In the run-up to the midterm elections, liberal America is starting to realize how much danger it’s in. The right has been openly, defiantly stoking the fires of civil war since at least 2008 – openly promoting secession, political violence and the overturning of electoral outcomes. Now the left, slowly, probably too late, is having some of the same discussions about the catastrophic failure of American political institutions. Biden’s speech in Philadelphia, his attempt to set the agenda for the midterms, mattered in this respect if in no other. The Democratic leader has finally, against all instinct, acknowledged the risk of national collapse.
“As I stand here tonight, equality and democracy are under assault,” the president declared. “We do ourselves no favor to pretend otherwise.” He even allowed himself to be specific, going so far as to call the Republican party under Trump “a threat to democracy”. Biden has a gift for stating what has been obvious to everyone as if he were thinking it for the first time. Still, his diagnosis was accurate, which is what made his proposed solution to the threat so frighteningly shallow: “I’m asking our nation to come together, unite behind the single purpose of defending our democracy regardless of your ideology.”
That’s not good enough. It’s nowhere even close to good enough. If the president of the United States declares that democracy in his country is under assault, then he needs to announce in the next breath what he’s doing about it, not try to exploit it for temporary political gain in a single election cycle.
A recent poll found that more than 40% of Americans believe that a civil war is likely with the next decade. The past two years have seen the rot of American government accelerate, even as Biden has made real legislative progress. That’s the irony of these midterms. Biden has made hugely significant strides on matters of policy, on climate crisis, on infrastructure, on education during his first two years. At the same time, the forces tearing America apart are more intense than they were during the Trump years.
Since the Dobbs decision, American women have come to exist in a patchwork of legal statuses, not only between states but even on county level. Just as before the first civil war, the question of free movement between different jurisdictions is once again unclear. The Mar-a-Lago raid has created a situation in which there are no good options: the government must either arrest an ex-president or allow classified secrets to fill up random closets. Already the fundamental question of civil war is in the air: how do you deal legally with citizens who want to destroy the basis of law? The success of election deniers across American states has created inevitable conflict over 2022 and 2024. The peaceful transition of power is more doubtful now than it has been at any period since the 19th century.
The drift towards disunion is not in Biden’s control if, indeed, it is in anyone’s control at this point. Hyper-partisanship is increasing and increasingly violent. Trust in institutions continues to decline. The sense of legitimacy in the press and the courts continues its long slide. Biden’s approach to the collapse of American institutions is institutionalist, and he is trying to make his faith in institutions the focus of the next election cycle. But the current crisis requires more than politics as usual, and more than Biden is providing.
If you want to take America off the high boil, promote open primaries, not vacuous calls to national unity. Independent redistricting commissions to fight partisan gerrymandering, campaign finance reform to pull America back from the black hole of dark money, and a general overhaul of the Federal Election Commission are, at this point, obviously necessary on the most basic level if American democracy is to survive. They are also against the interests of both parties. They are not on the table in 2022.
A pro-democracy agenda also requires a genuine reckoning with the opponents of democracy. The US supreme court is already dive-bombing into illegitimacy, passing through theocracy on its way to irrelevance. Biden is not preserving the legitimacy of the court by choosing not to stack it. He is only ensuring that an already illegitimate court will be opposed to democracy.
How far Biden can enact a pro-democracy agenda is dubious, of course, and every year, from now on, it will become more dubious. Biden seems to have nothing more to offer than the old soaring rhetoric that somehow still has people who will listen to it: “This is where the United States constitution was written and debated. This is where we set in motion the most extraordinary experiment of self-government the world has ever known,” he said, flanked by marines. Then he put the onus for defending that experiment on the American people.
That’s an alibi, an abrogation of responsibility. Biden was elected in 2020 to defend US democracy, but the solution to America’s crisis is not political but structural. It doesn’t require the American people to vote one way or another in order to enact one or another legislative agenda but to find a different way to govern themselves.
The first portion of the Biden administration has revealed a clandestine tragedy: the president has loved American institutions so much that he cannot bring himself to do what’s required to save them.
Stephen Marche is the author of The Next Civil War
