Joe Biden and Donald Trump occupy adjoining anterooms in Greymantle’s brain. The reason is simple: I’ve been listening and watching these two men perform their chosen political and cultural roles on national television and radio since the early 1980s.
I knew Biden and Trump by sight long before I knew their names. Where Trump as concerned, I regarded him as a notably exotic guest – quite a statement considering the other guests – who appeared with surprising regularity on the ‘Howard Stern Show’. Exotic, in the sense that my 14-year-old brain could not comprehend why an ostensibly respectable New York businessman would appear on the same radio show as convicted criminals, heavy metal musicians and libidinous porn stars.
Biden’s face and voice, by contrast, became familiar to me via the deeply establishmentarian “Meet the Press” TV show on Sunday mornings and occasional glimpses of U.S. Senate votes on network TV. Biden seemed as serious as any other Senator, albeit younger than average. He did seem to preen a lot.
My first real awareness of Biden and Trump’s personalities, however, came in 1987 when I was in high school. That year marked two important turning points in the careers of both Biden and Trump: Donald Trump’s rise to national business celebrity with the publication of his first major book, The Art of the Deal, and Joe Biden’s memorable performance as chairman of the Senate confirmation hearings for President Reagan’s third Supreme Court nominee, appellate judge Robert Bork.
Both moments are permanently etched in my memory, although, as will soon become clear, Greymantle views them through very different lenses. In the case of Biden, it was his tendency toward reactive sentimentality and a kind of partisan political theatre that made Biden memorable. The hearings showcased Biden’s emotionally-driven decision making which, in my view, has strongly influenced Biden’s political career and the country itself in profound ways, and not all of them good. Hence our title for this post: “The Sentimentalist: Joe Biden and Liberalism’s Decline”.
THE BORK HEARINGS: A DEFINING CAREER MOMENT FOR JOE BIDEN
In 1987, Biden was Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and played the central role in managing Robert Bork’s confirmation hearings. The hearings were covered in exhaustive detail on network television in a manner that anticipated the rise of 24-hour cable news a few years later.
Biden asked more questions than any other senator, and sparred with Bork with what I could only describe as political savoir faire—sharp, but not particularly deep.
Bork’s conservative judicial philosophy was seen as a threat by many on the political left, and would have represented a departure from the activist philosophy that had ascended to the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren in the 1940s. As such, Bork’s views were certainly fair game.
Biden’s approach, however, seemed focused more on scoring partisan political points and shaping a narrative than it was on a balanced inquiry into Bork’s qualifications and unorthodox judicial views. In taking this tack, Biden was copying the approach of his colleague, Senator Edward Kennedy, who had responded to Bork’s nomination on July 1, 1987, by giving his memorable “Robert Bork’s America” speech, which contended that if Robert Bork was elevated to the Supreme Court, the U.S. would essentially return to the year 1953.
Given this framing, the confirmation hearings gradually descended into spectacle, with Biden and Kennedy together pushing a narrative that was more about scoring an ideological victory than it was about determining whether a nominee for high government office was qualified for the job.
HUNTING FOR BULLIES
The intellectual jousting between Biden and Bork felt like a mismatch; it was a fight between a heavyweight and a welterweight, with Biden always seeming like he was relying more caricatures of Bork’s views and pre-existing loyalties than on a genuine understanding of Bork’s intellectual framework. To me, Biden came across as an average thinker with above-average social skills, trying to play a game that required more than just backroom political savvy. Put simply: he was grandstanding.
Biden’s performance wasn’t all theatre, though. Biden appeared to actually believe that Bork wanted to ban contraceptives, censor artists, make divorce illegal, and roll back government regulation of large corporations willy-nilly. Biden accused Bork of having a detailed plan in mind for overturning 40 years of judicial rulings made by the Warren and Burger courts. None of these accusations were based on any factual evidence, but rather seemed to arise out of Biden’s imagination.
Ever since he was a child, Biden has had an intense dislike for anyone that he considered a bully or a friend of bullies. Because he had to tangle with bullies aplenty, having growing up with an intense stutter that he only overcame in his late teens, Biden’s reaction to those he identifies as bullies can be intense. During the confirmation hearings, it seemed evident that Biden saw Bork as a bully, or a tool of bullies. The staff of the Senate Democrats had painted Bork in those colors, and Biden accepted the smear and ran with it.
