There is no single more important issue in American politics today than strengthening U.S. democracy and defeating the authoritarian movement that has rallied behind Donald Trump and the Republican Party. After the violent attempted coup by Trump on January 6, the Republican Party not only rapidly united around the former president, but made his war on American democracy fully their own. By promulgating Trump’s Big Lie that Democrats stole the 2020 election, and forging ahead with voter suppression and election sabotage efforts in state after state so that what failed in 2020 might succeed in 2022 and 2024, the GOP embraced insurrection by other means.
And so, for the last 20 months or so, the United States has essentially faced a rebellion by one of its two major political parties — a slow-motion insurrection that neither the public, nor the media, nor (most critically) the Democratic Party seemed to fully recognize or acknowledge. This imbalance has been all the more agonizing when you stop to consider how very aware the GOP has been of its subversive aims throughout this time.
So let’s hope that President Biden’s speech last week at Independence Hall marks the start of a sustained, effective strategy by the Democratic Party to fully engage in the necessary fight against America’s homegrown authoritarian movement. From start to finish, it was simply a startling and historical speech for an American president to make (and to have to make), in which Biden identified the dominant faction of a rival political party as scheming to destroy American democracy:
MAGA Republicans do not respect the Constitution. They do not believe in the rule of law. They do not recognize the will of the people.
They refuse to accept the results of a free election. And they’re working right now, as I speak, in state after state to give power to decide elections in America to partisans and cronies, empowering election deniers to undermine democracy itself.
[. . .]
They promote authoritarian leaders, and they fan the flames of political violence that are a threat to our personal rights, to the pursuit of justice, to the rule of law, to the very soul of this country.
In other words, Biden identified the MAGA movement as a clear and present danger to American democracy — he even quoted conservative Judge Michael Luttig saying this exact thing. The seriousness of such a charge can’t be understated; it is equal to the seriousness of the threat, and, as throughout the speech, Biden seems to recognize that the U.S. is in an existential struggle for its future; at one point, he described how we’re at a national “inflection point.”
Crucially, Biden paired his attack on the MAGA movement with a path to solving it — the political involvement of the overwhelming democratic majority whose wishes the Trump Republicans seek to overcome. Again and again, he talked about the “will” of the American people, and insisted that our fate is in all our hands. Such advice is democratically sound and realistic, and accords with the advice I’ve seen from experts on authoritarianism who stress the importance of broad coalitions in turning back such movements. In a similarly productive vein, Biden enumerated the solid accomplishments of his administration to date — the economy recovery bill, the infrastructure bill, and the Inflation Reduction Act with its enormous downpayment on a green energy-fueled economy. Against the Trump Republicans’ goals of dragging us backwards, he spoke optimistically of American potential.
That Biden recognizes the gravity of this moment could also be seen in his sustained riff on the impermissibility of political violence in America. He both condemned the violent rhetoric of the Trump Republicans (appearing to specifically reference not only January 6 but recent comments by politicians like Senator Lindsey Graham about riots in the streets if Trump is ever indicted) and the incompatibility of violence with democracy — both points I’ve been desperate to make and publicize here at The Hot Screen. You could also see Biden tying this condemnation of violence with his larger point that the majority must rule, pushing the idea that the vast majority of people oppose violence and that it’s the tool of those who seek to thwart their will.
Critiques that Biden was overly partisan are simply farcical; Biden bent over backwards to narrow his critique to MAGA Republicans, and he couched his remedy in terms of American coming together, not in terms of telling the public to vote blue or else. But I do think the criticism that Biden spoke in front of a backdrop in which two Marine guards were visible is worth noting and addressing. Commentary that Biden was somehow himself appropriating the pageantry of authoritarianism doesn’t really hold up, insofar as Biden’s speech communicated a message antithetical to the idea that we need a strongman in charge to restore law and order (witness the various times he noted that the power to fix things is in the hands of the American voter). But why did the White House choose martial imagery, also echoed in the red backdrop, with its connotations of danger? My guess is that the inclusion of the Marines was a deliberate message meant to signal that American’s constitutional government is indeed prepared to defend itself, including against those who would use violence to overthrow it. One strategy we’ve been seeing from the right is to paint federal agencies like the FBI as heavy-handed state agents stamping on American liberties; this is part of a larger effort to undercut the very agencies of state power charged with protecting us from insurrectionists, violent white supremacists, and their ilk. If the Biden White House wanted to signal that the country is in something of a war with insurrectionist forces, I’m all for it.
