The Old Man Who Saved American Democracy. Twice.

Age was Joe Biden’s secret weapon.

And he shall all sit under his own vines and fig trees, and no one shall make him afraid. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

1. Joe

I hope you drank it in last night. It was one of the most human moments I’ve ever seen in politics, from the second the president stepped on stage and embraced his daughter.

But it was more than that. It was America saying goodbye to this ordinary man who has become an extraordinary president. A president who saved our democracy.

This is one of those cases where the transcript doesn’t give you enough context. You need the video. You need to see Biden’s face and feel the vibrations from the crowd. And you absolutely need to watch his final section, when he transitions from a campaign speech to a valediction.

This is the story of a nation grateful to a president not just for his accomplishments, but for his sacrifice. For his ability to understand that he was dispensable.

It was this extraordinary willingness, when American democracy was threatened from within, that made Joe Biden the indispensable man.

I know I’ve said this before but I want to say it again: Biden is our greatest living president.

---

Seven years ago Joe Biden was an old man happy in retirement. Then he watched a group of neo-Nazis—emboldened by the election of Donald Trump—take to the streets of a college town in Virginia.

Biden looked around the political landscape and realized that he was the only person capable of defeating Trump in that moment. So he came out of retirement to run not a political campaign, but a fight for the soul of the nation.

And he won.

---

Biden’s victory set off a new crisis. As president-elect he watched the sitting president attempt a coup d’état—first through legal means, then through extralegal means, and finally through physical violence.

Lost in the analysis of January 6th and the post-election chaos is the critical role Biden played.

He was utterly and completely calm. He spent the post-election period preparing for the transition, even though Trump’s administration refused to cooperate with his team. And here are some of the things Biden did not do:

• Publicly attack Trump.

• Attempt to circumscribe Trump’s legal challenges.

• Spread disinformation.

• Antagonize Republican voters.

• Seek to tie “normal” elected Republicans to Trump’s authoritarian designs.

Any of those actions might have helped Biden politically. All of them would have added gasoline to a raging fire.

President-elect Biden chose unity and calm over hysteria and division even as President Trump was attempting to end our democratic experiment. Reflect on that for a moment: Can you think of a single thing Biden said or did during that period?

No, you can’t. And that’s because Biden knew that in order to preserve the legitimacy of our system, the conflict had to be between Donald Trump and the rule of law, not between Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

---

As president, Biden passed a large amount of meaningful legislation, but those accomplishments were secondary to his two larger projects, one foreign and one domestic.

On foreign policy, Biden’s big project was re-energizing internationalism. Where Trump had attempted to turn America into an isolated superpower that curried favor with dictators so that it could distance itself from alliances, Biden steeled—and expanded—NATO in the face of Russian aggression and took a hard line against China.

---

Domestically, Biden created a mechanism for the Republican party to heal itself. Instead of pushing a divisive agenda, Biden focused mostly on popular items with broad bipartisan support, many of which directly benefited Republican constituencies: infrastructure spending, the creation of manufacturing jobs, immigration reform, reducing medical costs for seniors.

Republicans could have supported these policies (which many of them did) while trying to guide their voters away from Trumpism (which almost none of them did).

Over and over Biden tried to make space on the right for a Republican party independent of fascist overtones.

That Republican voters affirmatively chose another run with Trump is no fault of Biden’s. He did everything he could. But his big domestic project failed because the base fact is that a political party can only be as healthy as its voters let it be.

And these days the GOP is a party where voters wear t-shirts bragging about how their nominee wants to be a “dictator.”

---

Faced with this failure and the resurgence of the authoritarian movement, Biden saved our democracy again—this time by walking away from power. When he realized that he could not win the battle a second time, Biden anointed Kamala Harris—shutting down any contest and giving her the space to establish herself as a force.

---

In Why We Did It Tim has a section on the people who accommodated evil because they believed they were indispensable.

The thought process usually went something like this:

I personally find Trump abhorrent, but I’m going to take a job in his administration as Assistant Deputy XYZ, because if I don’t take it, someone worse will. And by working within the system, I can do more good than if I were locked out on the outside with the Never Trump losers.

Over the last decade, that delusional rationalizing took over an entire political party as every midlevel hack told themselves that they just had to be complicit in Trumpism, because the world so needed them.

---

And on the other side, Joe Biden is the freaking president of the United States—yet he had the strength of character to understand that the country would be better off with him not running again.

He chose to walk away from the most important job on the planet. For the good of his country.

---

2. Old Man Biden

It will be some time before America fully appreciates how extraordinary Biden’s decision was.

The big question for me is: How was Biden able to make it?

I believe the answer is his age. Biden’s age was his electoral weakness. It was also his superpower.

Aging isn’t for the faint of heart. It is a process of having things taken from you. Your status. Your health. Your freedom. Eventually, your life.

But in return, a well-organized mind accumulates wisdom. If we age correctly we develop perspective: About the full breadth of the human experience. About love and loss. About what is, and is not, important.

