If you’re interested in a snapshot of how far the authoritarian Republican threat to American government and society has advanced, and how inadequately the Democrats, the media, and the public are responding to it, President Biden’s speech about democracy and political violence last week may qualify as the political Polaroid of the week.
Biden’s speech was remarkable for the crisis it describes and its willingness to describe it. Essentially, Biden accused “MAGA Republicans” not only of looking to subvert elections and overturn American democracy, but of using violence and intimidation to accomplish their goals. He drew a direct line from Donald Trump’s Big Lie about a stolen 2020 election, to the January 6 coup attempt, to the current wave of Republican voter suppression, right-wing political violence, and GOP voter intimidation, including the recent attack by a right-wing radical that hospitalized the husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. He warned that the U.S. stands on a precipice between democracy and autocracy, and urged Americans casting their votes to weight decisively whether a candidate has pledged to accept the election results.
A speech in which a president simply warned the public that the U.S. risks becoming an “autocracy” would itself be noteworthy; a speech that simultaneously indicts the opposing party as an agent of violence and authoritarianism is extraordinary. Yet the speech has already largely disappeared into the media and social spheres like a pebble slipping beneath the ocean surface (though we shouldn’t rule out that it may have energized some Democrats who pay closer attention to presidential speeches). The GOP refused to engage its critique, with Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel remarking that it was “divisive,” “[d]esperate and dishonest,” and that “Biden promised unity but has instead demonized and smeared Americans.” Media coverage has appeared minimal, with little acknowledgement of its extraordinary content or import.
But the third failure — of the Democrats themselves to amplify or better integrate Biden’s critique into their closing message in the midterms — is the one I want to focus on, because it’s what the party has the most control over. As political observers like Brian Beutler and Will Stancil have repeatedly argued, the Democrats seem not to understand that they can’t get a message out effectively if they can’t get the media to amplify it. In this instance, the speech disappeared into something of a black hole, despite its frankly shocking nature, partly because other Democrats weren’t out repeating its themes to reporters and otherwise trying to engage media attention.
More damagingly, despite the deadly serious and largely accurate (more on this below) assessment of our political crisis, the president himself hasn’t consistently and repeatedly made the case that he made in the speech. Even put together with his equally striking Independence Hall speech in September, and various comments since then, the president has not been making his argument against Republican extremism nearly as often as he could. This lack of consistency is echoed by the larger Democratic Party, which has struggled to integrate a compelling and consistent description of rising GOP authoritarianism into its midterm appeal.
As I’ve written before, one glaring reason the Democrats have shied away from making a steady case that would stand a better chance of impacting media coverage of the GOP threat is that they haven’t wanted to fully engage on the substantive reasons that are pushing the GOP towards authoritarianism. Instead, they’ve presented a somewhat abstract indictment of the Republican and right-wing threat — an abstraction that also ended up running through, and undermining, Joe Biden’s recent speech. It is not that anything that Joe Biden said was false, but rather that it was incomplete. It’s not enough to say that the GOP doesn’t want your vote to count or wants to be the only party that wins elections; I think it’s also important to tie this to the actual reasons the GOP has concluded that democracy is now the party’s enemy. The Republicans, first under Trump and increasingly in ways that will survive the former president, represents a coalition of white supremacism, Christian nationalism, and misogyny that doesn’t just want to wreck democracy for its own sadistic pleasure, but in order to impose on the rest of us the values that motivate them. Among other goals, the party seeks second-class status for non-whites, cultural primacy and deference to conservative Christianity, and a reversal of the past century’s gains for women’s rights (achieved in part already by the Supreme Court’s elimination of the constitutional right to an abortion).
Now, I can understand why Biden would want to keep his defense of democracy remarks separated from these more substantive goals of the Republican Party, since including the latter would introduce the possibility that Democrats’ conflict with GOP authoritarianism is actually more of a partisan objection to GOP values and objectives. Indeed, this is a case you seem some centrists and Republicans making. But I think this caution is misplaced, in the first place because no citizens of any country, including the United States, actually live in an abstract democracy. Rather, they live in a democracy that encompasses living, breathing people, and a society that holds certain values which that democracy is a vehicle for promoting and protecting. More to the crux of our current situation, democracy also becomes the means by which inevitable conflicts between values are negotiated and, ideally, resolved or at least mediated.
It is not merely incidental to the GOP’s war on democracy that the party also objects to a host of social and political advances and developments over the last half century, from civil rights to environmental protections to greater gender equality — advances that generally can be said to have the support of the American majority when gauged by the laws that have been passed and public opinion polls. In this sense, the GOP is waging a dual war against America — first, by attempting to subvert our democracy, and second, by attempting to leverage that subversion into an anti-democratic reversal of the last 50 (or 100 years) of progress on a host of fronts, in favor of a white supremacist, pseudo-Christian, and misogynistic vision of this country. The two attacks can’t really be disentangled — and when President Biden tries to separate them, he reduces the strength of the case that can, and I think should, be levied against the current Republican Party.
