President Biden, Please Step Down (An Open Letter)

Dear Mr. President,

I am not now, never have been, and never will be a Biden Basher. After literally years of thought, I believe you are the best president of my lifetime, save only JFK, who spared our species from nuclear self-extinction.

In my mind, you edge out your brilliant colleague and close friend, Barack Obama. He was more inspiring and transformational, but you got more done. You easily surpass LBJ, who let his own Great Society die in his personal obsession with Vietnam, which produced our nation’s most misguided and tragic military loss ever.

For a month, I’ve been working on an essay tentatively entitled “100 Reasons to Vote for Joe Biden.” I’m up to 25 already, and more are appearing every day. My first response to the debate debacle was to urge you to soldier on.

So no, I don’t for a moment devalue you, your honesty, integrity, experience and talent, nor a bit of what you’ve done for our nation and the world. If I knew that you and VP Harris could be appointed to a second term, I would cheer my lungs out for that result.

But that’s not the way our country works. You have to get elected, and you have to do so even as our ship of our democracy is sinking like the Titanic.

A single iceberg sank the Titanic. Our ship of state has hit five.

The biggest and most destructive is a Demagogue to rival Julius Caesar, who is an absolute master of modern media and little else. The second is tens of millions of Americans who have bought his lies and joined his cult. They seem quite willing to follow him into Hell, if only to preserve the dominance or privilege of their respective tribes (white people, Christians, so-called “conservatives,” business tycoons, market manipulators, oligarchs, billionaires, etc.).

The third iceberg is even more insidious, for it reveals rot in the very halls of government. A major political party has forsaken both truth and justice for power, abandoning multiple verbal repudiations of lies, violence, insurrection and lawlessness for the sake of political expediency. It exaggerates nothing to say that the erstwhile “Party of Lincoln” has gone rogue.

The fourth iceberg is our media, which mostly work for profit, and which are now devoting far more time and energy to increasing their audiences than reporting truth, or calling out evil. Our final iceberg is a Supreme Court that has gone lawless and rogue. I’ve just written an essay explaining how.

The recent immunity case of Trump v. US is an example. The five male justices who subscribed to all of Chief Justice Roberts’ majority opinion ignored a basic principle of separation of powers: that courts are not legislatures. They prescribed a detailed, abstract, multipart test for a president’s immunity from criminal prosecution, without even looking at the facts of the case before them. (In fact, they sent the case back down to the district court to find facts.) They admitted, repeatedly, that they didn’t have enough of a record of the facts to apply the abstract law that they had created out of whole cloth.

I’m sorry to say it. But that wrongheaded, lawless, totally abstract and power-grabbing opinion changed my mind about you. More accurately, it changed my mind about your chances of winning the upcoming election.

I do not see Chief Justice Roberts as an evil man. Nor do I believe he’s stupid. I’m aghast that he ignored the separation of powers, so explicitly applied to our judiciary in Article III, Section 2 of our Constitution. I understand that he earned highest distinction as an undergraduate in history at Harvard University, in a mere three years. And he served on the Harvard Law Review, just as I did nearly half a century ago.

So if CJ Roberts is neither evil nor stupid, what caused him to “go rogue”? Had he so desired, I think he could have led his four male colleagues in a different direction, with his power as Chief, his intellect, and his persuasive personality. Why didn’t he?

His majority opinion reveals why. It’s not much about law at all. Several times, it admits that precedent is scare—a fact that should have motivated judicial restraint, not power-grabbing. The opinion is really all about history, the field of Roberts’ own greatest educational triumph.

It’s long and repetitious. But if you have the patience to read it to the end, a single, overwhelming theme engulfs you. The Supreme Court’s majority opinion in Trump v. US is a paean to the strongman.

Roberts quotes numerous sources to the effect that our laws should not hog-tie a president who is “energetic,” “vigorous,” “decisive” and “independent.” Some of them are legal precedent; others come from the Federalist Papers and other historical documents. Some come from the writings of Alexander Hamilton who, we all should remember, was so “energetic” and “decisive” that he died of a stomach wound from a duel with Aaron Burr.

Whatever the details, it’s impossible to come away from an honest reading of CJ Roberts’ opinion without perceiving his belief that only a strongman can solve our many problems. That deep-seated belief explains why a man who had spent his whole adult life studying and practicing law appears to have abandoned it. And if the Chief Justice of our Supreme Court has had that sort of dark epiphany, what can we say of as-yet-undecided voters, let alone the tens of millions in the Demagogue’s Cult and in his Party, which the Demagogue now controls absolutely?

