Joe Biden is out. Long live the republic

Well, it finally happened. After weeks of vowing to stay in the race as the Democratic nominee for president, Joe Biden has folded under the rising pressure from those calling on him to quit. He threw his hat into the ring in 1988, 2008, 2020, and, for a while, in 2024. Now he’s thrown in the towel.

In the wake of Biden’s exit from the race and the attempt on former President Donald Trump’s life on July 13, we continue to hear a cacophony of apocalyptic diagnoses of the state of our union. We are in unprecedented times; our democracy is under threat; civil war is imminent. These are indeed momentous times. Considering the context of post–World War II politics, it is easy to become dismayed by the dramatic events of the summer of 2024.

Still, we should take the long view of things. The American republic will celebrate its sesqui-quincentennial anniversary in 2026. That’s a mouthful, but in our 250-year history, Americans have weathered all manner of internal and external threats and unprecedented events many times. Remember, ours is still a young country. Witnessing the unprecedented is a lot more ordinary for Americans than it is for other civilizations that have longer histories, like the British, French, or Chinese.

Many of us are familiar with the bitter and uniquely acrimonious election of 1800 between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. The election of 1860 also comes to mind as calamitous, the year that the Democratic Party split in two and Abraham Lincoln defeated three candidates that November, precipitating secession and the Civil War.

Other election years have seen intense, uncertain, and even weird circumstances come to pass. In 1824, John Quincy Adams defeated Andrew Jackson, even though he came in second to Jackson in both the electoral and popular votes. In 1876, Samuel Tilden defeated Republican Rutherford B. Hayes in the popular vote—winning more than 50 percent—but Hayes took the presidency by one electoral vote. Only the Compromise of 1877 averted a major upheaval. On October 2, 1919, Woodrow Wilson had a massive stroke and was incapacitated for the remainder of his presidency. And remember the time when Eugene Debs ran as a Socialist Party candidate for president in 1920? It was his fifth candidacy for president, and he ran as a prison inmate. Despite these and many other crises, our constitutional system has endured.

The last time Americans saw a sitting president withdraw from a reelection bid was in 1968. On March 31, 1968, President Lyndon Johnson went on television from the Oval Office to announce: “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.” In 1964, Johnson had won the greatest plurality of the popular vote since James Monroe in 1820. Four years later, his political capital spent after the failure of his policies at home and in Vietnam, Johnson was done. His departure from the race sent the Democratic Party scrambling to secure a nominee who could win that November. Momentum was with Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, Johnson’s bitter enemy, until he was cut down by an assassin on June 5, 1968, after winning the California primary.

The 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago that year devolved into chaos over divisions in the party resulting from controversies over American policy in Vietnam, as well as national trauma over the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968, and of Kennedy just weeks earlier. Hundreds of urban riots had erupted over civil rights and Vietnam in the months preceding the 1968 election. Days before the convention got underway, the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia, further contributing to general anxiety over the future of the country. The Democratic Convention seemed to be a sign of American decline. The party settled on Vice President Hubert Humphrey as its nominee, who lost to Richard Nixon in a closely contested race that November. Even then, the American constitutional system endured.

Are we witnessing the end of the American republic in 2024? These are difficult times, to be sure. But Americans have faced difficult times before. Our federal constitutional system has proven its resiliency in times of civil war, depression, world war, and a host of other crises. Imagine living in times witnessing a member of Congress beating a senator within an inch of his life in the Senate chamber (1856).

A former president running for a nonconsecutive second term came close to losing his life a few days ago. A sitting president, just over a week later, bowed out of the race due to his lack of fitness to run for a second term, much less to serve. These are crazy times. Whoever becomes the Democratic nominee will also come to that position in some process followed by the party. The two candidates will compete and the votes will be counted after Nov. 5, all according to constitutional norms. There is always the chance that some unforeseen event will forestall what we have come to expect. But up to this point, our constitutional system is running along just fine. For that, we should be thankful.