The past month has been overwhelming to live through — it can feel like a person’s mind is getting stretched and flattened by what’s happening in American politics and the world. One unbelievable event follows another, culminating in Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw from the presidential race.
Things have been changing so fast that no one can really make sense of the time we’re living in and what this chaos means: Are things breaking apart, or is this a difficult period that precedes more stability?
We can see the fragility in the systems that govern our lives. A man was killed and Donald Trump nearly killed onstage — the latest horrific event in a decade’s worth of grinding, destabilizing political violence and mass shootings. If a 20-year-old with a gun can get this close to a presidential candidate surrounded by Secret Service agents and cameras, in an era of militarized security and preparation, there’s an unavoidable tenuousness to everything in our society. And in the aftermath of that shock, there was no firm foundation to fall back on. We are still in a month when a software update crashed systems around the world and the Supreme Court delivered a ruling that granted the presidency a set of powers untouchable by criminal prosecution — and people are still trying to piece together how much that might or might not reshape the future of American politics.
Few things recently have been more of a strain to live through than the uncertainty surrounding Mr. Biden’s presidency and the nature of presidential power. The June 27 debate clarified that Mr. Biden’s age had gotten away from him, and from a lot of people — that the situation hadn’t been entirely understood or appreciated, in the accounts of unevenness and the bad moments that followed. It was a collective experience, either affirmation of people’s fears and worries, or a shock to the system.
It has been destabilizing to realize over the past decade how much individual decisions affect our political institutions. Nobody could persuade Ruth Bader Ginsburg to retire from the Supreme Court if she didn’t want to. Nearly every day of Mr. Trump’s presidency was like this, a battle between individuals who reshaped politics and American life, but especially in the aftermath of the 2020 election when he could not accept that he had lost. The smooth transfer of power depended, actually, on the person relinquishing it — and the entire country has suffered for that, every day since.
This is one reason Mr. Trump’s promises of retribution over the last year — the realization of how much one individual’s decision can matter — have worried so many people about a second term.
The original point of Mr. Biden’s candidacy for president in 2020 was keeping Mr. Trump from a second term: The campaign began with the idea of winning, and by extension, restoring American civil institutions in a wrecked, surreal world. Because Mr. Biden was such a known quantity to voters, and because he was clearly entering the final era of his political career, even if his age carried risk, there was also the suggestion that he would do nothing extreme. His presidency would be, then, about things being normal — a moral kind of response to what had happened during the Trump years that began with winning and ended with stability.
The world still often seems wrecked and surreal, in ways in and out of Mr. Biden’s control. When bad things happen — the worst, most destabilizing things — a lot of people’s understandable expectation is that the overall landscape will only deteriorate and break more. Over the last decade, that’s how it has often felt like, where something unexpected and extreme might begin, from pandemics to wars, and even if a person is somehow unaffected by the event, the fractured and polarized nature of the politics around them will make life that much more intense and confusing to live through.
As Mr. Biden’s position became more difficult, and it became more clear that this was another instance where only one person could decide, a few people, like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, made reasonable cases about the uncertainties of a post-Biden landscape — that his support would not be transferable to another candidate, that there might not really be a plan for what would happen next. That things might break and deteriorate more.
And yet, sometimes, chaotic and fast-moving situations can produce more stable outcomes. Four years ago, many leading candidates dropped out of the Democratic race and endorsed Mr. Biden in a period of days. That resulted in a more stable election and presidency (until recently) than anyone might have predicted. During the month last year when support for the House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, collapsed, it would have been hard to predict that Mike Johnson would end up speaker — let alone that his speakership would be more stable than Mr. McCarthy’s was. Things could get worse, but nobody actually knows — things could also get better.
As draining and painful as Mr. Biden’s decision process was, it did reflect the original premise of his candidacy — that the country could see potential problems up ahead and make a responsible choice, and that the people in power would respond in kind.
Katherine Miller is a staff writer and editor in The New York Times Opinion section. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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