Never say Nerva: a requiem for the Biden administration
When Joe Biden was first elected, I thought he would be the Democrats’ answer to the Roman emperor Nerva. Never heard of Nerva? Don’t beat yourself up. He wasn’t one of the more famous emperors. He was an old man when the Senate named him emperor, and he only lived another fifteen months.
But in that short time in office, Nerva accomplished one important thing: he adopted the future emperor Trajan, setting in motion a dynasty that became known in history as the Antonines, or the Five Good Emperors.
Before Nerva, the leadership of the Roman Empire went through a shaky period. All the emperors up to Nero had some familial relationship to the first emperor, Augustus Caesar. But Nero, seeing his relatives as potential rivals, had them all killed, so when he committed suicide after being overthrown by Galba, there was no obvious successor. The following year became known as the Year of Four Emperors: Galba was challenged by two other claimants; all three were proclaimed emperor for a brief time, and all had control of a portion of the Roman Army, but all were swept aside by a fourth claimant, the most powerful general, Flavius Vespasianus.
Vespasian, as he is called by English speakers, was a Pretty Good Emperor. Among other things, he initiated construction of the Flavian Amphitheater, which was later dubbed the Colosseum. He also established a new dynasty, but it didn’t last: his son Titus only outlived him by two years, and his second son, who became the emperor Domitian, had only one child, a son who died in childhood.
Like Nero, Domitian was consumed by paranoia and had his living relatives put to death, so after he was assassinated, there was no obvious choice for a successor. But for reasons unknown, the Roman Senate, on the very day of the assassination, chose Nerva, a government functionary who had served under Nero, Vespasian, and his sons.
After Nerva, the emperor Trajan ushered in an age of good government that lasted through the reign of Marcus Aurelius, the closest thing to Plato’s ideal philosopher-king that real life ever produced. Gibbon began his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire with a description of the age of the Antonines, who established a standard from which Rome could only decline.
When Biden entered the White House, I thought of Nerva, not because I expected Biden to expire after fifteen months, but because I hoped that, after one term in office, he would make way for a dynasty of good Democratic presidents. After Trump’s humiliating loss in 2020, and the public’s revulsion against the ugliness of January 6, I thought he would slink off to Mar-a-Lago and sink into obscurity, and the wreck of the Republican Party, which had abandoned its principles to become the Party of Whatever Trump Wants, would wither into irrelevance.
Of course, I was spectacularly wrong. But then again, in February of 2021, who, outside of Trump himself and his most ardent followers, thought he would be re-elected in 2024?
President Biden turned out to be something more than a Nerva — and something less.
History will remember him as the president who helped literally nurse America back to health after the Covid-19 pandemic. The month in which he took office, January 2021, was the deadliest month of the pandemic, when 96,000 people died of Covid in the U.S.
The American economy had suffered as a result. The unemployment rate in December 2020 was 6.7%, down from April’s high of 14.8%, but still high. At the end of Biden’s term, it would be a healthy 4.1%. The economy under Biden added more than 16 million jobs — that’s not just all the jobs lost during the pandemic, but over seven million more than in February 2020, just before the pandemic began.
Much of this impressive job growth is due to the American Rescue Plan, passed by the Democratic congress and signed into law by President Biden in March 2021. That same act has been blamed for the inflation that plagued the economy in 2021–2, but as economist Peter Orszag and others have pointed out, the main cause of inflation was the pandemic itself, which caused supply chain disruptions that limited the supply of goods.
If inflation was caused by the Biden administration, it would be largely limited to the U. S., but inflation was a world-wide phenomenon. Even countries that did much less to stimulate their economies had comparable inflation. And U. S. economic growth during that period was the envy of the world.
But in spite of that, the economy was the main reason why Biden appeared to be headed for a loss before he dropped out of the 2024 election. I have argued that Biden’s messaging on the economy could’ve been better, but Orsag speculates that maybe the Democrats’ campaign was doomed no matter what — he points out that the worldwide inflation had led to incumbents being turned out in democracies all over the world.
However, the thing that first got Biden’s approval rating down was the withdrawal from Afghanistan, which has been so often referred to as “the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan” that I wonder if that is how it will go down in history: The Chaotic Withdrawal. But can anyone really imagine that the withdrawal from Afghanistan could’ve been orderly? When you’ve been propping up an unpopular regime for 20 years, and you suddenly remove the props, the result is bound to be chaos.
