July 1, 2021
By Ezra Klein
Opinion Columnist
This weekend, American skies will be aflame with fireworks celebrating our legacy of freedom and democracy, even as Republican legislature after Republican legislature constricts the franchise and national Republicans have filibustered the expansive For The People Act. It will be a strange spectacle.
It is hard to view your own country objectively. There is too much cant and myth, too many stories and rituals. So over the past week, I’ve been asking foreign scholars of democracy how the fights over the American political system look to them. These conversations have been, for the most part, grim.
“I’m positive that American democracy is not what Americans think it is,” David Altman, a political scientist in Chile, told me. “There is a cognitive dissonance between what American citizens believe their institutions are and what they actually are.”
“The thing that makes me really worried is how similar what’s going on in the U.S. looks to a series of countries in the world where democracy has really taken a big toll and, in many cases, died,” Staffan Lindberg, a Swedish political scientist who directs the Varieties of Democracy Institute, said. “I’m talking about countries like Hungary under Orban, Turkey in the early days of Erdogan’s rule, Modi in India, and I can go down the line.”
Perhaps perversely, I was cheered by Lindberg’s list. America defies those examples in a consequential, and often ignored, way. In most cases of democratic collapse, a dominant party deploys its power and popularity to tighten its control. But there is more possibility in America than that. Democrats have a slim governing majority, at least nationally, and they are not fighting for the status quo. Even Senator Joe Manchin’s compromise proposal — to ban partisan gerrymandering, pass automatic voter registration, ensure 15 days of early voting, reinvigorate the Voting Rights Act and make Election Day a holiday, to name just a few provisions — would be a striking expansion of American democracy, bigger by far than anything passed since the 1960s.
Liberal pundits like, well, me, often focus on the risk of backsliding. And that is real. The Brennan Center for Justice reports that between early January and mid-May, at least 14 states enacted 22 laws that restrict access to the vote, putting the U.S. “on track to far exceed its most recent period of significant voter suppression.” A separate report by three voting rights groups tallied up 24 laws enacted in 14 states this year that will allow state legislatures to “politicize, criminalize and interfere in election administration.”
But the reverse is also true: The Brennan Center found at least 28 bills expanding voter access were signed in 14 states. The story of this era isn’t regression, but polarization. “We are becoming a two-tiered society when it comes to voting,” Ari Berman, author of “Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America,” told me on a recent episode of my podcast, “where it’s really easy to vote in some places, namely bluer places. And it’s really hard or getting harder to vote if you live in a red state.”
One thing foreign observers see clearly is that multiethnic democracy in America is a flower rooting in thin soil. We sometimes brag that we are the world’s oldest democracy, and that is true enough in a technical sense. But if you use a more modern definition of democracy, one that includes voting rights for women and minorities as a prerequisite, then we are one of the world’s younger democracies.
“For me, as a democracy scholar, it’s ridiculous to say America is the oldest democracy in the world,” Lindberg said. “The U.S. did not become a democracy until at least after the civil rights movement in the ’60s. In that sense, it’s kind of a new democracy, like Portugal or Spain.”
This is evident in our institutions. A society that valued democracy and political participation would not design the system we have. “For instance, the Electoral College,” Altman said. “From my perspective, this is a neolithic institution. It surprises every scholar of democracy worldwide.” Or the scheduling of American elections. “Why do you vote on Tuesday?” Altman asked me. “You don’t give people space to vote. You have to ask your employer to have the time to go out and vote. It’s weird.” Then there’s the role of money. “It looks much more like a plutocratic regime of democracy,” he told me.
From this perspective, the Republican Party’s ongoing efforts to silence certain voters and politicize electoral administration are not aberrations from a glittering past of fair and competitive contests. They are reversions to our mean. And that makes them all the likelier to succeed.
“Younger democracies tend to be weaker,” Lindberg said. “It’s much more common that young democracies fail than older ones. If America became so bad that it could no longer be considered a democracy, it would be a return to America’s historical norm: Some liberal rights for some people, but not to the extent that it is a true democracy.”
This is less a fight over the idea of democracy than over who gets to participate in it, and how their participation is weighted. “This isn’t about how people are electing their government,” Ivan Krastev, a political scientist who is the chairman of the Center for Liberal Strategies in Bulgaria, told me. “Everything is about what kind of people the government wants to elect — who you’ll give citizenship, who you’ll give the vote to, who you’ll try to exclude from voting.”
