The Advantages of Old Age for Biden

Almost by definition, Sleepy Joe can’t be too woke.

There are serious disadvantages to being a really old president. Three-quarters of Americans think Joe Biden is too old to effectively serve in our nation’s highest elected office. Sixty-nine percent of Democrats said he was too old, in a poll taken last August.

But I’ve started to think that Biden’s age presents him just as many advantages as disadvantages. Namely, Joe Biden is just too old to be a tribune of the young progressive Left. A man with the nickname “Sleepy Joe” can’t be too woke.

A major shift happened on the left in the last years of the Obama presidency. Ta-Nehisi Coates’s 2015 book Between the World and Me set a tone for a post-Obama re-radicalization of the Left on racial questions. College DEI admin positions multiplied, and “wokeness” bloomed in corporate and media life. The careers of “anti-racist” gurus like Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo soared. This reached its crescendo intellectually in the 1619 Project, which recast America’s founding and legacy as nothing more or less than one of white supremacy, and politically a year later in the protests after George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis. The message of this movement is that America’s founding is something to be ashamed of, and its domestic politics are irremediably corrupted by racism.