The Will to Power and the Presidency

After his spectacularly dreadful debate performance against Donald Trump, Joe Biden jumped on the opportunity (if that phrase can be applied to the man) to calm the storm of calls for his resignation by having an interview on ABC—to prove to the 50 million debate watchers who cringingly watched him sputtering like an old jalopy that he was up for the job. The result was not much better and did little to silence the growing cry for the president to suspend his campaign.

“I’ll feel, as long as I gave it my all, and did as good a job as I know I can do…” Biden said, “that’s what this is about.”

Is it? We the people disagree. This is about a good deal more than doing your best in the highest office in the land as an 81-year-old. Once again, Biden stumbled and trailed in his speech, seemed confused, disconnected, and foggy as he endured personal probing about his health, stamina, and mental acuity. He brushed off his debate showing by saying he had a “bad night” repeatedly (an obvious talking point) and meandered about the incisive questions like the forgetful codger he is.

Though he took full responsibility for his “bad night,” his excuses of exhaustion and having a cold in his head were hardly reassuring. “I realized I wasn’t in control,” he said, relating to Trump’s muted-mic commentary, prompting a further vote of no-confidence in the cracker-barrel Commander-in-Chief. But feeble though Joe Biden clearly is, there is a force of will present in his vows to remain in the race. He said the only thing that would make him call it quits is if “the Lord Almighty” came down and demanded it. 

This poll-denying defiance may be an old man’s pride—of which, Biden has plenty—but it also smacks of a political defiance that gives life to ideology and political delusion. This brand of defiance involves the sheer, stubborn force of will to make what is not so, so—an illusory, self-destructive attitude that is far from the honest regard and respect for reality that self-aware Catholics hold sacred. And this attitude is not limited to the blind, blunt determinism of the Biden-Harris ticket—Donald Trump, too, with his trumpeting MAGA crusade, is a steamrolling juggernaut himself. 

Welcome to the 2024 rumble. In this corner, the immovable Joe Biden with his pottering insistence on his record and shaky assurances that he’s as sharp as ever. And in this corner, the unstoppable Donald Trump with WWF theatrics, bombastic braggadocio, and demagogic rhetoric, shouting about forcibly cleansing the country of elitist corruption, forcibly defending it from illegal invasion, and forcibly keeping it free of international conflict by virtue of his savvy, smart, successful self. 

While Trump is certainly the better candidate, is there much difference in these opponents’ will to power? Both exhibit a force-of-will attitude in the face of opposing realities that is reminiscent of the social theories of the radical German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. 

Breaking with accepted moral and political norms was central to Nietzsche’s late-nineteenth-century philosophy of securing power by claiming it with an insistence that overawed all other takers. The will to win was all the justification needed in this system of the strong asserting their natural place over the weak and seizing what was stolen by the errors of Christian morality. 

Nietzsche posited that the Christian religion was answerable for humanity’s moral and societal decline. Religion, he asserted, trained human beings to be submissive to a fault, to revel in pity and stagger under guilt. As beings driven by power, such feelings were fundamentally devastating, for humility is theoretically disadvantageous to a nature that desires dominance. According to this line of thought, when people sympathize with others and act selflessly, they condemn themselves to inferiority and retard the social progress of the species. 

After the Enlightenment rang in God’s death, humanity was well out of religion and well into nihilism; free to define human meaning in the political arena. The same people who once felt shame before God for sin now felt shame before one another for privilege. The elimination of social difference came next to remove shame once and for all. Nietzsche wrote that this cultural leveling, however, was more debilitating to humanity’s power-seeking nature than even religion. For Nietzsche, such contradiction to human superiority left humanity racing toward depression, disillusionment, and, finally, the will-to-nothingness.

The only hope for the human race was the corrective generation he called the Supermen or the Overmen: those who rose above societal oppression and haughtily defied the community’s moral code. The Supermen would not apologize for being high and mighty (despite age or criminal record), but instead, they would claim their rightful place of command willfully and shamelessly.

Authority would never be a matter of old morals to the Supermen, for they would pass beyond the traditional restrictions of good and evil. They would, instead, determine morality by actions that would focus on their good rather than the common good. Nietzsche posited that the masses would venerate these Supermen, recognizing in them a realization of their own inhibited nature: the nature they themselves were too timid to enact but identified with strongly. Average men would uphold the Supermen, beholding in them what they once saw in God and now in social politics.

Could it be that Joe Biden and Donald Trump, with their rigid wills and slippery morals, are the American Supermen? They are men who break convention and common sense with impunity and are admired by their flaw-ignoring base. Trump adopts a Nietzschean punch with his extremist, egotist bluster, crowing over the pathetic rationalizations of the world’s losers.

Joe Biden has his own will to power in his resolve to keep running when his time is obviously up, but there is more determined denial in his policies. His flagrant spending looks to force economic health; his immigration policies (or lack of them) are weakening the country in the name of strengthening it; his calm, calculating statesman’s demeanor goes for that slow-and-steady-wins-the-race principle as he firmly advocates the murder of children, gender affirming abuse, invasive healthcare, botched foreign policies, climate change nonsense, and same-sex “marriage.”

But Donald Trump is not really a Superman. He is a salesman. Joe Biden is not a Superman, either. He is a strawman. Trump is an elitist critic of the elite, bull-horning mass frustration at the Washington machine. Biden is a wheezy old swamp thing who does as he’s told by whoever’s behind the curtain and will do so till the presidency is pried from his cold dead fingers. Trump wields his ego like a weapon to gain attention. Biden yammers about his record to gain confidence. But what we have on our hands is what Jimmy Carter called a crisis of confidence—even though it exists simultaneously with the unjustified and unflappable confidence of these two willful politicians. 

America’s hope lies not in a Nietzschean will to power, but rather in the Christian checking of the will. Friedrich Nietzsche’s Superman represents not the natural human self, but an unnatural human with no self. To live without shame is a denial of human nature—of fallen human nature—and is preeminently inhuman. Nietzsche’s philosophy frames morality as arbitrary and power as all. Nietzsche’s agenda allows the powerful to determine morality and for the rabble to revere the powerful, mesmerized by their power and mimicking their morality. 

Joe Biden and Donald Trump both bear an interesting philosophical parallel to the Superman. But, in the end, they are profoundly simpler than anything Nietzsche conceived. What is most confounding, though, is that so many Americans are taking the bait all the same. The dignity of old or irascible men should be held in higher regard, and such as they shouldn’t be allowed to have their will, no matter how iron-willed they are.

[Photo Credit: Getty Images]