Krastev’s theory, drawing on both European and American history, is that democratic states often have two kinds of majorities. One is the historical majority of the nation-state. In Europe, those majorities tend to be ethnic. In America, it’s bound more tightly by race and religion. But then there’s the more literal definition of a democratic majority: the coalition of voters that can come together to win elections. Unlike the historical majority, the electoral majority can, and does, change every few years.
Often, those two converge. The electoral majority reflects the historical majority. But in America, they increasingly conflict. “It used to seem these majorities were in harmony, but now it’s about how much the electoral majorities can change the permanent majority,” he told me. During the Yugoslav wars, Krastev said, there was a famous saying. “Why should I be in a minority in your country when you can be a minority in mine?”
At times, this is startlingly explicit, as when Robin Vos, the Republican speaker of the Wisconsin Assembly, said, “If you took Madison and Milwaukee out of the state election formula, we would have a clear majority.” To Krastev, though, Vos’s comment simply makes the subtext of the moment into text. “The major power of the political community is the power to include and exclude,” he said. “Who decides who you are going to exclude?”
I do not want to be blasé about the Republican Party’s assault on elections. It is a fearful thing to watch one of America’s two political parties develop the view that democracy itself is its problem, and an agenda with which to try to neuter the threat. I’ve described this as “the doom loop for democracy”: a party that wins power while losing votes will use the power it still holds to undermine the voters and the elections that threaten its future.
But that is not the only possible outcome here. It has been a cheering development to watch more and more Democrats realize that they actually need to fight for democracy. And with a simple change to the filibuster, they could pass legislation that would do more to better America’s electoral institutions than anything since the Voting Rights Act in 1965.
In that way, Republicans perceive the threat correctly: A country that is far closer to being truly democratic, where the unpopularity of their ideas would expose them to punishing electoral consequences. A country worthy of the stories we tell about it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/01/opin ... e=Homepage
The Rest of the World Is Worried About America
Re: The Rest of the World Is Worried About America
SCOTUS ruled today States may impose onerous voting restrictions as along as they stop short of prohibiting minorities from voting.This ruling augments the Court's earlier ,recent rulings that effectively prohibit Federal Courts from reviewing partisan gerrymandering and eliminate the requirement under the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that certain States have their voting rules reviewed and approved at the Federal level before implementation.SCOTUS also ruled today " charities " like IRC 501(c)(4) do not have to disclose identities of their donors to State election officials, even if the identities are kept confidential by the State,and even though such disclosure is required to the IRS,as such disclosure allegedly burdens the donors' 1st Amend. association and speech rights.This ruling augments the Court's earlier Citizens United ruling allowing corporations to make political contributions just like individuals can.
The Iowa Supreme Court ruled 6-1 this week that the State can cut off funding to Planned Parenthood for educational programs PP used to conduct for the State having nothing do with abortion because PP separately provides 95% of Iowa's abortions. The Iowa Court also ruled a jury should not have found former GOP Gov.Branstad lied when he testified he did not know a State official Branstad tried to remove was gay, a fact many other top State and GOP officials seemed to know, and the jury should not have awarded the official damages for sex discrimination.Branstad had appointed a couple of other officials he knew to be gay.
In case one thinks the courts can, will, or even are inclined to save democracy.
The Iowa Supreme Court ruled 6-1 this week that the State can cut off funding to Planned Parenthood for educational programs PP used to conduct for the State having nothing do with abortion because PP separately provides 95% of Iowa's abortions. The Iowa Court also ruled a jury should not have found former GOP Gov.Branstad lied when he testified he did not know a State official Branstad tried to remove was gay, a fact many other top State and GOP officials seemed to know, and the jury should not have awarded the official damages for sex discrimination.Branstad had appointed a couple of other officials he knew to be gay.
In case one thinks the courts can, will, or even are inclined to save democracy.
Re: The Rest of the World Is Worried About America
This looks like a very dark future rushing at us all.
And it's all "legal."
Never forget.
Our generation changed society with our outrage, political involvement and even our music.
Why are today's youngsters (except for a small percentage) so incredibly passive? Where are the massive marches on Washington organized to protest the Republican blockage of HR1? It's just not happening!
Divide & conquer was the lesson learned by those who would rule, rather than serve America. They've been plotting, scheming, and creeping up on this outcome ever since.
Looks like Hillary was right about the "vast Right-wing conspiracy."
But we knew that all along, didn't we?
And it's all "legal."
Never forget.
