What Does “Defend Democracy” Actually Mean?

Biden’s State of the Union hinted at a key shift in the liberal imagination: From a merely restorative to a potentially more transformative vision for America

credit: Shawn Thew via Reuters

It is probably inevitable that much of the discourse around the State of the Union address focuses on what effect the speech might have on the presidential race. Historically, there is not much evidence that these events have a lasting impact on presidential approval rating. Could this be the exception, as the president put in an energetic performance to counter the “Biden too old” narrative? Then again, mainstream media coverage quickly shifted to criticizing the speech as too aggressive or partisan, so who knows how, and to what extent, this will affect the way Biden is covered going forward and thus the information environment for most people.

I find almost all of this meta-level discourse unproductive and most of it unbearably obnoxious. Most pundits are determined to see in Biden’s State of the Union performance whatever allows them to justify the stance they have previously taken in public. And I simply don’t see the empirical basis on which anyone could make grand predictions about electoral impact. Finally, it’s entirely unclear how much of what is outlined in the address a second Biden administration would be able to translate into policy and legislation.

If you can look past the questions about politics and electoral impact, the actual speech was really interesting. It provides a window into how Joe Biden, his camp, and, by extension, those at the center of liberal, Democratic politics want to present themselves – into how they conceive of the political conflict and their own role in it. Over the past 18 months or so, the president has given a series of high-level speeches revolving around the idea of democracy being under acute threat from an authoritarian onslaught not just abroad, but also at home. In all of these speeches, Biden has invoked what he calls the “soul of the nation” – sometimes to reassure and remind Americans of what supposedly unites them, sometimes to alert his fellow citizens that the nation was in danger of losing that which was supposed to be its essence. Across these speeches, we can trace variations in how Biden has treated the “soul of the nation” theme and the challenge of authoritarian threat. They hint at mostly subtle, but impactful shifts in the liberal imagination of American democracy’s past and present that could potentially shape the political path forward and help answer the question of what, exactly, the Biden coalition actually envisions when it sets out to “defend democracy”?

Focus on defending democracy or on “Bidenomics”?

On September 1, 2022, president Biden gave a speech in Philadelphia, emphasizing the challenge of defending the Republic against the onslaught of what he repeatedly called “MAGA Republicans.” His “Soul of the Nation” speech, as it has been referred to, which the White House explicitly framed as the president’s urgent intervention into the struggle to preserve democracy, ruffled quite a few feathers at the time. Mainstream conservatives and a significant portion of the nation’s establishment *hated* it and tried to brandmark it as pure partisan warfare and liberal hysteria.

It marked a significant departure from what had been presented as the core of “Bidenism” in the first half of his presidency. Until that point, Biden had mostly been reluctant to center his political message around the defense of democracy, and he had almost entirely avoided emphasizing the radicalization of the Republican Party – rather than just Donald Trump – as the reason why constitutional government was in danger. Such a focus was at odds with what had been Biden’s political promise since he announced to run for president: Leave the Trump chaos behind, return the country to “normalcy,” restore unity. All of this was to be achieved by mostly evading the “culture wars” and instead concentrating on governing competently, with a particular emphasis on a socio-economic agenda, on the mythical pocketbook.

But in Philadelphia, “Bidenomics” played no role, nor did Biden evade the partisan conflict. Instead, the president was precise and direct about why democracy was under threat, and from whom. Throughout his speech, he made sure to distinguish between what he called “mainstream Republicans” on one side and extremist “MAGA Republicans” on the other. But Biden also left no doubt that the extremist forces were not simply fringe phenomena, that the GOP was “dominated, driven, and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans.”

After the 2022 midterm elections, however, Biden mostly shifted the emphasis back to what had been his initial promise – and to what he, personally, was clearly most comfortable with: Bring the country together, heal the nation with “Bidenomics.” That manifested most obviously in last year’s State of the Union address. In 2023, Biden opened and concluded his speech with pleas for bipartisanship and unity. He expressed his gratitude to Republicans who had been willing to cooperate with his administration – and his eagerness to work with the new speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (remember him?). He also congratulated Mitch McConnell, who he addressed as if he was talking to an old buddy with whom he had been through a lot. And he emphasized the “over 300 bipartisan pieces of legislation,” how “time and again, Democrats and Republicans came together,” which supposedly “proved the cynics and naysayers wrong.” Bipartisanship, the president really wanted us to believe, was still possible.

The 2023 address also focused almost entirely on socio-economic matters. Biden talked at length about economic policies, the job market and especially manufacturing jobs, semiconductors and infrastructure, better health care and a fairer tax system, antitrust enforcement and reigning in corrupt forms of capitalism. This was, for better or worse, a kitchen table/pocketbook State of the Union, with some economic populism mixed in.

Meanwhile, the reactionary mobilization against multiracial pluralism and the assault on the fundamental rights of vulnerable groups did not feature prominently in this speech. It wasn’t until the very end that Biden really turned to the state of democracy. Until then, the democratic crisis had only gotten a shout-out in the beginning, when the president referred to January 6 as a grave threat, but one that was mostly in the past, as “our democracy remains unbowed and unbroken.” Fully 70 minutes later, with only four minutes left, Biden returned to the issue of democracy in America – and he only spoke about it for 120 seconds. Compared with the feistiness with which he defended his socio-economic agenda, these few minutes differed markedly in thrust and in tone. On democracy, Biden did not emphasize differences with his Republican opponents. He opened with a general pledge of allegiance, describing democracy as “the most fundamental thing of all. With democracy, everything is possible. Without it, nothing is.” But this pledge came not with a warning for those who would undermine democracy, but with a unity plea. In striking contrast to his fall 2022 speech in Philadelphia, Biden did not name the enemy. “For the last few years our democracy has been threatened and attacked, put at risk” – passive voice, no mention of MAGA Republicans; these last few minutes were entirely about unity in the fight for democracy.

