It’s a bit of one of those stories we tell ourselves to make us feel better, but I can connect with the Jon Stewart take on Biden as the tragedy-stricken figure best suited to see us out of these dark times.
As I’ve mentioned above and elsewhere, it’s not so much that the current policies are cruel and terrible (they’re cruel and terrible), it’s that we’ve become cruel and terrible — full of hatred and division. That works hand in hand with the Trump movement; he arose out of this division and hatred and continues to amplify it as his only strategy.
It’s impossible to function or even rationally deal with policy in this environment. Even the perfect policies would fail under these conditions — it’s more fundamental than the right legislation. Our culture and social order is failing.
Biden is relatively inoffensive politically and has a life story with a good bit of tragedy — the stutter, the accident, Beau’s cancer, even Hunter’s addiction. If I squint hard enough, I could buy him actually repairing some of the broken parts of our social order, to the extent that a president can impact this (Trump has surely proven that they can).
Actual humanity can go a long way to getting back to arguing about marginal tax rates.