Our generation changed society with our outrage, political involvement and even our music.
Why are today's youngsters (except for a small percentage) so incredibly passive? Where are the massive marches on Washington organized to protest the Republican blockage of HR1? It's just not happening!
Divide & conquer was the lesson learned by those who would rule, rather than serve America. They've been plotting, scheming, and creeping up on this outcome ever since.
Looks like Hillary was right about the "vast Right-wing conspiracy."
But we knew that all along, didn't we?
Re: The Rest of the World Is Worried About America
The Supreme Court Abandons Voting Rights
July 1, 2021
By The Editorial Board
The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.
The 1965 Voting Rights Act was one of the most important pieces of legislation in American history. By outlawing racial discrimination in voting and imposing federal oversight in states with histories of discriminating, it finally enforced the 15th Amendment and marked the first time the nation could call itself a truly representative democracy. Until the last decade, the law occupied a sacred spot in the American legal system. In 2006, Congress reauthorized the law nearly unanimously.
Since then, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has been dismantling it, piece by piece.
The latest blow came Thursday, when all six conservative justices voted to uphold two Arizona voting laws despite lower federal courts finding clear evidence that the laws make voting harder for voters of color — whether Black, Latino or Native American. One law requires election officials to throw out ballots that were cast in the wrong precinct; the other bars most people and groups from collecting voters’ absentee ballots and dropping them off at polling places.
Under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which bars any law that discriminates on the basis of race, whether intentionally or not, the Arizona laws should have been invalidated. But the conservative justices dismissed the challenge because, they said, only a small number of people were affected. “The mere fact that there is some disparity in impact does not necessarily mean that a system is not equally open or that it does not give everyone an equal opportunity to vote,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote in an opinion joined by the other conservatives.
That is a dismissive wave of the hand at precisely the sort of evidence that Congress told voting-rights plaintiffs to present in court. As Justice Elena Kagan pointed out in a dissent longer than the ruling itself, small numbers can make a big difference. In 2020, for example, Joe Biden beat Donald Trump in Arizona by a little over 10,000 votes — fewer than the state threw out based on the out-of-precinct policy in two of the past three presidential elections.
Since the court is talking about “mere facts,” the conservative justices might have noted the mere fact that voting fraud, which lawmakers in a number of states claim they are trying to prevent with laws like the ones in Arizona, is essentially nonexistent. As one federal judge put it several years ago, such laws are akin to using “a sledgehammer to hit either a real or imaginary fly on a glass coffee table.”
That doesn’t appear to bother the conservative justices, who have given a free pass to state legislatures to discriminate, even as they demand more and more from voters trying to show that they are hurt by that discrimination.
This subverts the whole purpose of the Voting Rights Act, which was enacted because of the persistence of discriminatory state voting laws and policies, a point Justice Kagan made throughout her dissent. “What is tragic here is that the Court has (yet again) rewritten — in order to weaken — a statute that stands as a monument to America’s greatness, and protects against its basest impulses,” she wrote.
Those impulses have been on flagrant display over the past several years, as Republican-controlled legislatures across the country have raced one another to pass laws that make voting harder — whether through stringent voter-identification requirements, limits on early and absentee voting, hurdles to registration, indiscriminate purges of voter rolls and laws like Arizona’s. Many of these laws disproportionately hurt voters of color. Already this year, 28 laws restricting voting have passed in 17 states, according to a running tally by the Brennan Center for Justice.
The conservatives on the court choose to be oblivious to the function of these laws, perhaps because they and their colleagues created the conditions for them to thrive in the first place. In 2013, the court gutted the heart of the Voting Rights Act, Section 5, which had required states and localities with a history of discriminatory voting practices — including Arizona — to obtain approval from the federal government before changing or adopting any voting law.
Section 5 was by far the most effective way to prevent voting discrimination, but according to Chief Justice John Roberts — who has been working to hobble the Voting Rights Act since he was a junior lawyer in the Reagan administration — the list of offenders was out of date. “Things have changed dramatically,” he wrote in his 2013 majority opinion, pointing to the increase in Black voter registration and turnout in the years since the Voting Rights Act was adopted. It didn’t seem to occur to him that this increase was precisely because of the law, and not in spite of it. As if to drive home the point, Republican-led states that had been under federal oversight began imposing strict new voting laws within hours of the ruling.
