At a fundraiser last night, President Joe Biden, a man whose primary political utility has long been his status as the ‘not-Trump’ candidate, descended into the mud with his predecessor. He called Donald Trump a ‘loser’ and a ‘vanity project’, words that would be beneath the dignity of a schoolyard bully, let alone the leader of the free world. But here we are: the American republic, once the beacon of Enlightenment governance, now reduced to a spectacle of two ageing men trading insults like Victorian fishwives.
The Fall of Rome was not marked by a single battle, but by a thousand small betrayals of civic virtue. This is one such betrayal. The intellectual decadence of American politics has reached a point where the discourse resembles a reality television script.
Mr. Biden’s remarks, calculated to energise the base, only underscore the hollowing out of a nation’s soul. When the commander-in-chief must resort to the language of the tavern to galvanise support, we are witnessing not strength but an admission of weakness: the inability to lead through vision, only through opposition.
This is the ‘vanity project’ of a political class that has forgotten what a nation is for. The historical cycles of empire tell us this: when elites lose all sense of shame, the end is not far behind. For the sake of posterity, one hopes the American people will demand better.
But the evidence suggests we have already crossed the Rubicon into the age of eternal pettiness.
