The Leader of the Free World descended into a fundraiser last week and called his predecessor a 'loser'. President Biden’s remark, while utterly unremarkable by the degraded standards of modern American political discourse, has nonetheless sent a frisson of anxiety through the chancelleries of Europe. British political analysts, ever eager to detect transatlantic echoes of their own national decline, have flagged a worrying trend: the collapse of comity between the United Kingdom and the United States is now matched by a collapse of decorum within the White House itself.
Let us be clear. The word 'loser' is not a policy. It is not a strategy for managing the rise of China or stabilising energy markets. It is the grunt of a tribal chieftain, hurled across the cave. That the American President, a man who has styled himself as a restoration of normalcy after the Trumpian carnival, should resort to such language reveals a deeper rot. It is the rot of an intellectual class that has abandoned the grammar of statecraft for the vocabulary of the playground. We have seen this before, in the late Roman Republic, when Cicero called Clodius a 'vermin' and the forum became a place for personal vendetta rather than republican deliberation. The results were not pretty.
For British observers, the spectacle is doubly alarming. We recall, with the smugness of the marginal, that our own political discourse has not been immune. The Johnson years were a festival of schoolyard insults, with 'gammon' and 'traitor' bandied about with abandon. But there was a difference: Johnson’s vulgarity was strategic, a weapon against the establishment. Biden’s vulgarity is merely reactive, a sign that he has no higher ground to occupy. When the President of the United States must call a former president a 'loser' to raise campaign funds, he has admitted that his appeal rests not on a vision for the future but on the frisson of hatred for the past.
Transatlantic tensions, as the analysts note, are nothing new. The Suez Crisis, the Iraq War, the Brexit trade squabbles: we have weathered worse. But those were conflicts of interest. What we see now is a conflict of cultures. The United States, under both Trump and Biden, has ceased to be the reliable partner that British policymakers once took for granted. It has become a volatile, emotionally incontinent giant, lurching from scandal to scandal, from insult to insult. How can we build a stable alliance with a nation whose leader calls his rival a 'loser'? How can we trust that America’s commitments, whether to NATO or to the Special Relationship, will survive the next round of name-calling?
The answer, I fear, is that we cannot. And so we must look to our own resources, as we did before the American century. The decline of American political speech is merely the symptom of a broader decay: of institutions, of norms, of the very idea that politics should be about the common good rather than the cheap thrill of humiliation. The Victorians, for all their faults, knew that statesmanship required a certain dignity. Disraeli did not call Gladstone a 'loser'. Churchill did not call Attlee a 'loser'. They understood that language is the currency of power, and that debasing it debases the nation.
Biden’s fundraiser remark, therefore, is not a gaffe. It is a revelation. It reveals that the United States, like the United Kingdom, is trapped in a cycle of intellectual decadence, where the loudest voice wins and the most learned voice is silenced. The question for British analysts is not whether transatlantic tensions will rise, but whether we have the wisdom to salvage something from the wreckage of our own political culture before we too are reduced to calling our opponents 'losers'.
As I write this, the sun sets on an empire of words. Let us hope that the darkness does not last forever.
