We can all agree that the present occupant of the White House is seriously mentally ill, and that he suffers from a mental illness that puts the rest of us at risk.
But what does it say about the state of our nation that his possible (we can only hope) successor is also mentally ill, though in a way that would normally be fairly harmless.
There is an old saw that insanity can be defined as doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Another old saw warns us that those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. There is truth in both of these saws.
Joe Biden, touring Iowa, told reporters, in so many words, that his plan is to have an ineffectual, failed presidency. Or, as Biden put it more pithily, “Ending the filibuster is a very dangerous move.”
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Biden has clung to this conviction in the face of overwhelming evidence, including eight years in an administration in which opposing party senators followed a strategy of scorched-earth opposition and were rewarded for it.
The prospective concern with Biden is not that he would somehow revive the old Dixiecrat coalition, but that he is nostalgically trapped in the bygone world of his youth, unable to grasp the tectonic changes that have reshaped American politics. Biden’s nostalgia for the villains of his political youth, and his belief that the institution can be restored to its bygone manners, is a symptom of a more profound disorder that you might call “Senatitis.”
If Biden wins, which I don’t think he can do, he will deliver 4 years of nothing. By 2022 whatever majority we may have in either House will be swept away, and in 2024 he’ll be replaced by someone possibly worse than Trump. I know that sounds impossible, but who would have thought they could come up with someone worse that W, who was, after all, the worst in history when he left office. In his own way, Biden is a clear and present danger to the survival of the Republic.
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