Biden Just Delivered One of the Most Important Speeches Any President Has Had to Deliver
It was a call for us to unify around an endangered "soul of the nation," reminding us "This is a nation that honors our Constitution."
Last night, President Joe Biden publicly acknowledged in a prime time speech the existential threat myriad political writers (including this one), pundits, podcasters, former and current politicians, and journalists have been warning about for years — the rise of right-wing extremism.
While there have always been racist, xenophobic, fascistic elements present in American life, it is not hyperbole to compare today’s escalating peril to democracy to that which engulfed Europe a century ago.
Speaking for 23 minutes in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Pa., Biden called his predecessor out by name when alerting the American people that “Donald Trump and the MAGA republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic.”
While citing all examples of these extreme threats over just the past half decade is too daunting, the president summed it up:
“History tells us blind loyalty to a single leader and a willingness to engage in political violence is fatal to democracy.
“They’re [MAGA republicans] 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.
“MAGA forces are determined to take this country backwards, backwards to an America where there is no right to choose, no right to privacy, no right to contraception, no right to marry who you love. 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 an obvious dig to South Carolina Lindsey Graham, who recently warned of violent backlash if Donald Trump is charged for stealing classified documents, Biden proclaimed:
“There are public figures — today, yesterday and the day before — predicting and all but calling for mass violence and rioting in the streets. This is inflammatory. It’s dangerous. It’s against the rule of law. And we, the people, must say: This is not who we are.”
In an interview Friday morning on Democracy Now!, Nancy MacLean, Duke University historian, author of Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, said:
“My overall response is that this was the most important speech of President Joe Biden’s political career, and it was a wake-up call to the nation, and particularly to the mainstream media, in the nick of time. He was absolutely right, in my opinion, that the Trump wing of the party and the MAGA republicans have jumped the rails of constitutional democracy, of the factual universe and of representative democracy. You cannot have a democracy in which one party does not accept the legitimacy of the other party’s candidates, elected officials, and the outcomes of elections. But that is where we have come with Donald Trump and the MAGA faction since they first questioned the legitimacy of President Obama’s election and denied that he had been born in America. That was the start of all that has ensued since. And it’s really important that President Biden called that out for the nation.”
Ben Jealous, former head of the NAACP, and president of People for the American Way, responded to the president’s speech:
“I say this as somebody who’s both been a friend of Joe for a long time in politics and yet also taken serious issue when I thought that he was moving in the wrong direction. I was arrested for voting rights protests five times in front of his White House last year. And what we saw tonight was exactly the president we need in this moment.
“He was confident. He was clear about big victories for the climate, big victories for students, big victories for the economy. He was also very clear that he was drawing a line between MAGA extremists and the patriots that are the rest of this nation. He was very clear that we are at an existential moment, a moment I think most of us feel in our bones. And he was also clear, as a student of history, that we have been through worse and triumphed over it.”
Indeed we have.
That is what makes Biden’s speech so important.
It was not just a dig at “the former guy” and his sycophants.
It was a call for us to unify around an endangered “soul of the nation,” to put it in Biden’s words, reminding us “This is a nation that honors our Constitution.”
One of the most important points we must occasionally remind ourselves concerns democracy’s fragility, which Biden addressed.
America has traditionally regarded itself immune to the fissures that condemn weaker democracies.
We hail ourselves as the exemplar of elections, peaceful transitions of power, and civilized political discourse.
We understand intellectually we are imperfect and have done things for which we should not be proud and for which we must atone, like slavery, segregation, and the genocide of Indigenous Americans.
We have supervised elections in other countries to ensure honesty and transparency.
While economic interests and hubris have too frequently been behind our decisions more than good intentions, we want democracy to grow across the globe.
Yet here we are, beginning to look more like Bolivia, Botswana, Brazil, the Czech Republic, Hungary, India, Mauritius, Namibia, Slovenia, and Poland, countries the Global State of Democracy (GSoD Indices) report from the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance states the United States’ “backsliding” democracy is beginning to resemble.
Over the past forty years, we have been in the midst of a slow-moving coup that got accelerated six years after Donald Trump’s election.
Over the past year, we have seen more evidence America is closer to fascism than ever.
Jason Stanley, writing for The Guardian, stated:
“The contemporary American fascist movement is led by oligarchical interests for whom the public good is an impediment, such as those in the hydrocarbon business, as well as a social, political, and religious movement with roots in the Confederacy. As in all fascist movements, these forces have found a popular leader unconstrained by the rules of democracy, this time in the figure of Donald Trump.”
A new report from researchers at the University of California Davis Violence Prevention Research Program (VPRP) reveals an alarming number of 8,600 respondents — one in five — believe political violence may be necessary to achieve certain political goals.
According to the survey, half of Americans somewhat agree the country will engage in civil war “in the next few years.”
Nearly one in five assert they will soon arm themselves in situations “where political violence is justified.”
Dr. Rachel Kleinfeld, a Carnegie Endowment senior fellow specializing in democracy and security, stated:
“This is a very strong methodological study that backs up what we are seeing in a lot of other data. America is at risk of experiencing major political violence.”
This data comes at the same time members of the House of Representatives are going to start receiving up to $10,000 to upgrade security at their homes amid increasing threats.
US Capitol police reported 9,625 threats and “concerning actions or statements” against congressional members last year.
Five years ago, there were 3,939 reported.
44% — nearly half of respondents identifying as republicans on a CBS and YouGov survey administered to 2,021 — answered that we should accept mass shootings as the price of living in a free society.
There are a few groups new to the political violence milieu, however.
So much hate and violence have been lately directed at school board members and school district personnel, the FBI has gotten involved.
Librarians have also become targets of extremist threats from neo-Nazi and other right-wing extremist groups.
Since the last presidential election, threats to poll workers spiked as right-wing Donald Trump supporters targeted their animosity toward those they baselessly felt were helping to “steal votes” from Trump.
Now they’ve expanded the conspiracy to “votes being stolen” from all republican candidates.
On July 26 — a mere month ago — Donald Trump, spoke at the “America First Policy Institute” summit in which he called for concentration camps for the homeless, executing drug dealers, returning to the racist “stop-and-frisk” policies in cities, and overriding governors and mayors in deploying the national guard to high-crime neighborhoods.
It was a speech that would make Hungary’s fascist president Viktor Orbán and Vladimir Putin proud.
In the aftermath of the FBI search on his Florida Mar-a-Lago home, Trump has made his pact with the violent and racist faction of the rapidly deteriorating republican party’s base all the more blatant.
Only a few hours after federal agents descended on his property, Trump posted on his official “Truth Social” page what appeared to be a campaign-style video employing background music supposedly written by an adherent of the extreme right-wing conspiracy theory group Q-Anon.
But even if Trump’s political days are numbered, his supporters in state, local, and federal government are ready to pick up his dangerous mantle.
Whether it’s Trump, DeSantis, Josh Hawley, Rick Scott, Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, Mike Pence, or anyone else, every one of them is going to have to pander to the “MAGA” base.
No aspiring republican presidential nominee would risk alienating it now that Trump has lowered the bar, whether they like it or not.
That means trying to out-fascist the other guy.
It’s a vision that should concern us all.
We saw where it almost got us the first time.
President Biden’s speech was an acknowledgement of the danger we face.
It’s up to us now to follow through.
Register to vote, show up to vote, and get involved in politics at the local level, because it is there, in some of the most unlikely and unglamorous ways, we help influence the national ticket and select the candidates who will uphold it.