It goes much deeper than Biden and Gay.

Claudine Gay is now the former president of Harvard. Reaction to her catastrophically bad testimony before the House Committee on Education following the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel had the catalytic effect of revealing her serial plagiarism, a cardinal sin in academia. It was the plagiarism that got her.

Joe Biden is still the President of the United States. But his catastrophically low poll numbers suggest that he won’t be come January 20 of next year. Biden’s poor approval numbers are driven by voter concerns about declining personal economic well-being, growing fear that the U.S. will become embroiled in a foreign conflict, rising crime and a self-inflicted illegal immigration crisis.

Harvard will be better off without Claudine Gay. The United States will be better off without Joe Biden.

But it’s not that simple. Getting rid of Claudine Gay won’t fix Harvard. Getting rid of Joe Biden won’t fix the United States. In both cases, the ineptitude, malfeasance, ideological blindness and moral rot will remain when new administrations take over.

The problems at Harvard go well beyond Harvard. Harvard is emblematic of what’s wrong throughout academia. Today in America it is largely the case that the higher the tuition and the higher the perceived prestige of a university, the higher the likelihood that leftist indoctrination – that includes a near pathological fixation on race and gender – has crowded out academic rigor and the passing down of beneficial knowledge and appreciation of the culture to the next generation.

The problems of the country go well beyond Joe Biden. As we have repeatedly said in this space, we the people of a nominally democratic republic have been thoroughly misgoverned by politicians from both parties for more than 30 years.

The nation is $34 trillion in debt. Trust in once respected government departments and agencies – such as the Department of Justice, the FBI and the Centers for Disease Control – has been forfeited by leaders of those institutions who were inept at best and corrupt (more likely) at worst.

Power-addicted politicians in league with power-addicted bureaucrats are incrementally crowding out even the pretense of government of the people, by the people and for the people.

All these things have happened and continue to happen because we – the people – have let them happen.

Even as universities have shifted ever more left while lowering academic standards, we have been unquestioningly accepting the premise that every kid needs to go to college. We then let our kids borrow ruinously to cover tuition that goes up at three times the rate of inflation.

Even as government becomes more bloated and less responsive to the will of the people who pay for it, we continue to simply shrug our shoulders at every misspent dollar and every encroachment on personal liberty.

Vote for whomever you wish in 2024. But know that your vote will be largely meaningless absent the stomach, the spine and the attention span needed for the long hard slog of putting the country back on the footings of its founding principles.