Last week, the president referred to MAGA Republicans’ philosophy as “semi-fascism.” On Wednesday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre doubled down, framing MAGA Republicans as an “extreme threat to our democracy.” Biden sounds ready to rumble.īy framing his remarks tonight as a battle for “the soul of the nation,” Biden is doing what he did best in the 2020 election - elevating issues outside of partisan context and speaking to values. If that vision of what constitutes normal is defunct, then Biden’s critics were right.īiden and the White House have been dropping some fighting words. To help make government work in the past. That’s not the way it works anymore… I’ve worked across the aisle to reach consensus. “You can’t work with Republicans anymore. ‘Biden just doesn’t get it,’” the candidate had said.
And the restoration of the status quo ante, in Biden’s view, required ditching the antagonism Donald Trump and his movement embraced. They’re sick of the childish behavior,” the president said at the time. When he declared his intention to run for president in Philadelphia over three years ago, Biden essentially promised the public that he would restore the sense of normalcy America lost in the Trump years. “Too much of what’s happening in our country today is not normal,” Biden declared. Dressing up a boilerplate campaign trail speech as though it was an epochal address about the fate of the nation - in a midterm election year, no less - strikes an apoplectic tone that isn’t matched by America’s empirical circumstances.īiden was, however, admirably honest when he confessed to failing the American public. The idea that giving “power to decide elections in America to partisans and cronies,” like, say, secretaries of state, has been a bipartisan project for years. That admission alone lowers the temperature on what the White House clearly hoped would be a white-hot call to action. Some of this accurately describes a faction of American voters on both ends of the spectrum, though Biden chose not to quantify the number because it is unquantifiable. In a moment of diminishing rights, in a pivotal election year, the rhetoric needs to be matched with realistic plans that go beyond “vote harder.” White House executive action has simply not been enough to deliver abortion access in states, and Biden’s speech can’t defend against a Supreme Court that refuses to recognize the racist actions of local election boards. Congress has yet to pass a voting rights bill that restores access to the ballot that was commonplace for decades. Wade failed, with some Democratic senators helping the bill’s demise. It was good for Democrats’ electoral prospects for Biden to recite the litany of recent legislative accomplishments, ranging from infrastructure to climate change. But how does Biden plan to protect any of that progress with a Supreme Court packed with originalists and a slate of federal judges poised to assert states’ rights over everything?
The soaring rhetoric was needed for the soul of the country, for people to hear the language of freedom and democracy be used to advance civil rights, not restrict them. He drew a contrast with the past, a place where medical birth control didn’t exist and marriages were limited by the government. He spoke to the threat facing our democracy from political violence and extremist ideology. In a rousing speech, in the city where the Constitution was debated and developed - a backdrop he referenced early on - President Biden spoke to the idea of what it means to be American. “Political violence has always been the answer for white supremacists,” as Elie Mystal, justice correspondent at The Nation, noted after the speech. But in the absence of identifying the threat of white supremacy, he reinforces fears amongst civil rights activists and progressives that the ideology’s pernicious and pervasive effects will prevail. “No matter what the white supremacists and extremists say, I made a bet on you, the American people, and that bet is paying off,” Biden said towards the end of his speech, in a coy and singular reference to what ideologically underpins the MAGA movement.īiden may not have wanted to alienate purple and red Americans who, one would imagine, do not enjoy being identified as racists. While Biden spent much of his speech railing against MAGA Republicans and positioning them as a major existential threat to America’s political project, he stopped himself from going a step further and, with equal force, calling out the social forces this movement feeds off - chiefly, white supremacy.
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