Biden’s Legacy Is the End of American and Democratic Institutional Legitimacy

While there are countless articles being written about how outgoing President Joe Biden’s ultimate legacy is his support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, or his stubborn refusal to step down from a race he couldn’t run and handing the election to Trump, or any other number of huge missteps during his presidency, there were victories too. Prior to October 7th, there were plenty of progressives singing Biden’s praise for his robust domestic policies that broke with the established neoliberal order and made his adversarial friend Barack Obama very jealous. As much as Biden’s presidency will come to be defined by the disastrous second half, the first half will be remembered as the missed opportunity of this decade. Biden passed the largest climate bill ever and it’s working. Lina Khan as chair of the FTC is one of the greatest modern progressive victories, and Biden taught the left that transactional establishment politicians like him and Ed Markey have serious value so long as we can bring them votes. As David Dayen wrote at The American Prospect, a lot the good came with plenty of bad, and Biden’s presidency was defined by contradictions.

None more so than the crystal-clear A/B test of Ukraine and Gaza, where only one of those civilian populations under imperial siege received American backing, and through his unwavering material support of Israel’s genocide, Biden destroyed the post-WWII order in a way that Trump never could. As a senior G7 diplomat told the Financial Times, “We have definitely lost the battle in the Global South. All the work we have done with the Global South [over Ukraine] has been lost…Forget about rules, forget about world order. They won’t ever listen to us again.”

Joe Biden looks at himself as a foreign policy president and places a significant amount of his self-worth on how he acted on the global stage, but his biggest impact on American foreign policy going forward is proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that it doesn’t matter whether the president is Donald Trump or Joe Biden or George W. Bush or Barack Obama, “the international order” is simply just a cover story for the United States to do whatever it wants. This has created an opening for new relations with key stakeholders in American foreign policy that both Russia and China are actively exploiting.

There will be a different international order after Joe Biden. Many countries were able to talk themselves into Trump being an aberration and Biden was supposedly going to restore American international leadership, only to watch a rudderless State Department effectively hand control of it over to Benjamin Netanyahu. Biden accelerated the sprawling global sanctions regime past 21st century presidents have constructed, diverting a huge and influential chunk of the world into a parallel financial system from the one controlled by the United States. While Biden touts his record as a man who invested in NATO and pushed back against Russia to expand American leadership on the global stage, helping Trump win the election because of Biden’s egotistical belief that he alone can beat him has the potential to erase much if not all of the gains that Biden made in Europe. The rest of his foreign policy, save for his gargantuan win on semiconductors against China, had the overall effect of muddling American global leadership at best. Biden sold himself as a uniter in 2020, but he will leave office helping to divide both the world and his party in unprecedented ways.

The genocide in Gaza is the fault line for so many in the Democratic Party, and Israel’s apartheid has been one of the defining characteristics of American global hypocrisy since long before Osama bin Laden cited it as one of the chief inspirations for the 9/11 attacks. Biden’s stubborn refusal to do things that past Republican presidents did to rein in Israel proved him to be feckless at best and willingly complicit in genocide at worst.

Alexander Ward, hardly a critic of Biden foreign policy, wrote in his book The Internationalists that an administration official once told him “Not a fucking second of effort.” was put into brokering a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

[image or embed]

— Emissary Of Night | ليلى (@diplomatofnight.com) January 17, 2025 at 2:43 PM

Regardless of the intentions of a man who consistently leaked how mad he was that Netanyahu continued to dog walk him while doing nothing to stop it until Trump came in and ordered that Bibi agree to a ceasefire, Biden’s foreign policy legacy is forever tied to complicity in the ultimate crime. His record can never be mentioned without the word genocide, and allying himself with one of Trump’s biggest allies to facilitate it chased countless young voters from the Democratic Party.

A recent YouGov survey of non-voters found that it wasn’t the economy (24 percent) or immigration (11 percent) that was the top reason that non-voters stayed home in 2024, but Gaza (29 percent). This is not wholly conclusive as non-voters may have remained non-voters regardless, and citing a reason as to why they did not vote is not the same as saying they explicitly did not vote because of said reason. That said, there is more than enough evidence to suggest that Kamala Harris could have greatly benefited from separating herself from the Biden administration’s genocide.

A huge part of Biden’s legacy is Harris’s failure to create any kind of distinction between her vision and his to convince voters to trust her, reinforcing its failure. While team Harris clearly has their own problems as they have consistently blamed “the political environment” while taking little public responsibility for why they couldn’t get the job done, the brutal political environment they point to as their insurmountable obstacle was created in large part by Joe Biden and his historic unpopularity dragging the party down. Inflation is the other side of this excuse, as many, but not all, global incumbents were taken down in so-called inflation elections across 2023 and 2024. While how much of Biden’s policies contributed to inflation will be a topic that conservative and liberal economists fight about until the sun explodes, most crucially, despite inflation coming down during his term, Biden failed to fully articulate why the Inflation Reduction Act would make people’s lives better.

He settled on Bidenomics to describe his successful economic policy which grew the United States out of the pandemic faster than our peer countries, but in classic Democratic Party fashion, he let the Republicans define the word in the public sphere more than he did, and voters wound up associating his policies with inflation. Instead of fighting back, Biden leaned into the Democratic Party’s worst instinct to trust the media to communicate their talking points to voters, and the media spent much of the year downplaying the strength of the economy.

This all led to a situation where Biden, because his inability to overcome his own ego is one of the defining characteristics of his presidency, became defensive over people’s failure to see his policies working. Being defensive is very bad politics, especially when your critics have a point. Many everyday items are still too expensive, and the rent is too damn high, and the struggles that people have faced since before Biden came into office became more acute when their hugely beneficial pandemic relief ran out under a Democratic president, and they were forced to bear the greed of the market on their own.

Biden buried the post-WWII order in Gaza, and he failed to fight to justify his successful domestic policies. He oversaw a period where after winning an election tailor-made for his declining abilities during a once-in-a-generation social movement and a (hopefully) once-in-a-generation pandemic, Democratic legitimacy declined across the board. From 2020 to 2024, Democrats lost support with minority groups, young people, and they shockingly failed to win a majority of their bread-and-butter demographic: people making under $100,000. As Michael Podhorzer noted in his must-read piece about how Trump didn’t win as much as the Democrats lost, 19 million voters who voted for Biden in 2020 did not vote in 2024. Perhaps nothing better summarizes Biden’s legacy than that fact. The Democratic Party is a cloistered, out of touch group of gerontocrats with a literal death-grip on power, and Joe Biden has ensured that no one will take him or his Democratic allies seriously ever again.