Similarities and Differences between Joe Biden and Lyndon B. Johnson's Presidency
Although I’ve been slacking on my personal reading a little bit lately, Rick Perlstein’s Political Tetralogy (from Before The Storm to Reaganland) has been at the forefront of my mind. Perlstein brings a lot of strong political analysis to the table, touching on political moralizing, symbolic battle lines, and the subterranean moods that drive American politics.
While I can, and at some point probably will, dive deeply into how I see echoes and transfigurations of Perlstein’s conclusions in our contemporary cultural landscape, today I would like to give space to one of my own Perlstein-inspired comparisons. That being the similarities between the Presidencies of Joe Biden and Lyndon Baines Johnson. I am not going to give a side-by-side play-by-play of their executive decisions or dive too deeply into their policies because as we’ll see, the concrete facts aren’t the only things that matter so far as public opinion goes, and that’s the focus here.
Biden and Johnson’s presidencies are overarchingly similar in the sense that their “successes” (and certainly failures) in the arena of popular opinion are largely driven by an external mood, a perceived “vibe” that colors the kaleidoscopic lens through which the electorate judge them. Who can really say exactly where such a force comes from, or what it even truly is? In a way, as soon as the mood element steps in -passing or failing the “vibe check”-, their levels of political popularity are in a sense predestined. That’s really the main takeaway here, that on a certain level, it doesn’t matter what he does or does not do- the ethereal gavel will fall, and the vibe check will rule that Biden ain’t it.
This kind of deterministic aesthetic element seems to me to be the most prevalent among younger voters — although maybe the older generations just have a lot more experience sneaking a general, nonspecific distaste into what appear to be completely “rational” reasons. Not like politics is ever purely rational, anyway. But that’s just what makes this “vibe” facet of it all so interesting: the fact that it doesn’t really make sense on paper, but for many voters, the “vibe”, aesthetic, or mood of the times nonetheless remains the primary barometer by which to judge a politician.
Evidence of “the vibe” being a pertinent influence on Joe Biden’s popularity comes in the form of logical discrepancies. Columnists from the New York Times to the Guardian and many more have puzzled at the discrepancies between Biden’s growing unpopularity and record administrative success with things such as the Inflation Reduction Act and CHIPS Law. The type of action that should logically win Biden popularity in the polls, at least with Democrats if no one else, seems to remain an entirely irrelevant factor in his favor among voters. The New York Times's Ross Douthat in his article “Why is Joe Biden So Unpopular?” sifts through a variety of possible political explanations for the malaise surrounding Biden’s presidency. From the state of the economy to the crisis of the Afghanistan withdrawal, the only semblance of a logical conclusion that Douthat reaches admits that a mystifying “pall of private depression and general pessimism hanging over Americans” colors much of the electorate’s bleak attitude towards the president. It is, generally, a feeling -a “vibe”- of political malaise that haunts Joe Biden’s approval rating into the low 40s among many Americans, not stark disagreements on specific policies or executive actions.
Biden is not the first president, however, to face such a seemingly random, meaningless backlash on paper. Lyndon Baines Johnson faced a similar -yet much more violent and overtly chaotic- scorn from the electorate in 1965. Johnson won a historic landslide victory over Republican candidate Barry Goldwater just a year earlier, in 1964. Johnson’s historic sweep (winning 61% of the popular vote and 486 electoral votes) seemed, to many pundits, to usher in a permanent liberal consensus in the United States. Riding the sentimentality and embodying the popular spirit of his recently assassinated predecessor, John F. Kennedy, Johnson used a shrewd combination of executive power, legislative knowledge, and personal favors (he had spent nearly a decade climbing the ranks of the Senate; many Senators still owed him favors) to pass what many historians consider to be the most socially progressive legislation since the Reconstruction Era. The “Great Society” (Johnson’s nickname for his agenda) contained a slew of reforms and government expenditures aiming to create a harmonious, ideal liberal society. Civil Rights reforms, Medicaid, funding for education, beautification, urban renewal, a “War on Poverty”, and much more all had Johnson taking an aggressively proactive initiative toward ushering in the era Americans had universally voted for.
Things seemed hopeful for Americans. The powers of human reason seemed capable of swelling up a legislative answer for any and every domestic issue, and it seemed not only possible, but a reasonable, inevitable conclusion, that Johnson’s America would grow into a cohesive, equal-opportunity whole. After all, as Johnson trumpeted fresh off the heels of his 1964 landslide, “These are the most hopeful times in all the years since Christ was born in Bethlehem.” It all just made so much sense.