After 2013, Section 2 was the only meaningful tool left in the Voting Rights Act — indeed, Chief Justice Roberts pointed out this fact as supposed consolation when the court eliminated Section 5. But its medicine was never as strong. Lawsuits alleging violations under Section 2 can be brought only after a new voting law has passed and may have been discriminating against voters for years. The suits are expensive and time-consuming, which deters most potential plaintiffs. Even when plaintiffs show incontestable proof of discrimination, as they did in Thursday’s case, the odds are stacked against them.
This is bad news for upcoming legal challenges to Republican-enacted voter restrictions in other states. Just how bad will depend in part on the outcome of a lawsuit the Justice Department filed last week against a sweeping new voting law in Georgia. The suit contends that the Georgia Republicans who passed it, upset at Democratic victories in the state’s presidential and Senate contests, intentionally targeted Black voters, who vote overwhelmingly Democratic. Proving intentional discrimination is a high bar, but Georgia’s lawmakers worked hard to make the job easier, passing all kinds of restrictions that disproportionately hurt Black voters.
Congress has been debating a bill that would restore the heart of the Voting Rights Act by reimposing federal oversight of voting laws in states that have repeatedly discriminated in the last 25 years. Thanks to blanket opposition by Republicans and the existence of the filibuster, which allows a minority of senators to block a bill with majority support, the bill is a dead letter — unless Democrats decide to end the filibuster.
Even that step would not turn back the anti-democratic tide, which grew into a wave during the Trump administration. In Georgia, Arizona and elsewhere, Republican lawmakers driven by demonstrable lies about fraud in the 2020 election are changing the rules around how votes are counted and certified. They are stripping power from officials, like the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, who did their jobs in 2020 and refused to succumb to pressure from Mr. Trump and his allies to “find” extra votes and overturn the results to help him win.
The strategy is so dangerous because it is so dull. It’s easy to be outraged by, say, making it a crime to give voters water while they wait in oppressively long lines to cast a ballot, as the new Georgia law does. It’s harder to get worked up about the arcane machinery of election administration. But these laws are of a piece with the voting restrictions being passed by the same lawmakers. Together, they are designed to keep Democratic-leaning voters away from the polls, and to the extent that fails, to deny victory to Democratic candidates, even when they win more votes.
The current conservative majority on the Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice Roberts, shows no interest in thwarting this attack on democracy and protecting Americans’ fundamental constitutional right to vote. The ball is in Congress’s court, and time is fast running out.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/01/opin ... e=Homepage
July 1, 2021
By The Editorial Board
The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.
The 1965 Voting Rights Act was one of the most important pieces of legislation in American history. By outlawing racial discrimination in voting and imposing federal oversight in states with histories of discriminating, it finally enforced the 15th Amendment and marked the first time the nation could call itself a truly representative democracy. Until the last decade, the law occupied a sacred spot in the American legal system. In 2006, Congress reauthorized the law nearly unanimously.
Since then, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has been dismantling it, piece by piece.
The latest blow came Thursday, when all six conservative justices voted to uphold two Arizona voting laws despite lower federal courts finding clear evidence that the laws make voting harder for voters of color — whether Black, Latino or Native American. One law requires election officials to throw out ballots that were cast in the wrong precinct; the other bars most people and groups from collecting voters’ absentee ballots and dropping them off at polling places.
Under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which bars any law that discriminates on the basis of race, whether intentionally or not, the Arizona laws should have been invalidated. But the conservative justices dismissed the challenge because, they said, only a small number of people were affected. “The mere fact that there is some disparity in impact does not necessarily mean that a system is not equally open or that it does not give everyone an equal opportunity to vote,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote in an opinion joined by the other conservatives.
That is a dismissive wave of the hand at precisely the sort of evidence that Congress told voting-rights plaintiffs to present in court. As Justice Elena Kagan pointed out in a dissent longer than the ruling itself, small numbers can make a big difference. In 2020, for example, Joe Biden beat Donald Trump in Arizona by a little over 10,000 votes — fewer than the state threw out based on the out-of-precinct policy in two of the past three presidential elections.
Since the court is talking about “mere facts,” the conservative justices might have noted the mere fact that voting fraud, which lawmakers in a number of states claim they are trying to prevent with laws like the ones in Arizona, is essentially nonexistent. As one federal judge put it several years ago, such laws are akin to using “a sledgehammer to hit either a real or imaginary fly on a glass coffee table.”
That doesn’t appear to bother the conservative justices, who have given a free pass to state legislatures to discriminate, even as they demand more and more from voters trying to show that they are hurt by that discrimination.
