The Wasted Interregnums Of Obama And Biden

The Biden interregnum after Trump 1.0 shares an essential flaw with the Obama interregnum after two terms of Bush-Cheney warmongering. Both presidents during these two hiatuses from America’s downward spiral paved the way for Trump by failing to perceive, much less articulate the loss of the nation’s soul.

In a belated admission that our core intactness as a nation was lost, President Biden ran in 2020 on leading Democrats to victory “in the battle for the soul of this nation.” Adhering to American exceptionalism, he also declared that the United States would become “a light to the world once again.”

How absurd that sounds now! Trump’s America joins Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China as the biggest black holes in the world. In perhaps the greatest irony of history, Russia, China and America have become the real “axis of evil.” Nations are dead, but nationalism rears its ugly head.

President Obama hitched his wagon to Bush-Cheney’s “global war on terror” by increasing extrajudicial drone assassinations, with little reportage and no oversight. Seeing enemies everywhere then came home. One of the most popular shows on cable is “Fear Thy Neighbor,” which follows a plotline that begins with halcyon days of helpfulness and BBQs, and ends in hellish violence between neighbors.

Since neither Obama nor Biden was capable of speaking from the clarity, insight and passion required for meeting the psycho-spiritual crisis in the USA, both interregnums were wasted.

Obama had rhetorical skills, but his studied coolness belied an underlying indifference. Millions of people who voted for him wrote him off and voted for Trump in 2016 when he kissed the big bankers asses during the financial crisis, rather than support ordinary homeowners who were losing their homes.

Just as Obama took a “let’s just move on” attitude toward Bush-Cheney’s crimes against humanity (the franchising out of torture alone required a reckoning), Biden took the same attitude after Trump’s seditious attempt to overthrow the 2020 election.

Biden’s decency and common-man touch held him in good stead despite his rhetorical deficits and speech impediment, and he won the presidency he had so long sought. But his increasing mumbling and stumbling gave more than just the appearance of weakness. His tragedy-tested heart had hardened into heartless support for Netanyahu’s genocidal war, and he was complicit in Gaza being bombed into rubble by sending an unending supply of American bombs.

Biden followed the same pattern and precedent as Obama, who paved the way for Trump in 2016. In keeping with the long American tradition of sweeping dark and disturbing things under the rug, Biden also made it clear that he “just wanted to move on.”

That American mantra has been used to cover up innumerable crimes at home and abroad. It’s one of the core national character flaws that allowed Trump to emerge and sink the presidency. (Once was written off as a mistake, an aberration, but twice attests to four wasted years that could have been used for reflection and reckoning.)

As reported in Politico in September 2024, Biden “grumbled to aides and advisers that had Attorney General Garland moved sooner in his investigation into former President Donald Trump’s election interference, a trial may already be underway or even have concluded.”

Besides Joe trying to have things both ways, that begs the question: Why did our institutions and the people who head them fail so miserably? They failed because of the very thing that Biden implicitly acknowledged but was unable to address -- the nation had lost its soul.

The narrative that “Biden failed to step aside in time and overstayed his welcome” is superficial and convenient. The truth is much deeper and more disturbing.

It’s true that Biden “publicly pledged to serve one term only and then step aside, and if he had perhaps a Democrat and not a rightwing autocrat would have taken the oath of office.”

However, that’s also a form of denial, since anyone who looks below the political surface knows there’s a dark, psycho-spiritual, even metaphysical feature to the Trump phenomenon, which cannot be explained away by expedient political analyses.

So what does it mean for a nation to lose its soul? Is it a metaphor, a remnant of Christian theology rendered into political theology?

When a people lose their soul, the “better angels of their nature” lie buried under the worst aspects of human nature.

To secularists, speaking about a people losing their soul is a meaningless rhetorical flourish, the sacralisation of politics. Setting aside essential spiritual considerations, the psychological meaning of a nation losing its soul is an erosion of what is best in a people, which causes a loss of their basic intactness as a people.

To be intact as a people is a very different thing than national identity and unity. The latter leads inexorably to the scourge of nationalism. And as we are witnessing in America and around the world, nationalism is a counterfeit of intactness, bringing a despotism that fills the vacuum of a vital citizenry and effective democracy.

Like all empires in the end, the United States has become a self-defeated nation. It will remain so until this darkness is disgorged from the body politic. Not by force, not by arms, but through revulsion and rebirth of the people.

The Earth and Humanity cannot wait for America to right itself however. Besides, nations don’t matter anymore; people and peoples do.

The explosion of insight that changes the disastrous course of humankind has to begin somewhere. Where?

Martin LeFevre: lefevremartin77@gmail

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