The Nexus of the Presidency
Overemphasizing Biden’s verbal gaffes risks falling prey to a reactionary politics of the performance: What matters more is the nexus of forces the President surrounds himself with.
On Friday, the New York Times Editorial Board called for Biden’s resignation from the 2024 presidential race. Recognizing that a call for “ending his candidacy” was an extraordinary step, the Times still lamented “the president’s performance,” noting: “Even when Mr. Biden tried to lay out his policy proposals, he stumbled.”
The somewhat hysterical anti-Biden reactions to the Biden-Trump presidential debate on CNN suggest that we still have an essentially olympic and theatrical relationship to politics, that is, a politics of performance and (implicit) athleticism.
But overemphasizing Biden’s verbal gaffes and stammering risks falling prey to a reactionary politics of the performance.
In the age of hyperindividualized politics, what counts, seemingly, is measuring the figure of the Leader, according to the ideals of the individual performer—a bit like a contestant on America’s Got Talent, or an athlete in an olympic sport evaluated by judges, like gymnastics or figure skating. As the comedian Jon Stewart said, to much laughter from his audience: “Both of these men should be using performance-enhancing drugs.” And while this is a good line for a stand-up comedian, it nevertheless reveals the essentially performative-dramaturgical nature of politics in the West today.
Clearly, criticizing this hyperindividuality has its limits. The President of the United States is often thought to be the most powerful individual in the world, and there is a performative, “personal suitability” element to the job. To take but one example: The President stands at the apex of a nuclear weapons force that includes more than 400 nuclear-armed Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles, 14 Ohio-class submarines carrying up to 20 nuclear ballistic missiles, and 66 nuclear-armed bombers; in theory, the President has the power to wipe out all of humanity at the push of a button. On a smaller scale, the U.S. president wields the authority to assassinate single persons using drone strikes: President Obama, for instance, ordered 563 drone strikes during his two-term presidency, killing “between 384 and 807 civilians” in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen; and Trump nearly started a regional conflagration in the Middle East in 2020 when he ordered the airstrike that killed the Iranian general, Qasem Soleimani in Baghdad. The President also has the power to (attempt to) break individual dissidents, as the case of Julian Assange’s 14-year ordeal shows. All of this means that personal suitability and individual characteristics are not totally irrelevant.
And yet: We ought to think more about the way a President acts as a nexus of complex interlocking forces involving a machinery of politics that draws upon the energies of thousands of individuals: An incoming president must, for example, make “about 4,000 political appointments” in a short period of time after taking up office. As the philosopher Slavoj Zizek reminds us, via Hegel, the King should be an idiot, an “idiotic dotter of the i’s.” It is when the Leader “embodied the rational totality”—Stalin comes to mind—that we are really in trouble and run the risk of a figurehead who involves themselves in every aspect of the polity.
Thinking in terms of nexus, not personal character—and what kinds of forces will be mobilized within this nexus—should occupy our time far more than the current hyper-stress on individuality indicates.
So what kind of nexus of forces did the two presidents hint at in the debate?
First, Biden pulled leftward and attacked Trump for his vehement class politics. It is telling in the extreme that Biden’s very first statement went straight for Trump’s class/economic jugular: “[H]e rewarded the wealthy. He had the largest tax cut in American history, $2 trillion,” Biden said. The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) is the most important Trump policy that hardly anyone seems to remember.
Remember that Biden is the first sitting U.S. president who has attended an ongoing strike: In September 2023, he “visited a picket line in Michigan in a show of loyalty to autoworkers.” And as Bernie Sanders points out in his most recent book, It’s OK to be Angry About Capitalism, Biden in 2020 understood the need to “adopt policies that could create some degree of excitement within the progressive community.” He can be made to understand it again.
