In the wake of last week's assassination attempt on Nancy Pelosi by a right-wing domestic terrorist that invaded the Pelosi's home, President Biden laid out his final argument before the midterms why MAGA trolls are the biggest threat to American democracy in decades.
Signs of strain in the nation’s democratic system mounted Wednesday with less than a week left before the midterm elections, as President Biden warned that candidates who refuse to accept Tuesday’s results could set the nation on a “path to chaos.”
Biden’s grim assessment in a speech Wednesday evening came as the FBI and other agencies have forecast that threats of violence from domestic extremists are likely to be on the rise after the election. In Arizona, voters have complained of intimidation by self-appointed drop-box monitors — some of them armed — prompting a federal judge to set strict new limits. And the GOP has stepped up litigation in multiple states in an effort to toss out some ballots and to expand access for partisan poll watchers.
Speaking at Washington’s Union Station — steps from the U.S. Capitol, which was attacked by a pro-Trump mob in the wake of the nation’s last major election — Biden warned of an ongoing assault on American democracy. The president spoke as a growing number of major Republican candidates have said they may follow in former president Donald Trump’s footsteps and refuse to concede should they lose.
“It’s unprecedented. It’s unlawful. And it is un-American,” Biden said. “As I’ve said before, you can’t love your country only when you win.”
The virtually unprecedented presidential message — a plea to Americans to accept the basic tenets of their democracy — came as millions of voters have already cast their ballots or are planning to go to the polls on Election Day, and as some election officials expressed confidence that the system would hold.
Biden spoke days after an assailant armed with a hammer broke into the San Francisco home of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and, according to police and prosecutors, bludgeoned her 82-year-old husband, Paul. Biden opened by addressing the gruesome early Friday morning assault.
“We must, with one overwhelming unified voice, speak as a country and say there’s no place, no place for voter intimidation or political violence in America, whether it’s directed at Democrats or Republicans,” he said. “No place, period. No place, ever.”
Last week, multiple government agencies, including the FBI and Department of Homeland Security, issued a memo warning that threats posed by domestic violent extremists would probably increase in the 90-day post election period, according to a copy of the document obtained by The Washington Post.
The memo listed possible scenarios that could trigger more violence, including “actual or perceived efforts to suppress voting access.”
“Following the 2022 midterm election, perceptions of election-related fraud and dissatisfaction with electoral outcomes likely will result in heightened threats of violence against a broad range of targets — such as ideological opponents and election workers,” the memo read.
Judging from the screeching and howling from the right today, Biden's plea for basic human dignity is falling on deaf ears. As John Ganz writes, Biden is on the right side of history here, and you can't make people who don't want democracy actually want democracy.
The idea that one party, even if it has a clear-cut ideological or partisan agenda, can also embody the democracy as such has a lot of historical precedent. That was part of Roosevelt’s appeal. It’s also an old tradition in France, where the entire left would periodically identify itself with the republic and adopt a politics of “republican defense” against the right, usually when the right would engage in some coup-like behavior. The last great example of this, the Popular Front of the 1930s, was not a government of centrist compromise but quite radical in the social reforms it pushed through. The idea was that the surge of the far-right suggested a fundamental social problem that needed to be remedied through bold action. Did that approach work? Well, in some ways yes and in some ways no, but let’s leave that for another time.
Democracy is not simply the presence of a multi- or two-party system: That’s a necessary but not sufficient condition. There are some actual substantive commitments that come with it. One of the most important of these is a belief in popular sovereignty, which is the principle that virtually all Republican politics are designed to get around: either in the old fashioned form of Senatorial or Judicial anti-majoritarianism and gerrymandering or its more recent politics of menacing putschism and election denial. The former is bad, but conforms to the rule of law and one hopes can be remedied over time. The latter breaks the system. Fused together, as they are now, they form the basis of potential one-party rule.
Look, they even say it all the time—“We’re a republic, not a democracy,”—or some such similar bullshit. It’s just the simple truth: They don’t want the country to be a democracy anymore. They know it. We know it. But for some reason all these pundits say we shouldn’t say it. The centrist pundit, in either his cynical or naive form, loves to warn about the dangers of rhetoric, but this kind of equivocation about the parties sets the predicate for political cynicism and resignation: everyone shrugging their shoulders and saying, “Well, they are both bad, they Democrats have their authoritarian side, too, after all. I mean, look at all that manipulative ‘ saving democracy’ talk.” It also allows us to settle for the curtailing of democracy, but not an absolute destruction: some kind of hybrid regime: “Well, it’s not really an authoritarian dictatorship, there’s an opposition, after all, look, there’s still a Democratic mayor of…Ann Arbor.”
Are the Democrats incompetent, cynical, flailing, etc.? Of course. After all, this is the Democratic Party we are talking about. But, as always, they are still not the Republicans.
Choose a side, folks.
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