This subverts the whole purpose of the Voting Rights Act, which was enacted because of the persistence of discriminatory state voting laws and policies, a point Justice Kagan made throughout her dissent. “What is tragic here is that the Court has (yet again) rewritten — in order to weaken — a statute that stands as a monument to America’s greatness, and protects against its basest impulses,” she wrote.
Those impulses have been on flagrant display over the past several years, as Republican-controlled legislatures across the country have raced one another to pass laws that make voting harder — whether through stringent voter-identification requirements, limits on early and absentee voting, hurdles to registration, indiscriminate purges of voter rolls and laws like Arizona’s. Many of these laws disproportionately hurt voters of color. Already this year, 28 laws restricting voting have passed in 17 states, according to a running tally by the Brennan Center for Justice.
The conservatives on the court choose to be oblivious to the function of these laws, perhaps because they and their colleagues created the conditions for them to thrive in the first place. In 2013, the court gutted the heart of the Voting Rights Act, Section 5, which had required states and localities with a history of discriminatory voting practices — including Arizona — to obtain approval from the federal government before changing or adopting any voting law.
Section 5 was by far the most effective way to prevent voting discrimination, but according to Chief Justice John Roberts — who has been working to hobble the Voting Rights Act since he was a junior lawyer in the Reagan administration — the list of offenders was out of date. “Things have changed dramatically,” he wrote in his 2013 majority opinion, pointing to the increase in Black voter registration and turnout in the years since the Voting Rights Act was adopted. It didn’t seem to occur to him that this increase was precisely because of the law, and not in spite of it. As if to drive home the point, Republican-led states that had been under federal oversight began imposing strict new voting laws within hours of the ruling.
After 2013, Section 2 was the only meaningful tool left in the Voting Rights Act — indeed, Chief Justice Roberts pointed out this fact as supposed consolation when the court eliminated Section 5. But its medicine was never as strong. Lawsuits alleging violations under Section 2 can be brought only after a new voting law has passed and may have been discriminating against voters for years. The suits are expensive and time-consuming, which deters most potential plaintiffs. Even when plaintiffs show incontestable proof of discrimination, as they did in Thursday’s case, the odds are stacked against them.
This is bad news for upcoming legal challenges to Republican-enacted voter restrictions in other states. Just how bad will depend in part on the outcome of a lawsuit the Justice Department filed last week against a sweeping new voting law in Georgia. The suit contends that the Georgia Republicans who passed it, upset at Democratic victories in the state’s presidential and Senate contests, intentionally targeted Black voters, who vote overwhelmingly Democratic. Proving intentional discrimination is a high bar, but Georgia’s lawmakers worked hard to make the job easier, passing all kinds of restrictions that disproportionately hurt Black voters.
Congress has been debating a bill that would restore the heart of the Voting Rights Act by reimposing federal oversight of voting laws in states that have repeatedly discriminated in the last 25 years. Thanks to blanket opposition by Republicans and the existence of the filibuster, which allows a minority of senators to block a bill with majority support, the bill is a dead letter — unless Democrats decide to end the filibuster.
Even that step would not turn back the anti-democratic tide, which grew into a wave during the Trump administration. In Georgia, Arizona and elsewhere, Republican lawmakers driven by demonstrable lies about fraud in the 2020 election are changing the rules around how votes are counted and certified. They are stripping power from officials, like the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, who did their jobs in 2020 and refused to succumb to pressure from Mr. Trump and his allies to “find” extra votes and overturn the results to help him win.
The strategy is so dangerous because it is so dull. It’s easy to be outraged by, say, making it a crime to give voters water while they wait in oppressively long lines to cast a ballot, as the new Georgia law does. It’s harder to get worked up about the arcane machinery of election administration. But these laws are of a piece with the voting restrictions being passed by the same lawmakers. Together, they are designed to keep Democratic-leaning voters away from the polls, and to the extent that fails, to deny victory to Democratic candidates, even when they win more votes.
The current conservative majority on the Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice Roberts, shows no interest in thwarting this attack on democracy and protecting Americans’ fundamental constitutional right to vote. The ball is in Congress’s court, and time is fast running out.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/01/opin ... e=Homepage
Re: The Rest of the World Is Worried About America
Undoubtedly.Is America Falling Behind?
We are ruled more and more by a hysterical, anti-democracy minority that wants to take away hard-earned rights of the majority.
The resulting hostility is trashing the American experiment.