As one would expect, the Senate voted against confirming Bork’s appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court, and President Reagan had to nominate another judge (several, as it turned out) to take his place.
SUMMER 1987: A TURNING POINT IN U.S. POLITICS
The Bork confirmation hearings, which resulted in the nominee’s rejection on purely ideological grounds, marked a significant turning point in U.S. politics. It was our first “no holds barred” confirmation battle for a Supreme Court justice. Partisanship and ideology came to dominate over the dispassionate examination of a candidate’s background, and ‘Borked’ entered the political lexicon. To get ‘Borked’ was to be rejected for political reasons even when one was eminently qualified for a particular government job.
Greymantle views the summer of 1987 as the moment when ideology began to assume greater importance in national politics than good governance and the maintenance of unwritten norms designed to prevent excessive partisan rancor.
Biden helped to usher in this shift by making what Greymantle viewed, both then and now, as a series of shortsighted moves meant to showcase Biden’s partisan chops six months before Biden threw his hat into the 1988 presidential race.
In the process, Biden, then a moderate-to-conservative Democrat, became, perhaps unwittingly, the unlikely architect of a new era. If Biden had used his political acumen to guide a more reasonable confirmation process, we might have avoided this ideological rift. Instead, Biden’s political ambition, matched with his reactive sentimentality, led to a larger political fracture, one that has poisoned U.S. politics ever since.
The implications have been massive: the ideological divide between the parties has deepened in ways that will not be easily reversible, and will likely require the ascendance of new political parties, issues, and actors before the damage can be undone.
THE CHILDHOOD ROOTS OF BIDEN’S SENTIMENTALISM; NIXON AND VIETNAM
Looking back to the beginning of Biden’s political career, it’s clear that his political evolution has been shaped by an innate sense of sentimentality rooted in empathy (no bad thing, in and of itself) for the underdog, matched by a visceral need to stick up for the perceived ‘wronged party’ in any given conflict.
Biden’s political career began in the mid-1960s during a time of significant social upheaval in the United States. Biden was initially drawn to liberal Republicans. These were men like Nelson Rockefeller and George Romney who were more progressive on issues of race and desegregation than were many of their conservative Democratic counterparts, a stance that Biden noticed and appreciated.
In the 1966 Delaware governor’s race, Biden supported Republican Russell Peterson over the incumbent Democrat, Charles L. Terry. Peterson was a liberal Republican who supported progressive social reforms that included desegregation, while Terry had a history of opposing civil rights. Biden’s support for Peterson marked his initial affinity for liberal Republicans, but also foreshadowed future shifts in his political trajectory.
By the late 1960s, as the civil rights movement gained momentum and the country became embroiled in the Vietnam War, Biden began a shift toward the Democratic Party—not because of any profound ideological transformation, but rather due to his visceral dislike of one man: Richard Nixon.
It’s difficult to say what caused Biden’s dislike for Nixon. Nixon was always a controversial figure in American politics who inspired heated reactions across the political spectrum. Nixon wasn’t particularly anti-union and supported much legislation that benefited the poor and working class. Perhaps Nixon came across as too calculating and self-interested to Biden. Whatever the reason, Biden’s personal animus toward Nixon drove him into the Democratic Party in 1968, a decision that shaped the rest of his career.
This early shift in loyalty is a prime example of Biden’s reactive sentimentality in action. Biden’s allegiance to the Democrats in the late 1960s was not driven by any grand vision for the future or a deep-seated belief in progressive values. Instead, it was an emotional reaction to his personal disdain for Nixon and the Republican Party’s support for America’s involvement in Vietnam.
Throughout Biden’s career, this tendency to make decisions based on his emotional responses to people and situations, rather than on a firm ideological, or even factual grounding, would shape his politics. Swinging between anger rooted in Biden’s famously fast temper and empathy grounded in his childhood stutter and difficult economic circumstances — as well as the death of his first wife and daughter in a tragic 1972 auto accident — Biden’s sentimentality led him to make a number of fateful decisions.