This is why military quagmires happen: presidents keep them going because nobody wants to be the one in charge when we finally pull the plug. It’s bound to be ugly, and there’s a political price to pay. The fall of Saigon, to which the withdrawal from Kabul was often compared, certainly didn’t help President Ford, whose term, like Biden’s, also coincided with a period of inflation.
The blame for Afghanistan belongs with the president who got us involved in the first place, George W. Bush, and the president who escalated the war, Barack Obama. After that, Americans wanted out of Afghanistan, and it was Trump who negotiated the end of the war; Biden merely presided over the withdrawal.
After Afghanistan, nothing Biden did could bring up his approval rating. Not the bipartisan infrastructure bill, passed at a time when people thought bipartisanship was dead. After Newt Gingrich brought his bomb-throwing style to the House leadership, shutting down the government in a faceoff with President Clinton, after Mitch McConnel vowed to make Obama a one-term president, and after the open warfare between Trump and congressional Democrats who impeached him twice, Biden’s promise to work with Republicans in congress was met with derision. But he kept his promise and delivered a bill on infrastructure, something Trump talked about for four years but never accomplished.
Biden followed up this act by signing a bill to promote clean energy, misleadingly labeled the Inflation Reduction Act. And by the time his presidency was over, he really had reduced inflation — by refusing to interfere with the Fed’s belt-tightening measures. The 2.9% increase in prices in 2024 was short of the Fed’s target of 2%, but certainly better than its post-pandemic peak of 7% in 2021.
To me, the defining moment of the Biden presidency was the spring of 2021, when a Covid vaccine was made available to all American adults — and a good chunk of the population refused to take it. What should have been a simple act of self-preservation had become politicized: “vaccine hesitancy,” as it came to be called, was especially prevalent among Republicans. A Monmouth University poll conducted in April showed that 43% of Republicans refused to take the vaccine, while only 5% of Democrats felt that way.
The appearance of the vaccine just after the election in 2020 — just eight months after the start of the pandemic — was nothing short of miraculous. Building on technology that was discovered in 2005, when Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman learned how to effectively use RNA to create vaccines, drug companies, urged on by Trump’s Operation Warp Speed, concluded clinical trials by mid-November 2020, and the vaccine was approved by the FDA in December. As President-elect, Biden promised to deliver 100 million shots of the vaccine in his first 100 days, and he exceeded that goal. And yet, more than 20% of Americans said, “Pass.”
Pollsters blamed Trump for downplaying the severity of Covid early in the pandemic, and mask mandates and other restrictions became a political issue when Trump’s followers resisted them. When the vaccine came out, Trump could’ve taken credit for the success of Operation Warp Speed and urged his followers to get vaccinated. But given the choice between saving lives and exploiting an issue that could help him get re-elected, Trump chose the latter.
Of course, Biden was blamed for not reaching the goal of 80% vaccination, which scientists estimated was necessary for “herd immunity.” But as Trump will soon rediscover, it’s tough to lead a nation when you only get about half the votes, and the other half is vehemently opposed to just about everything you want to do.
Thus Biden’s achievements, though unappreciated, were substantial. He was more than a Nerva, a mere place holder. But he was also something less.
During the 2020 campaign, Biden had said, “Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else,” and then, referring to Kamala Harris, Corey Booker, and Gretchen Whitmer, who were in attendance, he said, “There’s an entire generation of leaders you saw stand behind me. They are the future of this country.” Like many people, I took this to mean that he would step aside after one term.
Nobody knows what would have happened if Biden had stepped aside in 2023, and the Democrats had nominated Harris or someone else in a real, normal primary. But his decision to run for re-election at age 81 will probably remain a blot on his record.
He may have delayed the new generation’s ascent to power, but give him credit for giving the Democrats a new strategy on his way out the door. In a farewell speech reminiscent of Eisenhower’s famous “military-industrial complex” speech, Biden warned of the rise of a new American oligarchy.
This will be a powerful theme if, as appears likely, Trump pushes new tax cuts for the wealthy, and to help pay for them, cuts benefits that his low-income supporters depend on. Already we have witnessed the spectacle of the world’s richest man bragging about dismantling an agency that gives food and vaccinations to the world’s poorest children. It’s not a good look.
