OK. I don’t really know that I’m right in my assertion that I’m onto the real reason, and that it’s something not widely recognized.
But it is my strong intuition— and it is being offered up by one with nearly 60 years investigating what might be called “the psychology of politics.” (I hope it wouldn’t be too gauche for me to burnish my credentials by saying that in the 1980s, my work was awarded the Erik Erikson Prize by the International Society for Political Psychology.)
The general consensus about Biden’s poor approval levels seems to be that he’s being dragged down by people’s unhappiness about how things are going — the price of gas, the persistence of the pandemic, not getting his proposals through Congress, etc. Whenever people are unhappy, they reflexively blame the President.
No doubt that’s a piece of the picture. But I believe the heart of the matter lies elsewhere— something more fundamental, more primitive, at the level of the larger phenomenon of how people relate to their leaders, and their heroes.
To cut to the chase: Biden has been under continual all-out attack from his Republican enemies, but he does not fight back. People don’t accept that — not hitting back — in their President. We’d cringe if our hero in a movie took the kind of punishment Biden’s taking, and continued to act in the not combative way that Biden has been acting toward the people pummeling him and thwarting him at every turn.
The Republican attack on Biden is at the most fundamental level. Two huge aspects of these attacks are:
- The Big Lie, by which Republicans not only sought to overturn his legitimate election, but have continued to prevent tens of millions of Americans from recognizing him as their President. It remains a way of stealing the powers the American people chose to give him.
- The across-the-board obstructionism of the Republicans in the Senate, by which they make Biden impotent to provide much of the leadership that the American system depends on the Presidency to provide. Once again, enemies attacking Biden and robbing him of his rightful powers.)
While the Republicans are acting like mortal enemies of this President in such ways, the President does not strike back with anything remotely matching the intensity of the attacks.
Here’s where we get to that primitive level: People generally — and Americans in particular — need for their leaders to be strong fighters.
The leader has always been the person who, in a dangerous world, is the protector of the people. I can’t recall who said something like, “Americans would prefer a leader who is strong and wrong to one who is weak and right,” but whoever said it was onto something.
This may be especially true of people on the authoritarian end of the spectrum, who get enthusiastic about a monster like Trump. But the most successful Presidents have been people who were ready for a fight. (Americans ought not want a “strong man” leader, such as Fascism offers. But there’s good reason for Americans to want a strong fighter in their President, since he represents them not only in a dangerous world but also in the political battle.)
- Ronald Reagan’s political fortunes improved when he got combative about a microphone he “paid for” (at a New Hampshire debate?). And Reagan has his equivalent to Biden’s disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal, but went on to win re-election in a landslide.
- And FDR showed his readiness for battle with his famous, “I welcome their hatred.” Like Biden, he was good at expressing his caring for the people, but he could also throw a good punch.
Just look at the kind of figures Americans have traditionally looked to as their heroes.
(John Wayne became an icon of American heroes not because he always played a “nice guy” — on that score, his characters were vulnerable to criticism — but because nobody ever pushed him around, or intimidated him into doing anything but what he wanted to do.)
So I like Biden a lot. Such a decent guy. Also he’s shown great competence behind the scenes with putting together his Build Back Better package, and with unifying NATO and the West to meet the challenge of Putin’s threatened (then actual) invasion of Ukraine.
But Americans can sense, whether consciously or not, that their President is taking indefensible abuse, and he’s not counter-attacking the way the American commander-in-chief should. He’s not fighting back, the way any protagonist should — but especially if he’s got what it takes to be the protective Father of the Nation.
He can’t even defend himself.
And, for that reason, he can’t even protect the nation— because those attacks on Biden are also — emphatically — attacks on everything it is the President’s job to protect.
- The Big Lie is an attack on the Constitution that the President takes an oath to protect.
- The across-the-board obstructionism is an attack on the nation’s well-being, because making their priority the failure of the President, rather than the success of the nation — particularly at a time of multiple crises — endangers the nation’s future (as well as squandering a historic opportunity for national progress).
On both scores, the Republicans conduct is quite clearly indefensible. But they get away with it largely because Biden does not press the attack against the clearly indefensible.
The most important thing that Biden can do to raise his standing with the American people is to PRESS THE BATTLE — go after his enemies, who are also the enemies of the nation — as vigorously as he can.
Such combativeness may not be in his nature, but it is a clear requirement of this political moment. A hero like Shane sticks to his no-guns policy only so long, but by the end of the movie — like a lot of other Western heroes before and since — he realizes that his pacifism does not meet the needs of the moment, and he dispatches the greedy cattle--baron and his hired gun and the good folks of the community can live their decent lives.
Postscript:
Biden seems to have some strong — and totally inappropriate — inhibition about directly attacking the Republicans as a Party (even though it is as a Party that they are acting consistently as his enemies, and as a Party that they are assaulting American democracy).
Dana Milbank wrote a column this week in the Washington Post calling on “Complaining Democrats” to “Give Biden a Break.” His argument is that the complainers don’t notice that he’s already speaking out strongly on various issues. To illustrate Milbank’s argument, and the glaring problem with it, here’s how Milbank shows Biden’s strong speech on the issue of guns:
“What in God’s name do you need an assault weapon for except to kill someone?” and “Deer aren’t running through the forest with Kevlar vests on, for God’s sake. It’s just sick,” and “When in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby?” and “I am sick and tired of it. We have to act. And don’t tell me we can’t have an impact on this carnage.” After the Buffalo massacre, he denounced the “murderous, racist rampage” and “weapons of war” deployed by an “evil” shooter “who massacred innocent people in the name of hateful and perverse ideology.”
The problem is that his enemy — and the nation’s at this dangerous moment — is the Republican Party, and Biden shies away from throwing his punch at the target that needs to bit hit. (The “gun lobby” may be pernicious, but they are trivial in the big picture of America’s problems. The Republican Party is the heart of the destructive force at work in America in these times.