe.

On the other hand, the clownish displays put on by Trump’s Republicans are eminently legible. Not only are they continuously screaming, pulling hair, deposing their own legislative leaders, and the rest, but the mainstream press subjects them to constant, ruthless, adversarial scrutiny. They have neither the resources nor the discipline for a vast national cover-up; their staffs leak like the Titanic circa 2am.

Indeed, they are repeatedly writing articles and books about their secret plans for running the government, giving them pompous names such as “Project 2025”. They have spent most of their current period of majority in the House of Representatives gridlocking their own agenda. This is transparency. I very much fear that this is democracy.

Some of Trump’s policy positions I like — immigration, defence, trade. Some I’m less keen on — his tack toward the centre on social issues. To some degree, these opinions are beside the point. I do not hold with secret committees and nascent theories of the President’s Two Bodies.

It makes the world safer if foreign observers can know what’s going on

If I wanted to be nannied by a Crown, my understanding is that the Atlantic boats still run both ways, and that Sir Keir has not yet declared a Cromwellian dictatorship and driven the current dynasts into the Channel. Although our republican forms have in large part been hollowed out and co-opted, I still have a fondness for the charade that, if things are going poorly, I can vote to kick the bums out. More simply, I prefer a nation where I know what is going on; I believe it makes the world safer to have a nation where foreign observers can know what is going on, too.

There is a clear choice, then, and it doesn’t change if Biden drops ignominiously off the ticket. On one side, there is government by conspiracy, by the same gang that was happy to keep the public in the dark about what was happening to the American people’s chosen leader. On the other, there is government by Donald Trump, who will have to fight not only the Democrats, but factions within his own party in potentially very embarrassing, very funny ways. Dare I say that democracy is on the ballot?

For a foreign audience — and, for my money, Europeans and Britishers are still foreigners, despite their abject reliance on These States for defence and cultural leadership — I would ask, Do you want to deal with a power whose deliberative processes are out in the open, whose actions are transparent and well telegraphed, or would you prefer the North Korean or Russian style?

Forewarned is forearmed. If Trump wins, as seems more likely than ever after the assassination attempt, even if you loathe every policy that he proposes, you’ll be able to see and prepare for what is coming. If he loses — well, do you feel lucky?