Jonathan V. Last is editor of The Bulwark, a site for Republican Never-Trumpers. I enjoy reading articles on this site because it is not part of a liberal Democratic echo chamber. He was a strong supporter of President Biden. He here refers to him as “the old man who saved democracy. Twice.” He published this article the day after Biden gave his moving speech to the Democratic National Convention.

He writes:

I hope you drank it in last night. It was one of the most human moments I’ve ever seen in politics, from the second the president stepped on stage and embraced his daughter.

But it was more than that. It was America saying goodbye to this ordinary man who has become an extraordinary president. A president who saved our democracy.

This is one of those cases where the transcript doesn’t give you enough context. You need the video. You need to see Biden’s face and feel the vibrations from the crowd. And you absolutely need to watch his final section, when he transitions from a campaign speech to a valediction.

This is the story of a nation grateful to a president not just for his accomplishments, but for his sacrifice. For his ability to understand that he was dispensable.

It was this extraordinary willingness, when American democracy was threatened from within, that made Joe Biden the indispensable man.

I know I’ve said this before but I want to say it again: Biden is our greatest living president. 

Seven years ago Joe Biden was an old man happy in retirement. Then he watched a group of neo-Nazis—emboldened by the election of Donald Trump—take to the streets of a college town in Virginia.

Biden looked around the political landscape and realized that he was the only person capable of defeating Trump in that moment. So he came out of retirement to run not a political campaign, but a fight for the soul of the nation.

And he won.

Biden’s victory set off a new crisis. As president-elect he watched the sitting president attempt a coup d’état—first through legal means, then through extralegal means, and finally through physical violence.

Lost in the analysis of January 6th and the post-election chaos is the critical role Biden played.

He was utterly and completely calm. He spent the post-election period preparing for the transition, even though Trump’s administration refused to cooperate with his team. And here are some of the things Biden did not do:

  • Publicly attack Trump.
  • Attempt to circumscribe Trump’s legal challenges.
  • Spread disinformation.
  • Antagonize Republican voters.
  • Seek to tie “normal” elected Republicans to Trump’s authoritarian designs.

Any of those actions might have helped Biden politically. All of them would have added gasoline to a raging fire.

President-elect Biden chose unity and calm over hysteria and division even as President Trump was attempting to end our democratic experiment. Reflect on that for a moment: Can you think of a single thing Biden said or did during that period?

No, you can’t. And that’s because Biden knew that in order to preserve the legitimacy of our system, the conflict had to be between Donald Trump and the rule of law, not between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. 

As president, Biden passed a large amount of meaningful legislation, but those accomplishments were secondary to his two larger projects, one foreign and one domestic.

On foreign policy, Biden’s big project was re-energizing internationalism. Where Trump had attempted to turn America into an isolated superpower that curried favor with dictators so that it could distance itself from alliances, Biden steeled—and expanded—NATO in the face of Russian aggression and took a hard line against China.

Domestically, Biden created a mechanism for the Republican party to heal itself. Instead of pushing a divisive agenda, Biden focused mostly on popular items with broad bipartisan support, many of which directly benefited Republican constituencies: infrastructure spending, the creation of manufacturing jobs, immigration reform, reducing medical costs for seniors.

Republicans could have supported these policies (which many of them did) while trying to guide their voters away from Trumpism (which almost none of them did).

Over and over Biden tried to make space on the right for a Republican party independent of fascist overtones.

That Republican voters affirmatively chose another run with Trump is no fault of Biden’s. He did everything he could. But his big domestic project failed because the base fact is that a political party can only be as healthy as its voters let it be.

And these days the GOP is a party where voters wear t-shirts bragging about how their nominee wants to be a “dictator.”

Faced with this failure and the resurgence of the authoritarian movement, Biden saved our democracy again—this time by walking away from power. When he realized that he could not win the battle a second time, Biden anointed Kamala Harris—shutting down any contest and giving her the space to establish herself as a force.