Instead, for understandable but ultimately erroneous reasons, Biden continues to stress that the authoritarian bent is not shared by a majority of Republicans, even as he made clear in his recent speech that authoritarianism is in the driver’s seat of the GOP. He clearly wants to reach those Republicans he believes can still be reached, and to make this into a fight about democracy, rather than about policy positions and other values that go beyond the question of whether your vote will count or not. In this sense, his strategy has a logic to it — by asking Americans to vote based on candidates’ allegiance to democracy above all else, he is asking GOP and GOP-leaning voters to essentially put their love of country above partisan loyalties and their support of certain values, such as opposition to abortion. From this perspective, the president’s decision to include GOP-incited political violence as part of his indictment makes a lot of sense — even if some Republican voters don’t agree with Democrats’ policy choices, surely they can draw the line at supporting a party that encourages violence as a path to winning elections? But realistically, I just don’t see how Biden and the Democrats can thread the needle of keeping the fight for democracy separate from a host of positions supported by the party and opposed by the GOP, since, again, the ultimate motivation for the GOP’s turn to authoritarianism is to advance their own preferences against those of the Democrats and majority rule.
In some sense, I think the Democrats have tried to thread this needle by sending separate messages to separate audiences. With Democrats, they are more wont to draw the direct connection between the GOP ending democracy and Democratic voters losing a host of rights — the most notable and recent example being the right to abortion. To the small group of persuadable Republican voters and independents, they aim speeches like Biden’s last week, where the struggle is pitched as a high-minded one of democracy versus authoritarianism.
But while both pitches are in themselves true, together they form a more muddled whole, in which the Republicans are portrayed as both largely decent and as necessary partners in governance, and also as existential threats to democracy. Moreover, the stakes of losing our democracy end up getting abstracted from the basics of our lives that most of us frankly take for granted, whether it’s the right to an abortion, to apply for a job without fear we will be discriminated against because of our gender or the color of our skin, or to send our children to school without worrying that they’ll be forced to say prayers to a god they don’t recognize or be shot by a gunman emboldened by the GOP’s radical views of the Second Amendment. Threats to democracy aren’t just morally abominable in and of themselves; they also open the door to existential threats to our dignity, our livelihoods, and our lives — but the Democrats’ mixed messaging has helped keep them from stating matters as bluntly and clearly as they need to be.
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Biden and Democrats also back away from fully identifying the motivation of the GOP as inextricable from the party’s anti-democratic turn because this would require a confrontation with the burning heart of white supremacism and Christian nationalism that drives the Republican Party. This strategic decision, while rational, is also a mistake. The Democrats seem to fear running the risk of becoming identified as the non-white people’s party, and driving more whites into the GOP by making white Americans choose between their racial identity and their loyalty to the country. While there’s certainly a basis for such fears, I also think there are ways to talk about white supremacism that aren’t the same as telling every white voter in America that they’re racist if they don’t vote for the Democratic Party. What I do know is that when the right has placed openly white supremacist ideas like the Great Replacement Theory at the center of its appeal, it is simply crazy for the opposition not to make explicit the role of that white supremacism when making its case against the GOP.
Likewise, I suspect a fear of having the GOP and right-wing media machine distort Democratic attacks prevents the party from more fully calling out the Christian nationalism driving the GOP. Just as the Democrats don’t want to be accused of “hating white people” if they were to fully condemn the role of white supremacism in GOP politics, so they likely worry about being accused of anti-Christian attitudes were they to name Christian nationalism as a threat to the country. Yet this also seems like a case where the benefits would outweigh the costs. While a majority of Americans still identify as Christians, I think most American understand the difference between actual Christianity versus a right-wing Christianity that is a shell of its sacred self, subverted by racist hatred, fundamentalist and anti-human readings of the Bible, and an appalling misogyny. Americans are absolutely free to practice whatever religion they wish, but the corollary to this is that they absolutely have no right to impose their views on others (though we are indeed seeing such an imposition happening now in a rollback of abortion rights that, at its core, is about the political victory of sectarian Christian beliefs).
So I think the benefits of calling out the full illiberal agenda of the authoritarian GOP outweigh overblown risks of inadvertently aiding the right-wing cause by inspiring a white Christian backlash against democracy and the liberal society it has helped nurture — in part because that white Christian backlash is already underway and self-reinforcing. We need now a massive pushback against the backlash, and the way to do this necessarily includes exposing to public view and debate what’s motivating the reactionary backlash in the first place. The indictment of the GOP needs to be substantive as well as procedural — that the reason to oppose the GOP isn’t just because the party wants to subvert democracy, but also because this subversion is driven by priorities that run against the fundamental beliefs of most Americans. The GOP’s odds of victory are enhanced when the Democrats fail to talk about what is fundamentally motivating the current GOP.
And lest this sound as abstract as talking about a context-free “defense of democracy,” I would add that talking about what the GOP really wants opens the door to highlighting the GOP’s lack of interest in actual policies to benefit the material existence of ordinary Americans. A GOP that prioritizes disparagement of minorities and the elevation of white Americans isn’t going to prioritize an economy that works for all, since that would inevitably mean policies that help, well, everyone, no matter the color of their skin. A GOP that talks so much about supposedly stolen elections does so to distract from the reality of wages stolen from workers or stagnant over the last several decades. A GOP that believes the earth was made in seven days by an omnipotent God and rejects science doesn’t have anything to offer Americans who are already suffering the effects of climate change, from supercharged storms hitting Florida to supercharged forest fires across the West.
It seems to me that in the midst of our profound democratic crisis, more truth-telling, not less, should be the order of the day. If America has deep conflicts, then let’s actually talk about those, not cover them over because it might offend some people, backed by faith that as open a discussion as possible will rally a majority, sooner or later, to defend the society we’ve built together. We’re not going to win this fight through idealism and abstract appeals to principle alone; we also need to root it as firmly as possible in our actual lives, the things we cherish, and the challenges we face together.