BIDEN’S REACTIVE SENTIMENTALITY AND THE CLARENCE THOMAS HEARINGS
Biden’s role in another controversial set of confirmation hearings—those for Clarence Thomas in 1991—reinforced Greymantle’s perception of Biden as a politician driven by sentimentality. The confirmation hearings became another circus, as Biden let the debate shift from Thomas’s thin qualifications to nakedly partisan attacks, and eventually, to sensationalized allegations about Thomas’s character.
While it would have been logical to focus mainly on Thomas’s legal qualifications and conservative views, Biden instead seemed to revel in spectacle, allowing the hearings to turn into a political game of ‘gotcha’. His tendency to lean on emotions over reason again emerged.
Biden, again alongside fellow Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy, led a campaign of aggressive ideological questioning primarily aimed at unmasking Thomas’s conservative leanings. This was not a thoughtful discussion of judicial philosophy, but rather a political show designed to delegitimize a nominee who was perceived as an ideological threat, similar to Robert Bork.
Then came the Anita Hill accusations.
When law professor Anita Hill came forward with charges that Thomas had sexually harassed her when she worked for him at the Equal Opportunity Employment commission, the hearings took a dramatic turn, and Biden was thrust into the middle of a highly charged, and sensitive, cultural moment.
Biden’s reactive sentimentality took over. He sought to empathize with Anita Hill, which was admirable. But in doing so, he sidestepped core questions about Clarence Thomas’s fitness for the Supreme Court. The hearings became a tit-for-tat game of “he said, she said” with no neutral third party available to confirm who was telling the truth about Hill and Thomas’s workplace relationship.
Rather than carefully weighing the facts and returning the focus of the hearings to Thomas’s thin resume, Biden let the hearings to devolve into a battle over which party could claim the moral high ground. But by turning the hearings into a moral indictment of Thomas, Biden only deepened the partisan divide. In the end, Biden and Kennedy came out looking just as bad as Thomas.
When Thomas compared the hearings to “the high-tech lynching of an uppity Black” on live television, the Democrats’ strategy of attacking Thomas’s character began to falter. Two weeks later, Clarence Thomas was confirmed as the newest associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court on October 15, 1991. Biden’s failure to guide the hearings with a steady hand allowed scandal to obscure the underlying issues.
But the most significant fallout of the Thomas confirmation hearings for Biden was still to come. Initially skeptical of Hill’s claims, Biden was caught in a moral quandary after a new wave of sexual harassment and assault revelations in corporate America and the Catholic Church came to light in the early 2000s. Biden became consumed with guilt for not having believed Hill’s testimony, and could not reconcile his earlier doubts with the growing cultural conversation in American society about sexual misconduct.
This guilt and desire to make amends colored his subsequent political actions.
BIDEN’S CULTURALLY LEFTWARD TURN SINCE THE 1990s EXPLAINED
In his reactive sentimentality, Biden overcompensated for not completely supporting Anita Hill by bending over backward to support any and all women’s rights causes, even if it meant embracing increasingly radical stances on gender and sexual issues. This emotional overreaction drove him further left—setting the stage for Biden’s uncritical embrace of “wokeness” during his presidency in the 2020s.
His actions on transgender rights, women’s issues, and LGBTQ+ causes may have won him praise from progressive circles, but they also alienated significant portions of the electorate, including some Democrats, giving rise to frequent – and effective — caricatures of Biden as America’s “woke grandpa” and contributing to his party’s struggles in the 2024 general election.
Biden’s reflexive empathy—his unyielding desire to right perceived wrongs—often turned against him politically. If someone or some group felt wronged by Biden, he would immediately empathize with them, often at the expense of reasoned judgment. The result was a pattern of policy reversals: from his earlier stance against same-sex marriage in the 1990s, when he was a prominent supporter of the Defense of Marriage Act, to his vocal support for transgender rights, including gender-affirming care, as president in the 2020s.
Each of these stances was driven less by an evolving and carefully considered philosophy and more by a desire to make amends for his own perceived past mistakes, as well as to make himself the champion of the underdog. But what this reactive sentimentality obscured was the reality that Biden’s policies often did more to fracture the political landscape than to unite it, fanning partisan animosity and social divides.