This same sort of thing is happening all over the world. In Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Hezbollah, Hamas and even Israel, people are looking for strongmen to lead them. This is not just a sudden and coincidental failure of human education or culture. It’s a product of our evolutionary biology.

Our species evolved from apes on the African savannah, in clans of around thirty or fewer individuals. The alpha male ruled each clan absolutely, enforcing “discipline” by growling, grimacing, gestures, roundhouse swipes, chases and (in extreme cases) ape-to-ape combat. (Apes still rule their clans this way.) This model of “government” is in our DNA.

So it’s not surprising that, when things get confusing and tough, we revert to this evolutionary model. The ancient Romans, who had the first region-spanning democracy, invented the word “dictator” (which originated in Latin) to recognize this point. They appointed a “dictator” to rule absolutely, without second-guessing by the Roman Senate, for limited times during crises. Most often, the crises involved a war or civil uprising and the “dictator” was an experienced military general.

This is why the alpha leader (almost, but not entirely, always a male) is a constant figure throughout human history. This is why real democracy has been limited to a very few times and places: ancient Greece (Athens, not so much Sparta), ancient Rome, England and the British Empire, and the modern democracies that sprang from them by colonization or imitation. An honest look at human history shows that democracy is an anomaly.

So what does all this have to do with your stepping down, Mr. President? Everything.

You are a good, kind, empathetic and admirable man. You care about people. You want to heal the sick, help the poor, vindicate the oppressed, strengthen the economy, and elevate the downtrodden. But you are not a strongman.

You never were. Your skills are those of a bygone era: listening, negotiating honestly, compromising, making friends, thwarting enemies through alliances and deterrence, and improving things by careful and incremental change. You are a product and a master of the postwar “international order” that is even now coming to a violent and chaotic end.

Many of us still value all that you are. If you are the Democratic candidate for president, I will vote for you as long as I have a pulse. But I fear and believe that many will not. The strongman model is too deeply entrenched in our history and our evolution. And our times seem so chaotic, disorganized and incomprehensible that many voters feel only a strongman will do. If our highly-educated Chief Justice of the Supreme Court can succumb to the lure of the strongman so completely as to forsake basic constitutional law, what chance does an undecided voter have?

For all that you are, you are not a strongman. You don’t look like one. You don’t act like one. You don’t speak like one. You don’t have the youth, energy, vitality or gall to simulate one. I believe that, deep down, the last thing you desire is to be one. And as you get older, in the weeks ahead in the campaign, I believe that any attempt to simulate one will be viewed as disingenuous, even pathetic.

Yet that’s precisely what CJ Roberts, the Republican Party, and all the followers of the Cult of Trump seem to want. That’s what all but a few Republican stalwarts have devoted their party to. That’s what many now-unaligned voters will seek as they go to the polls. And if you look outside our beleaguered democracy, much of the world (except doughty Britain) seems to be chanting in unison, “Caesar! Caesar! Caesar!”

Under these circumstances, I think you have no more than a 30% chance of winning—even less if your physical or mental condition deteriorates in the four months remaining until the election. Do you want all that you have worked for and built your whole life to be at the risk of one person’s good health?

So the question I pose to you is simple. Do you want to roll the dice, when the odds are against you, and at stake are not just all you have done in your career, but a quarter millennium of American democracy and four centuries of the Western Enlightenment?

If you run and lose, all those things will end forthwith. Our Demagogue may be scatterbrained and increasingly demented, if not deranged. But there are people behind him who know exactly what they are doing. They have complete control of the Republican Party. They have the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation. And they have plans: Project 2025 and the “Unitary Executive”—a plan for “gentle” despotism under a strongman. History and logic—and those careful plans—suggest that their takeover our government and subversion of our democracy will be just as quick and decisive as was Hitler’s takeover of the Weimar Republic.

So I ask you point blank, Mr. President. Do you prefer to go down in history as the leader who saved American democracy and the Western Enlightenment from the Demagogue once, and then went on to help pick a successor who did it again? Or do you want to roll the dice against even a 30% chance that your second try will end in failure, with all that portends? And what would you prefer if the odds against you this time are 70%, as I believe?

The choice is yours, Mr. President. It is one of the most consequential choices in human history, with grave implications for our species’ trio of growing existential threats: (1) nuclear proliferation; (2) runaway planetary heating; and (3) the possible evolution of a pandemic much more contagious and deadly than Covid. If you are truly a Man of the Enlightenment, then you should make your choice without ego, pride, nostalgia or regret, in cold, rational contemplation of the odds and likely consequences.

With great appreciation, admiration and gratitude for all you have done so far,

Jay Dratler, Jr.

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