It was a bit trippy to listen to a presidential speech that sounded a lot like a Hot Screen column, but I won’t object to feeling included in the mainstream on this most vital of topics. But in the spirit of encouraging Biden (and the rest of the Democratic Party) to sound even more like THS, here’s the more critical commentary that you may have seen coming.
First, even the trenchancy of this speech will matter little if Biden and the rest of his party don’t continue to repeat and articulate its ideas going forward. It’s hard not to shake the memory of Biden’s speech commemorating January 6, in which strong language about democracy under attack wasn’t paired with a specific-enough indictment on who was doing the attacking, and was certainly not followed up by a sustained effort to repeat its message of an endangered republic. I’m cautiously optimistic it will be different this time, in that Biden very specifically identified a significant percentage of the GOP as seeking to destroy American democracy. Dropping the topic would be nonsensical and noticeable to Democratic partisans and their GOP opponents alike, respectively liable to dishearten and encourage these two groups. Staying on this message is all the more important in light of the faltering performance of major media organs, such as in the decision of big networks not to broadcast Biden’s speech live.
Future speeches and comments by Biden and the Democrats also need to dig deeper into the specifics not only of what the MAGA movement is doing that is so objectionable, but into motivations. Biden touched on the GOP authoritarians’ goals mostly in broad terms, such as in saying that they won’t accept elections results when they won’t win and their willingness to court violence. These are important points, but politics isn’t just about abstract ideals. When Biden mentioned that the MAGA movement opposes the right to choose, the right to privacy, and the right to marry, he conveyed more of the concrete threats it poses — more of this in the future would be productive. In a similar vein, it is time to start naming names, and identifying those particular GOP politicians who are most involved with taking a wrecking ball to democracy and the rule of law, and holding them to account in the court of public opinion.
Just as importantly, the Democrats and defenders of American democracy need to truly engage in publicizing what’s driving not just the MAGA politicians but the larger reactionary social movement that fuels the rise of authoritarian politicians like Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis in Florida, and Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania. They need to directly talk about conservative fears of demographic change and the browning of American, along with the fundamentally white supremacist mindset behind such fears; the anxiety of Christian Americans who feel that the country is becoming increasingly secular; and worries around the rising power of women in our society. It’s not enough to describe the MAGA forces as a vague malevolent menace; Democrats also need to hold a mirror up at what's actually motivating this violent anti-democratic movement. On the one hand, this might help promote a national dialogue in which the exaggerated and bigoted fears of a white American minority don’t exist in a self-reinforcing feedback loop of paranoia conducted solely by the bad faith conservative media and politicians on the right. And on the other, talking about the reactionary religious, gender, and racial motivations of the right would also help the American majority recognize the fundamental soundness of the more diverse, publicly secular country that most of us live in and enjoy living in, and to recognize that most of us already stand united by ideals of tolerance, equality, and freedom; it would also ensure that the American majority understands, and rallies against, the very specific threats posed by this reactionary movement, which represents the worst, most intolerant strains of American history and culture.
Joe Biden needs to step up with not just words, but with actions, to actually prosecute and win this struggle against domestic extremists. It’s on point for him to tell us that the solution to defending American democracy is for Americans to get involved in politics and vote — but he must also be aware that such exhortations are meaningless if there aren’t laws in place that ensure that our votes count in the first place. This isn’t just a chicken and egg problem — the Democrats do currently hold Congress, even if by an excruciatingly narrow margin, and it’s in their power to either press forward legislation like the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, or to start talking about it a hell of lot more than they have been recently. I can understand how Biden would want to refrain from putting himself forward as the solution to our democratic challenges — like I noted above, this starts moving into strongman, “I alone can fix it” territory. But I’m not sure if he gets the balance right when he downplays the role he does need to play in advancing the concrete changes we need, like an end to gerrymandering, same-day voter registration, stronger protections for election administrators, and other democracy-strengthening measures.
Finally, Biden and the Democrats will have to continue negotiating the line between condemning the MAGA faction of the GOP, and grappling with the reality that much of the rest of the GOP has essentially embraced or allowed itself to be dominated by the party’s most extreme elements. I cannot see a tremendous amount of difference between a Republican politician who claims to be middle of the road, but still does nothing to speak out against the party’s embrace of a criminal hooligan like Donald Trump. At some point, you have to face the fact that the GOP appears to be corrupted beyond redemption, a point that even some conservatives are now making.