By the time Biden became the 46th U.S. president in 2021, he leaned so far leftward on these issues that even many traditional liberals became uncomfortable with his stances, which became subject to effective attacks from the political right. Unlike President Clinton, Biden refused to ‘triangulate’ to capture the center.
IRAQ, THE SURGE, AND BIDEN’S ILL-CONSIDERED ABOUT FACE
In the early 2000s, Biden once again had to grapple with an urgent policy dilemma: the Iraq War. Initially, Biden supported the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, voting to authorize the use of force against the Iraqi government in March 2003 even as cooler heads like West Virginia’s Robert Byrd spoke with great eloquence and against the resolution in the U.S. Senate.
The administration of President George W. Bush pushed for a decision to invade Iraq for months in 2002 and essentially fabricated a connection between al-Qaeda terrorist leader Osama bin Laden and longtime Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. The attacks of September 11, 2001 on the U.S. by Islamic militants trained in Afghanistan by Bin Laden had stunned and outraged the American public, who were clamoring for U.S. leaders to do something – anything – to strike back at terrorists.
To support the Bush Administration’s use of force resolution in Congress was smart politics, on its face. More than 90% of Republicans and a narrow majority of Democrats supported the decision to invade Iraq. It was clear that American voters could not tell the difference between bin Laden and Hussein – they were both Middle Eastern Muslims who were sworn enemies of the U.S.
White, working class Democrats were more supportive of the use of force than college-educated Democrats. Biden’s base was calling. But in hindsight, Biden’s decision to back the Iraq War is one of several key moments where his political and moral instincts failed him.
As everyone alive then remembers, the U.S. occupation of Iraq turned into a bloody, $1 trillion fiasco for the United States. No weapons of mass destruction were ever found – aside from some old chemical shells buried beneath an Iraqi army base, long past their use date – and no connection between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden was ever substantiated.
By 2006, the American public turned against the war even as the security situation in Iraq was unraveling and American casualties were mounting. Biden had turned against the war by then, as well, and was a frequent guest on TV news programs at that time, on which he was eager to point out the many flaws in the Bush Administration’s approach.
But Biden’s criticism of the conduct of the war and his failure to support the Bush administration’s troop surge in 2007—a policy shift championed by John McCain—was a case of reactive sentimentality at its worst. Bush’s last ditch attempt to stabilize the military situation in Iraq worked: the ‘Troop Surge’ was a major success and allowed the U.S. to begin pulling combat troops out of Iraq.
Rather than pulling his ‘about face’ in 2005-06, Greymantle believes Biden should have been consistent: he should have opposed the Iraq War at the start and talked straight with his constituents about the likely costs and uncertain outcome, but been flexible enough to support the 2007 Troop Surge to try and salvage the occupation and restore what was left of America’s reputation. Instead, his actions were expedient in the political sense, but dishonest, emotional, and extremely short-sighted.
2012: BIDEN, SAME-SEX MARRIAGE, AND THE POLITICS OF EMPATHY
As Vice President in 2012, Biden made a significant, and controversial, reversal on same-sex marriage. While President Obama had been actively opposed to same-sex marriage during his 2008 campaign, Biden unexpectedly came out in favor of legalizing same-sex marriage in the late spring of 2012, just as the presidential election campaign was heating up.
This decision was not politically expedient, but a reflection of Biden’s personal evolution on the issue. Obama was initially aghast that Biden had come out publicly in favor of ‘gay’ marriage without consulting with him first, and felt wrongfooted and embarrassed by Biden’s actions. Obama worried that opposition to gay marriage among moderate Democrats might doom their reelection chances.
But the timing turned out to be fortuitous for Obama, as it helped galvanize support within the LGBTQ community and younger, more liberal Democrats in the lead-up to the 2012 election. Even though the U.S. economy was on shaky ground in 2012, with unemployment still elevated in the aftermath of the 2008 Financial Crisis, working class Democratic voters appreciated Obama’s bailout of the U.S. auto industry in 2009 and were annoyed by Republican candidate Mitt Romney’s loud denunciation of the move.
