When President Joe Biden spoke to the nation from Philadelphia last September to warn about ongoing threats to democracy, the symbolism was unmistakable: The backdrop was Independence Hall, where the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were adopted. The speech was made during prime time, reflecting the importance of the moment.
The message was one Americans needed to hear, as we wrote at the time. Biden has since made three such speeches, the latest on Thursday in Tempe, Arizona. And the message — to open our eyes, roll up our sleeves and stand up for America’s ideals — is no less important now than it was back on Sept. 1, 2022.
Americans cannot afford to tire of that message. We can’t shrug our collective shoulders and dismiss the warnings as the usual partisan politics heading into an election year. Biden is not alone in waving the red flag about the threat from the extreme right, led by former president Donald Trump.
What does it say about the state of the nation when a president who has surely seen it all during decades spent in politics, feels compelled to make speech after speech reminding Americans of this basic fact:
All of us have a stake in protecting the American experiment.
“While Biden has made the defense of American democracy central to his presidency,” as historian and author Heather Cox Richardson wrote after Biden’s speech, “he has never been clearer or more impassioned than he was today.”
We’re clear on this front, too America is not perfect, but our democratic ideals — equality, opportunity, freedom, self-government — are still a model for the rest of the world. Those ideals are worth defending, from internal as well as external threats.
No one wants to wake up one day and think, as one meme we’ve seen on social media put it: “America: It was a good idea while it lasted.”
Chaos, dysfunction and threats
Consider the chaos that has been unfolding in recent weeks in Washington, D.C., where far-right Republicans have held up passage of a spending bill to avoid a potentially crippling shutdown on Oct. 1.
The jobs of hundreds of thousands of federal employees — nearly 43,000 in Illinois alone — are at stake. Millions of Americans who rely on government social services and programs stand to be affected.
But no matter to the GOP-led House, where some on the far right are demanding huge spending cuts in exchange for voting in favor of a budget to keep the government functioning. They’re more determined, as Biden said Thursday, “to burn the place down than to let the people’s business be done.”
The dysfunction doesn’t stop there. While Biden spoke on Thursday, some House Republicans were busy launching an impeachment inquiry against the president, without any solid evidence — their own witnesses admitted as much — of the “treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors” required by the U.S. Constitution.
Trump’s fingerprints are all over that fishing expedition, too. The former president, still aggrieved over his own two impeachments, has more than once urged his party to impeach Biden because, as he wrote on social media, “THEY DID IT TO US!”
Don’t forget, either, the dysfunctional and disgraceful antics of U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, who is holding up hundreds of military promotions because he disagrees with the military’s policy on abortion access. Then there’s Tuberville’s colleague, U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, who is holding up several U.S. attorney nominations, including that of April Perry for the Chicago-based Northern District of Illinois.
Why? Vance is angry about the federal prosecutions of Trump, for alleged mishandling of classified documents and for his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
There are more red flags: the threat of politically motivated violence, including against moderate Republicans who speak out against Trump and the MAGA movement; the tiresome election-denying, three years (three years!) after the 2020 election that an alarming number of Republicans still refuse to believe Biden legitimately won; and the frightening plans of some conservatives to remake government by expanding the power of the presidency and replacing thousands of civil servants with loyal political cronies, should Trump win a second presidency.
Too few Republicans — and we include the candidates for the GOP presidential nomination — have stood up to the extremists in their party, or to Trump.
“A very large portion of my party really doesn’t believe in the Constitution,” U.S. Sen. Mitt Romney told writer McKay Coppins as part of Coppins’ forthcoming biography.
That’s shameful for the GOP. It’s terrible, and frightening, for our democracy. How can America thrive, or even survive, if one of its two major political parties largely rejects the nation’s basic principles and ideals?
There’s no robust exchange of competing ideas, which is what democracy is about, with that scenario.
Biden has now given four speeches on the threat. America has to keep paying attention.
This editorial is part of “The Democracy Solutions Project,” a partnership among the Chicago Sun-Times, WBEZ and the University of Chicago’s Center for Effective Government. Together, we’re examining critical issues facing our democracy in the run-up to the 2024 elections.
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