Re: The Rest of the World Is Worried About America
And Biden is fumbling.
Jennifer Rubin in WAPO today:
President Biden and his team came into office with the benighted belief that they could “lower the temperature” in Washington and reduce the profile of the presidency. The result, Biden hoped, would be more functional and productive politics.
It did not work. Instead, he has too frequently ceded rhetorical energy to Republicans and has demoralized his own side by coming across as blasé in the face of outrageous developments.
Biden’s tough rhetoric often lasts no more than one speech (e.g., his speech in Atlantic rebuking Georgia’s voting restrictions, his White House speech decrying the mass shooting in Uvalde, Tex.) before he returns to speaking in pale pastels. His thirst for bipartisanship, whetted by limited success on guns and noncontroversial deals on infrastructure, appears to have sapped him of the righteous anger our times demand.
Biden’s first reaction to the shooting in Highland Park, Ill., on July 4 was illustrative. Granted, he was speaking to military families on a holiday, but his words Monday afternoon struck the wrong note. “You all heard what happened today,” he said, not even using the word “shooting” or mentioning the location. He continued, “I know many Americans look around today and see a divided country and are deeply worried about that fact. I understand. But I believe we’re more united than we are divided.”
Actually, we’re more divided than ever — and increasingly so thanks to the Supreme Court. And the worry is not that we are divided, but that our democracy is imperiled.
Biden’s written remarks were somber and more heartfelt, but devoid of anger. “Jill and I are shocked by the senseless gun violence that has yet again brought grief to an American community on this Independence Day,” the statement read. “As always, we are grateful for the first responders and law enforcement on the scene.” He noted the gun reforms he recently signed into law and meekly offered that “there is much more work to do, and I’m not going to give up fighting the epidemic of gun violence.” It sounded depressed, not defiant.
The murmurs of dissatisfaction rolling through the Democratic Party in part stem from a sense that his serene, platitudinous language and disinclination to fully denounce the GOP only minimize the dangers we face and disguises the extremism of democracy’s opponents. Whether it is his reflexive opposition to court reform or his characterization of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) as being “rational” on guns, Biden’s responses do not match the level of fear, frustration and anger that millions of Americans feel.
Democrats cheered when Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) said in the wake of the July 4 massacre, “If you’re angry today, I’m here to tell you: Be angry. I’m furious. I’m furious that yet more innocent lives were taken by gun violence.” He continued, “While we celebrate the Fourth of July just once a year, mass shootings have become our weekly — yes, weekly — American tradition.” He added, “There are going to be people who say that today is not the day, that now is not the time, to talk about guns. I’m telling you there is no better day and no better time than right here and right now.” That is how a leader talks.
Certainly, the country does not need an alarmist president. But for those on the front lines battling for democracy, racial justice, women’s autonomy and an end to gun violence, anodyne statements and grating paeans to bipartisanship reinforce the sense that Biden is out of touch and unprepared to “battle for the soul of our nation.”
Instead, the White House appears to suffer from the mentality that defending Democrats amounts to Trumpism on the left. Cedric L. Richmond, a former Democratic representative from Louisiana who left his seat to work in the Biden White House, recently told CNN: “The country didn’t elect Joe Biden because they wanted a Democratic Donald Trump to go out there every day and divide the country more.” In Richmond’s mind, demanding Biden speak up more aggressively is the “the same foolishness that got us Donald Trump.”
That’s just daft. It shows an utter lack of appreciation for the nature of the GOP and the critical need to mobilize the rest of the country in defense of democratic values. Surely, Democrats are hoping the rest of the administration doesn’t buy into this.
Ironically, Democrats for the moment have the upper hand on some of the most powerful issues, including gun safety and abortion. It’s obvious that McConnell desperately wants to change the topic. (Remember when “cultural issues” were losers for Democrats?) That is because these issues animate millions of voters, especially suburbanites and women.
Unlike Biden, Democrats up and down the ballot appear to recognize we are at an inflection point. Rather than wait for direction from the president or some unified message from advocacy groups, they should continue doing precisely what they have begun: Highlight the cruelty, extremism and unfitness of their opponents. Run on women’s autonomy and ending senseless gun violence. Put initiatives on the ballot to draw voters to the polls. Condemn a radical, out-of-control Supreme Court and vow to reform it — by filibuster reform if necessary.
If the president, the leader of his party, cannot channel that and capture the zeitgeist, the party will need to do it without him. If that happens, the sense that Biden is not the man for the moment will only intensify.
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