Second, Biden suggested a much more fiery and self-assertive (potentially progressive) Democratic Party, with barbs against Trump that matched the 45th president’s own historic aggressiveness. In one memorable utterance, Biden said of his opponent, “You have the morals of an alley cat,” after having accused him of “having sex with a porn star”—words one never expected to hear in a U.S. presidential debate. Biden dismissed Trump’s ramblings coolly: “I’ve never heard so much malarkey in my whole life.” And when Trump accused Biden, surreally, of being “a very bad Palestinian,” Biden rightly riposted that he had “never heard so much foolishness.” He sliced against Trump’s alleged remark that the war dead of World War I were “losers and suckers,” and attacked Trump’s far-right allegiances for his infamous, and chilling, remark after the Charlotesville “Unite the Right Rally” that there were “fine people on both sides.”
Biden’s gloves were off, which is the only way of dealing effectively with Trump: One must, within limits and while maintaining one’s dignity, confront Trump at his own rhetorical level. Silk-glove politics will not work against Trump the street brawler. For all of Biden’s verbal bumbling and stumbling, it remains the case that Trump, as Biden rightly said, “has no idea what the hell he’s talking about”: He is the ultimate empty signifier, the opportunist par excellence, who turns wherever the winds of political fortune will take him.
Trump did not do himself any favors among black or other minority voters when describing the former as “the black people”—a syntactic construction seeming to confirm suspicions that his relations to minority voters are still entangled in the racist policies of his father’s real-estate business in the 1970s, when black would-be tenants found themselves barred from Fred Sr.’s buildings.
Third, on the geopolitical front, Biden’s statements suggested business as usual, and stasis, with more deaths and killings on the horizon. It was clear he had no meaningful policy for Ukraine—short of delivering ATACMS missiles and the like—capable of pulling the country out of its stalemate, if not outright war of attrition, with the more populous Russia. Trump, conversely, could credibly score major points on his observation that “[t]hat’s a war that should have never started” and his view that “they’re running out of people, they’re running out of soldiers, they’ve lost so many people.” His pathos-filled line, “It’s so sad,” even seemed half-authentic.
On Palestine, Biden’s ghoulish side came to the fore. He claimed to have denied Israel nothing except “2,000-pound bombs” because “[t]hey don’t work very well in populated areas. They kill a lot of innocent people. We are providing Israel with all the weapons they need and when they need them.” This pseudo-noble attitude is an outright lie: The news agency Reuters has revealed that the U.S. has in fact sent some 14,000 MK-84 2,000-pound bombs. Biden’s latter claim, however, is more or less accurate: He has provided Israel with all the weapons they want (though “need” implies that the destruction of Gaza is rational, not wanton): “6,500 500-pound bombs, 3,000 Hellfire precision-guided air-to-ground missiles, 1,000 bunker-buster bombs, 2,600 air-dropped small-diameter bombs,” according to Reuters. The dead and mutilated among the ruins of Gaza cry out against Biden’s presidency.
Two other elements stand out from that night': The lack of an audience—and yet Biden for some reason walking out on to the stage pointing and smiling, as if to an invisible or spectral audience—with the consequence that both candidates looked like Zoom-call lecturers at the height of the pandemic, speaking out into the abyss of virtual space; and the absurdity of the two candidates comparing their golf game, in what is surely the most “privileged male senior citizen” moment in U.S. presidential politics.
The absence of an audience is hard to square with the democratic process: Even if we all know that the audiences in televised debates are likely highly selective and, in some sense, “rigged,” maintaining this minimal fiction, it turns out, is still important to what I would call, borrowing a term from the culinary arts, the “mouthfeel” of democracy. Without even this veneer of public participation, the (Baudrillardian) simulacra-like tendencies of modern democratic politics reach an almost unbearable degree.
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In short, for Biden, the debate performance amounts to a familiar picture: An unhinged or impotent foreign policy (on Gaza and Ukraine, respectively), and yet with a domestic policy that can, with enough popular mobilization, be pulled leftward. In his most recent book, Bernie Sanders boasts of having “succeeded in pushing Biden in a more progressive direction” back in 2020. The question is whether the left in America can succeed in doing so again—that is, in reshaping the nexus of forces that Biden represents, more so than obsessing over his personal characteristics, such as they are.
[An abbreviated, translated version of this post was published by the Norwegian daily newspaper Klassekampen (paywall).]
Superb take! Well done.