Deciding when to leave isn’t always easy. As I write, Gareth Southgate is considering whether or not to continue as the England football manager following his team’s 2-1 loss to Spain in the final of the Euros. It’s unlikely he’ll stay.
Southgate held his nerve through the tournament despite savage criticism of his tactical decisions from Gary Lineker and most other pundits. They all wanted England to play more attacking football, yet Southgate’s conservative approach very nearly took the team all the way to winning the competition against a brilliant Spanish team.
Second place is disappointing, but can be a good result in a sports final against top opposition. In politics it almost never is. If Joe Biden hangs on and loses the US election to Donald Trump, he will be blamed and vilified for what his stubbornness has unleashed upon the world. It’s possible he will have stepped down by the time you read this, but I doubt it.
If Biden hangs on and wins, he will be a hero, and his stubbornness will be seen in retrospect as a virtue. If he steps down and Trump wins, however, it’s unlikely that history will describe Biden’s decision as the cause.
The pundits can be wrong, but the 81-year-old Biden has made so many public gaffes that public perception is that he is in cognitive decline. Some even fear that it has clouded his judgment about whether it’s wise for him to carry on as the presidential candidate. The disappointing reality is that the American people probably won’t vote him back into office: not being Trump won’t be enough, nor will his past political achievements count for much.
In Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, Ulysses tells Achilles, who is disgruntled that his former achievements are not being sufficiently recognised and that Ajax is catching the eye of the Greeks, “The present eye praises the present object.” Public support can be fickle. Past glory isn’t enough to win the day.
Some major donors to the Democrats recognise this and are making their financial support conditional on Biden’s withdrawal. One of them, Abigail Disney, summed up their thinking: “If Biden does not step down the Democrats will lose. Of that, I am absolutely certain. The consequences for the loss will be genuinely dire.”
Aristotle maintained that virtues lie between two extremes. Bravery, for example, lies between cowardice and foolhardiness. Stubbornness can be a kind of bravery, holding fast to one’s values despite pressure from those around you to compromise them. But when it tips over into foolhardiness it becomes a dangerous vice, an unwillingness to face facts. Biden is now operating in the border area between virtue and foolhardiness.
Biden may be thinking, “In the past people criticised me, but I stuck with it and defied their predictions. I knew I was right, and I won. If I stick with it today, something similar is likely to happen. After all, the incumbent president usually wins.”
We all at times fall for the fallacy of assuming that the future will be like the past. That’s an unreliable form of reasoning, though, tempting as it can be.
As Bertrand Russell noted in The Problems of Philosophy, crude expectations of the future being like the past are liable to mislead us: “The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken.”
Last week’s assassination attempt compounds all this. Violence has once again entered US politics, and that is a tragedy. There has already been a rise in online threats of political violence.
Trump’s quick-thinking fist-pump response to it resulted in an iconic photograph by Evan Vucci that could win the presidency for the intended victim. It’s one of the greatest reportage photographs ever taken.
A propagandist couldn’t have posed it better for Trump: the blood, the American flag, the spirit of defiance. Caravaggio would have been proud of the composition, and of that isosceles triangle with Trump’s fist at its apex. Once seen it can’t be forgotten. This only makes Biden’s abdication more urgent.
Trump, we know, has not been brave in the past – he avoided the Vietnam draft five times. But in politics, as Niccolò Machiavelli, whom Shakespeare read, observed: “In general men judge more with their eyes than with their heads, since everybody can see but few can perceive.”