Until it didn’t. The eruption of Johnson’s illusory “liberal consensus” came not a week after the passage of his Voting Rights Act in the form of the Watts riots, and seemed to follow no political logic whatsoever. Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland lays out Johnson’s confoundment: “‘How is it possible after all we’ve accomplished?’ Lyndon Johnson cried in anguish. ‘How could it be? Is the world topsy-turvy?’” (Perlstein 11). It simply didn’t add up. On paper, Johnson had accomplished or was in the process of accomplishing nearly everything he was elected to do. Nonetheless, Watts erupted in flames, sparking a political explosion in which the bone-deep political dividing lines of the 1960s would come to be defined, obliterating the “logical” and “peaceful” liberal consensus and ushering in a decade of chaos. Johnson did everything he was elected to do in strides, so why the riots? How does any of this make any sense?
Similar to Biden in our current day and age, Johnson’s disastrous second term doesn’t exactly have its genesis in any one clear issue. Of course, there was Vietnam, but when Watts erupted in 1965 and blew down the walls of the Great Society, Vietnam was nowhere near as prominent in the cultural consciousness as it would later become. Even then, in a world where Johnson had pulled the United States out of Vietnam, it's hard to imagine the 60s going any other way. I mean, was Vietnam itself really even a singular cause of Johnson’s unpopularity? Or did it represent, to many younger voters, a symptom of something else: a certain “vibe” of the American government, a symbol of the ossified state and all its injustices to be rejected? It seems to me that, whatever its concrete, physical, manifestations, the ’60s’ rejections of Lyndon Johnson stem just as much (arguably moreso) from an underlying political mood -a craving for rapid, bombastic systematic change- as they do from concrete policy issues. At the time, the Watts riots, as Perlstein writes, seemed to political pundits “a visitation from another planet” (Perlstein 11); a sign that the fast-paced rebellious “vibe” bubbling under the surface was wholly incongruous to the even-tempered, ploddingly reasonable legislative solutions of the Johnson administration. This gave the appearance to political geniuses everywhere of being “irrational”. The result, as we know, was a country torn in two and a president dying a slow death in the polls that seemed to completely defy any concrete political logic.
The point here is not to diagnose the chaos of the '60s- but to highlight that in the '60s and in the decline of the Johnson administration lay energetic echoes -lessons- that reverberate during the Biden Administration today. The main takeaway being that politics is not a solely “logical” process, but subject to the whims and moods of the historical moment. It was the mournful, redemptive national spirit in the wake of JFK that Johnson rode to pass his 1964 Civil Rights Act and reclaim the presidency in the first place- why would it be “unreasonable” for a similar national mood to find him in its crosshairs? Biden and Johnson’s situations are not identical, of course (No two historical situations ever are), but in my opinion, Biden now finds himself being swept away by the tides of the times in the same way Lyndon Johnson once did. Even if the tides these days are mostly sludgy, swampy muck instead of the ‘60s’ violent tsunami waves.
Biden’s shrinking approval rating, much like Johnson’s was, seems completely mystifying on paper, and it is. These are not “logical” times we are living in where elections are decided on pure policy. At the same time, however, the fall of Lyndon Johnson gives us historical recourse to know that Biden’s unpopularity isn’t entirely random chance, either. It’s the mood of the times, the “vibe”, the aesthetic of institutions that so many of us have grown to distrust and that inspire overwhelming malaise, that weighs Biden’s popularity down. There is a lingering smell of plasticity in the air that nobody really cares enough to feign excitement for anymore.
For many of us, the most obvious evidence of Biden lacking the “vibe” is all around us. Anecdotally, the majority of Biden voters I know viewed him as a “lesser evil” choice in 2020, and it certainly feels like that attitude of begrudging responsibility will likely be his driving force into 2024, too, no matter what he does. There is little, if any, genuine enthusiasm around Biden himself, and it is hard to say that there ever really was even in 2020 except as an anti-Trump hedge. With Trump out of office for several years, though, even the once obvious utility he had to many feels foggy. People voted for him not for what he would do, but for what he wouldn’t do, and that’s really the nail in the coffin here. It doesn’t matter what Biden does policy-wise, because it never really does for someone elected on the consolation of being a “lesser evil”. Sure, his near term-low approval rating as of October 10th doesn’t exactly track with his administrative success, but it DOES track with the “vibe” that has singed him since his initial candidacy- one of dismissal as a “lesser evil” to be tolerated in lieu of something worse. Politics is never purely rational, but that doesn’t mean it can’t make sense.
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