Barack Obama won the 2012 presidential election by a healthy margin, buoyed by working class voters, Black voters, cultural moderates, and young and gay voters.
Nevertheless, Biden’s decision to come out in favor of same-sex marriage out of the blue also put him at odds with more moderate factions of the Democratic Party, and made him a hated figure among many Republicans. Biden’s shift on this issue was a reflection of his growing tendency to always support whoever he perceived as the “underdog,” an impulse that would define his later years in office.
REACTIVE SENTIMENTALITY AND BIDEN’S FOREIGN POLICY FAILURES
Biden’s repeated pattern of overcompensating for past mistakes through overly sentimental responses has not been limited to domestic policy. Biden’s approach to foreign policy has similarly been shaped by his emotional responses to global events.
The most notable example of this came in the wake of the murder of exiled Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul, Turkey in 2018.
Biden, deeply affected by the brutality of the act and its likely connection to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), reacted with fury, promising to recalibrate U.S.-Saudi relations if he ever returned to office. This stance was rooted in Biden’s belief that he could not let such a moral violation slide.
Upon assuming office in 2021, Biden made a public condemnation of MBS and the Saudi government that was highly unusual in the history of U.S-Saudi relations. This reactive sentimentality nearly caused a complete rupture in U.S.-Saudi relations at a critical juncture. Biden’s moral outrage may have been understandable, but his emotional response to the situation was strategically unsound.
By prioritizing his personal sense of justice over the long-term interests of the United States, Biden risked alienating a key ally in the region and pushing MBS closer to U.S. adversaries such as China and Russia. Biden’s reaction was disconnected from broader strategic realities, risking a deeper rift in the Middle East at a time when U.S. interests required cohesion, and undermining the very stability Biden sought to restore.
When the Hamas-Israel War broke out on October 7, 2023, and Yemen’s Houthi rebels tied up shipping in the Red Sea at the behest of Iran, the Saudis did nothing to assist the U.S., despite requests from Secretary of State Antony Blinken. This was despite the fact that the Saudis had long considered the Houthis to be a major enemy, partly due to Houthi missile attacks on Saudi oil facilities in 2019. Biden had thoughtlessly condemned the Saudi retaliation, further annoying MBS and his government.
Biden’s reactive sentimentality toward MBS and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has not only weakened America’s position in the Middle East but has inadvertently emboldened Iran and other hostile actors in the region.
BIDEN’S LEGACY: THE TWILIGHT OF AMERICAN LIBERALISM
Biden’s political career is a case study in the dangers of reactive sentimentality. From his early years in politics, when his personal animus toward Richard Nixon drove his political decisions, to his handling of the Bork and Thomas confirmation hearings, Biden’s political choices have been driven more by emotion than by reasoned analysis. His tendency to empathize with the “underdog” has sometimes led to policy victories and ideological shifts, but always at the cost of clarity, consistency and social peace.
Biden’s sense of empathy has been both his greatest strength and his greatest weakness.
Biden’s sentimental tendencies have shaped his career in profound ways. Whether dealing with foreign policy, judicial appoints, or the challenges of navigating the shifting terrain of social issues, Biden’s reactive sentimentality has repeatedly driven him to overcompensate when confronted with perceived moral wrongs. While this may have made him popular in some circles, it has also made him a deeply polarizing figure, whose emotional overreactions have left a lasting imprint on American politics.
What is clear is that the political landscape Biden helped create—marked by deep ideological divides, culture wars, and moral certainties on each side—will be his lasting legacy to American liberalism. Whether that gift is a blessing or a curse depends on one’s perspective. But one thing is certain: Biden’s politics will continue to echo through the corridors of American history as a swan song for an era.
The 2024 election was close, but indicative of a deeper trend: the gradual unwinding of a 60-year golden era for American liberalism that began in 1964 with Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Joe Biden sentimental politics have set the stage for a new political era, one that may no longer align with the values that sustained the U.S. for the last six decades, or even the past 250 years.
Donald Trump’s re-election signals the return of isolationism, a renewed American embrace of the Monroe Doctrine and territorial expansion, and a potential shift to a more authoritarian form of governance—outcomes that were not inevitable, but are now increasingly likely.
Until next time, I remain —
Greymantle
