The demeaning spectacle the candidates inflicted upon the nation last week unintentionally showcased how steeply the caliber of America’s political leadership has fallen in recent decades.

Start with Biden. Last month, historian Niall Ferguson published a deliberately provocative essay detailing some of the unsettling similarities between late-era Soviet Union and the USA today.

Ferguson made his case before the Presidential debate. Before a POTUS in full Brezhnev-mode was on display for an hour and a half.

During Leonid Brezhnev’s decline, the Soviet Union lacked anything like a 25th Amendment. The United States has no such excuse for submitting to an unfit commander-in-chief.

From his unsteady, whistle-voiced opening to his shuffling, wife-assisted exit off-stage, Biden was an advertisement for the very incapacity the 25th Amendment intends to protect America against.

A President takes an oath to protect the Constitution against enemies foreign and domestic. The frail, sometimes incoherent figure onstage last week was manifestly in no shape to do either.

In the Kremlin, Tehran, and elsewhere, America’s enemies undoubtedly gained heart from what they saw last week, and presumably made aggressive new calculations.

Biden’s inner circle has been deliberately concealing the condition of the “big guy” in a quest to cling to power. (Propagandists in our politically skewed press must answer for their role in the cover-up, too.)

In a dangerous world, the risks of their duplicity should be obvious. Those could yet prove catastrophic.

Team Biden talks endlessly about the imperative of voting for their candidate to “save democracy.” Evidently, though, the Bidenistas are willing to destroy American democracy in order to save it.

Reportedly, in Biden’s post-debate damage-control conference call with the Democratic National Committee, “the chat function was disabled and no questions were allowed.” How perfectly telling. Such one-way communication smacks more of Soviet-style “democratic centralism” than of normal politicking in an open society. 

Then there is Trump.

The man is a confident, brazen, and absolutely unhesitating liar.

His peculiar talent—his vibrant glee—at lying in public was every bit as central to the debate fiasco last week as his opponent’s decrepitude.

More than a few of Trump’s lies were breath-taking, pro-wrestling scale howlers.

From the claim that Speaker Pelosi turned down thousands of troops to protect the Capitol against the January 6 attack, to the assertion that his proposed tariffs would not penalize Americans (!)[1], Trump happily—seemingly sincerely—said whatever suited him, whenever it suited him.

Once upon a time, some may still recall, Donald Trump actually was a professional wrestling character.

And in the good-fella world of New Jersey casinos and New York construction unions, Vito Corleone’s admonition to “never tell anybody outside the family what you’re thinking” may sound like wise advice.

But for the leader of the free world, the “Art of the Deal” entails earning the consent of the governed at home, and trust from allies abroad—a problematic project for a celebrity unabashedly in awe of his own skills as a BS artist. Put to work once again in the White House, such “skills” can hardly but degrade our government—and endanger the Pax Americana.

In a better functioning polity, civil society might hold a leader with scant respect for the truth to account. Unfortunately, the media and the academy are both deeply compromised on that score nowadays: the slow death of truth in the public square is on their hands, too.

For anyone who does not recall firsthand the 1980 Presidential debate: spare the time to witness it.

Not so long ago, the man who would (rightly) lose by a landslide nevertheless made a spirited, principled, mainly intelligent case for his Presidency.

That 1980 debate shows how much we have lost, and need to reclaim.

We have no Reagan today—we don’t even have a Carter.

But the country’s current political doldrums are neither inevitable nor incurable.

Colleagues at AEI have been at the forefront in both diagnosing our current political travails and prescribing some of the remedies for them.

Yuval Levin has done sterling service laying out some of the work ahead. Others have too.

Restoring our polity to full health will likely be a long-term task.

But the cure begins with appreciating, and understanding, America’s founding documents and ideas. They remain the North Star to guide us out of our present woes.

Let our re-learning begin.

[1] By definition, a tariff is an import tax imposed on domestic markets and paid by domestic consumers

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