Over the past few years, while driving through a few select local neighborhoods, I always saw an interesting flag being flown from a few particular houses.
The flags read, “Let’s Go Brandon,” which, for the sake of being as dignified as possible, is just a euphemism for a vulgar phrase about former president Joe Biden, for those who don’t know.
Obviously, the people living in these homes disapproved of Biden’s presidency and took to very hostile means to express this. And while not everyone who disapproved of him went to this level, he was clearly not very popular when he left office.
But is this justified?
In contemporary politics, it’s tough to get an objective judgment of what is good and bad in our political culture. Rampant partisanship clouds everything, and it hurts our ability to judge our politicians and presidents honestly and fairly.
Ask anyone who flew a “Let’s Go Brandon” flag if Joe Biden did anything good during his presidency, and I bet you’ll get the cynical answer of “Nothing.” The same goes for most Democrats about what Donald Trump did during his first term.
And while we usually need to wait at least a few decades to really get a good picture of whether a president was good or bad for the country, due to recency bias and the overall context of history, extreme partisan politics has made our ability to judge our leaders honestly very important in a contemporary context. Because we all live in this era, and partisan bias will eventually make all our lives worse if we continue to be defensive of party ideologies in favor of an honest assessment of what a politician did, even if we don’t like that person.
So, in the spirit of this, let’s look at some of the most significant pros and cons of Joe Biden’s presidency.