I submit to you that it is precisely because Biden has lived a long, rich life that he was able to make those decisions which saved our democracy.

He was able to comprehend the threat of Trumpism clearly. He was able to see when he was needed to confront it. And he was able to understand when it was time for him to step back so that his friend could take his place on the battlements.

Only an old soul could live the words Biden spoke last night:

Folks, all of us carry a special obligation. Independents, Republicans, Democrats. We saved democracy in 2020, and now we must save it again in 2024. The vote that each of us cast this year will determine whether democracy and freedom will prevail. It’s that simple. It’s that serious. And the power is literally in your hands. History’s in your hands. . . .

Each of us has a part in the American story. For me and my family, there’s a song that means a lot to us, that captures the best of who we are as a nation. The song is called American Anthem. There’s one verse that stands out—and I can’t sing worth a damn so I’m not gonna try, I’ll just quote it—“The work and prayers of centuries have brought us to this day. What shall our legacy be? What will our children say? Let me know in my heart when my days are through. America, America, I gave my best to you.”

I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my career, but I gave my best to you. For 50 years, like many of you, I’ve given my heart and soul to our nation. And I’ve been blessed a million times in return with the support of the American people. 

I’ve either been too young to be in the Senate because I wasn’t 30 yet and too old to stay as President. But I hope you know how grateful I am to all of you. . . .

Folks, we just have to remember who we are. We’re the United States of America. And there's nothing we cannot do when we do it together. God bless you all, and may God protect our troops. Thank you.

That’s the sort of wisdom that only the elder among us can provide.

---

One more thing:

I find many of the criticisms of Biden to be somewhat misguided. Not wrong, mind you. Biden was not perfect and his administration made mistakes. He managed the most public phase of the Afghanistan pullout badly. He could have gone further, faster with aid to Ukraine. He should have realized that he could not defeat Trump sooner. There are others.

But you can pick apart every presidency, even the great ones.

Abraham Lincoln appointed a series of generals who were failures.

FDR interned Japanese Americans, tried to pack the Supreme Court, and alongside the successes of the New Deal instituted a bunch of economic and employment policies that failed.

The measure of a presidency isn’t a neat sum of credits minus debits. It’s the big picture.

And the big picture of Joe Biden’s presidency is that he saved American democracy. Twice.

---

3. Offshored

The original offshoring wasn’t about jobs.

The financier and bon vivant Wallace Groves had little use for the law or social norms. His wife, a former Hollywood starlet, left him in 1937 after he’d had their infant son briefly kidnapped from their glittering Park Avenue triplex apartment. A day after the supposed abduction, authorities arrested Groves on the tarmac at Newark airport, in the company of two women whom Time magazine coyly described as his “girl friends.” Monaei (pronounced “money-I”) Groves soon ended up with a divorce settlement worth about $3 million in today’s currency. New Deal–era federal prosecutors, bent on reining in what President Franklin D. Roosevelt called “privileged princes of new economic dynasties,” indicted him the following year on multiple counts of fraud and conspiracy.

Monaei’s testimony helped put Groves in a federal penitentiary. But his conviction didn’t break his spirit or teach him the error of his ways. Historical accounts indicate that he left prison with a new wife—Monaei’s former hairdresser—a ticket to the Bahamas, and a plan that would change the world. What started as his personal quest to rebuild a fortune turned a balmy Caribbean archipelago into a powerhouse of the global economy and a model for what we now call the offshore financial system. Groves started by taking over a sleepy lumber business on the island of Grand Bahama, but by 1955 had amassed so much wealth and political capital that he persuaded the colonial government to do something extraordinary: Authorities granted him carte blanche to rule and develop 50,000 acres—about 15 percent of the island, including what is now the city of Freeport—that would be immune from taxation and regulation for the next 99 years.

The Bahamas, which gained independence in 1973, are well known today as the former home of Sam Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency exchange FTX, whose meltdown cost investors $8 billion. But the company would never have set up in the island nation if not for Groves, the founding fraudster of offshore finance. Groves pioneered the model for turning British colonies with lax financial regulation and minimal taxation for expats into snug harbors for foreign capital seeking refuge from other countries’ laws. A generation later, Groves’s imitators expanded his model to the Cayman Islands, the British Virgin Islands, and other territories of the fading British empire.

According to the International Monetary Fund, the Bahamas are now the fourth-largest tax haven in the world in terms of the volume of assets flowing through the country. It’s a major hub of a global system that the economists Annette Alstadsæter, Gabriel Zucman, and their colleagues at the EU Tax Observatory estimate contains at least $13.7 trillion in private household wealth; the IMF estimated that a similar amount of corporate wealth—$12 trillion—is held in offshore shell companies that exist mainly to dodge taxes and other laws. In total, that amounts to about a quarter of the wealth produced annually worldwide.

Read the whole thing.