So how concerned have scholars been with Joe Biden’s mental acuity over the past six years? Very little. They do hate Trump, however.
I just put “Biden senile” into Google Scholar. The third result is an article from the December 2023 edition of the journal Political Thought (written by German scholars):
Ulrich Haltern is Chair of Public Law, EU Law, International Law and Comparative Law at Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg (Germany) and Martin Flynn Professor of Global Law at the University of Connecticut Law School. He writes:
NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN? AMERICA’S ELDERLY PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES AS A CRISIS OF THE BODY OF POPULAR SOVEREIGNTY
The world’s oldest democracy is currently also the oldest with regard to its highest decision-makers.
The question whether a person over 80 can ideally or at least reliably fulfil an office such as president of the US is undoubtedly important, for it is rather worrying that Americans discuss the presidential elections with the same concerns as the question whether their parents should still be driving a car. More interesting, however, is the influence of this kind of gerontocracy on the relation between voters and elected, as well as on the system of democratic representation in general. It is not daring to think that a political system, in which the president is more than twice as old as the average citizen (namely 38 years), lacks sufficient contact with its very population…
However, it remains unexplained why other democracies are not gerontocratic. In Europe, the exact opposite is the case: while the population is getting older, political decision-makers are getting younger and younger. Examples include Volodymyr Zelensky, 45, Great Britain’s Rishi Sunak, 43, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, 46, Spain’s Pedro Sánchez, 51, and Finland’s Petteri Orpo, 53. The latter succeeded Sanna Marin, who had just turned 34 when she got elected in 2019…
The age of American political leaders is alienating younger people from politics. The Economist has shown that the extent to which older voters outrival younger ones is considerably greater in the USA than in other OECD countries. Other studies have proven that the average age of participants in local elections in the USA is 57, almost one generation older than the average eligible voter…
Political identity describes how individuals situate themselves within the political sphere, melding individual and collective identity. Its reference point is the political collective referred to as state or, sometimes, nation.
In the USA, this reference point is much more imagined as an organism than in Europe, where the organic structure of the state has given way to discourse and communication, and where political identity is much more found in the word. The American idea of corporeality − a fusion of body politic and body of the people, reminiscent of the frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan in its composite nature − provides the state with a life and a value of its own, as an organic appearance of the people. When we as Europeans set foot on American soil, we cannot escape the manifestations of the idea of this value of its own, however strange they may seem to us, from the flag to the civil-religious rituals such as the Pledge of Allegiance, an oath of loyalty towards the nation and the flag of the United States. The higher idea embodied in the body politic of the state justifies its absolute demands towards the civic body that constitutes it, and the individual puts himself at its service: “Nothing is more typical of the American character than to give everything for a greater cause”, said Barack Obama in his inaugural address. Herein lies an ambivalence of American identity, which, on the one hand, emphasises great individuality and freedom, which should strive under the rule of law, but at the same time wraps this individuality into a great collective narrative…
Since this kind of imaginative space cannot be comprehended by intuition, it requires a powerful myth. In the USA, it is the myth of the revolution, in which the sovereign people, We the People, manifested itself and brought the state into existence. It is this big bang that unleashed political power and liberal self-government (unlike Europe’s revolutions, which politically restricted existing monarchic power), and therefore legitimation and legitimacy revolve around this moment of emergence only. The revolutionaries become the heroic founding fathers that the following post-heroic generations are to keep referring to…
American presidents are not only seen as leaders who coin and implement political programmes, but always also as elements of America’s imagined past, in which the nation recognises itself. The nation wants to be led, but it also wants to see its reflection. This reflection is twofold, corporeal and ideal….
At first, the corporeal reflection is as comprehensible as it is enigmatic. It is comprehensible because the public is endlessly fascinated by looking at presidential bodies and because presidents stage themselves as physically identifiable transubstantiations of the popular sovereign. Barack Obama, for instance, who, being black, did not reflect the majority of Americans, put it the way that American history “has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts — that out of many, we are truly one.” Even more enigmatic it seems that in 2024, two about eighty-year-old men are expected to run for presidency…
Meanwhile, reflection requires positioning oneself in the national narrative of origin. This collective imagination is the corridor of argumentation in which the presidents
have to position themselves in terms of history of ideas. Again, we can learn from Obama. He closely followed Lincoln’s example and adopted his civil religious, morally charged vision of a fusion between the individual and the collective body. Lincoln had fully developed this vision in his Gettysburg speech, in which the semantic of patriotism
and love finds its vehicle, culminating in the theme of sacrifice and not ignoring the willingness to sacrifice oneself. At the very end of his book The Audacity of Hope, Obama
describes how his Washington evening jogging routes lead him to the Lincoln Memorial and the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. Lincoln and Martin Luther King play a key role in Obama’s account. He, both actually and figuratively, runs towards the two of them, as if they were present for real (and not only their memorials and memories), or as if Obama was able to transcend time. He is reading Lincoln’s Gettysburg speech and second inaugural address. In his head, he hears King’s famous “I have a dream” speech and sees the audience of 250.000 at the Reflecting Pool. Lincoln, King, Obama and the nation become one, thus wondrously and wonderfully suspending the rules of time and space and sweeping along all Americans.…If we still want to say something unifying with regard to the representants’ age, then that could be that, in their increasingly senile frailness, they represent the disintegrating state of the American Constitution and its institutions. Only with good will can we still discern the might and glory of the political power that rests on popular sovereign representation and spreads apart there. However, even a quick glimpse reveals that the coat of power has been hanging loosely over brittle bones for a long time, and that the end of legitimate representation and its reliable decisions could soon be nigh. Ruffling up their feathers, but short of breath and emaciated, the staff runs across the scene, freezes, stumbles or forgets the sentence just started, but that does not matter: the political itself has broken in two, and its standard performers do not represent a nation.
I don’t recall feeling a fascination for the bodies of presidents.