Democracy and patriotism

The general thrust of Biden’s address last week was closer to the Philadelphia speech from September 2022 than to the 2023 State of the Union. Purely in quantitative terms, the focus was still very much on Bidenomics, to which the president devoted well over forty percent of the entire speech: The economic recovery after the pandemic, investments in infrastructure, the fight to lower the cost of prescription drugs and healthcare, affordable education, and the struggle to make the wealthy pay their share by creating a fairer tax code and reining in corporate creed – all that sounded very much like the agenda Biden had outlined in Congress a year ago.

But this time, it was all framed by the threat to democracy and freedom at home and abroad, with which Biden opened and closed his address. And just as he did in his Philadelphia speech, Biden made sure to tie the onslaught on the democratic system and constitutional self-government to the assault on individual rights and fundamental freedoms – reproductive freedom, specifically (while noticeably avoiding the term abortion entirely).

Tying the Republican anti-democratic radicalization to the broader assault on the post-1960s civil rights order is not only smart politically, as it gives substance to what might otherwise sound rather abstract and formalistic: “democracy.” It is, moreover, entirely plausible analytically. “Folks, American cannot go back,” Biden said last week. That was also a theme in his 2022 “Soul of the Nation” speech: “MAGA forces are determined to take this country backwards,” the president had declared, “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.” Both the attempts to subvert the political system and to impose conservative social and cultural ideals on the entire country are indeed part of a broader reactionary counter-mobilization against egalitarian multiracial pluralism. The conservative vision for America is one of maintaining traditional hierarchies, of white Christian patriarchal dominance in all spheres of American life: the political institutions, the public square, the workplace, the family. And conservatives understand that they are pursuing a minoritarian project. In a functioning democratic system, they would have to moderate, accept compromise, accommodate the will of the majority. Instead, they have chosen a different path, favoring authoritarian minority rule over the acceptance of democratic defeat.

Precisely because Biden was clear about the threat to democracy and freedom, he faced a significant challenge: In a country in which ideas of a glorious democratic tradition – of America being the oldest democracy in the world, a global role model of liberty! – feature so prominently in the collective national imaginary, the fact that one of the major parties and a significant portion of the electorate is fully committed to erecting authoritarian minority rule under the leadership of a vindictive autocrat requires investigation.

One approach to dealing with this problem that Biden has often chosen is to appeal to his fellow citizens’ patriotic sense in order to bring them back into the democratic fold. “You can’t love your country only when you win,” Biden said in his State of the Union – he had also used this exact phrase in Philadelphia in 2022, and in a speech earlier this year, on the eve of January 6. It’s certainly a good line. But in a rather fundamental way, it misses the point – because as the Right sees it, if they don’t win, it’s by definition not their country anymore, it’s not “America” anymore in any meaningful way. It has become dogma on the Right to define “Us” (conservative white Christians) as the sole proponents of “real America” – and “Them” (Democrats, liberals, “the Left”) as a dangerous “Other.” The Democratic Party, in the Right’s understanding, is not just a political opponent, but an “Un-American” enemy – a fundamentally illegitimate political faction captured by the radical forces of leftism, liberalism, “wokeism,” and multiculturalism. They see the struggle between Republicans and Democrats as an existential conflict over whether or not the only version of the country they are willing to accept as “real America” will survive and endure. Rightwingers have decided that they *are* the country. The choice, therefore, isn’t partisanship or loyalty to the country. To them, the partisan divide maps perfectly onto the struggle between patriots and “Un-American” radicals for the survival of the nation. In that sense, choosing the Republican Party *is* choosing the country.

American exceptionalism

Another pervasive strategy of dealing with the problem of mass anti-democratic radicalization in a country that those in charge of the national story have always defined as fundamentally democratic is to declare the authoritarian movement an aberration – a departure from America’s true essence. This sentiment often crystallizes in variations of the slogan “That’s not who we are.” And it usually comes with a hefty dose of American exceptionalism, which shaped even Biden’s 2022 Philadelphia address. As convincing as that speech was on the threat represented by the Trumpist Right, there was a striking tension between the diagnosis Biden outlined and the long-standing myths about America’s supposedly exceptional character he seemed unable or unwilling to shake. Right off the bat, the president presented the U.S. as the “greatest nation on earth” and a “beacon to the world.” What made the country great, in this view, was the idea that supposedly defines America, that “beats in all our hearts” and unites all Americans, that forms the “soul of this nation,” as Biden put it: The belief in equality and democracy, in the notion that “all are created equal,” and that “all are entitled to be treated with decency, dignity, and respect.” All is not yet perfect in this exceptional nation, but America is guaranteed to eventually get there, as “no matter how long the road, progress does come.”

These are the building blocks of a well-established national myth. But if there were any truth to this exceptionalist story, the fundamental conflict over democracy that defines the country wouldn’t exist, and we wouldn’t be in the precise situation Biden himself so clearly laid out.

“We’ve never fully lived up to that idea”

This is where last week’s State of the Union address offered a different interpretation that might hint at a consequential shift in the liberal democratic imagination. Biden still insisted that there are certain “core values” that “have defined America – honesty, decency, dignity, and equality; to respect everyone; to give everyone a fair shot; to give hate no safe harbor.” But he did not foreground those values in order to denounce the authoritarian assault as a departure that is foreign to what America *really* is. Rather than propagating an aberrationist tale, the president offered a crucial acknowledgment when referring to the idea that “we’re all created equal”: “We’ve never fully lived up to that idea, but we’ve never walked away from it either. And I won’t walk away from it now.”

In this version, U.S. history and national identity are no longer characterized by a supposedly exceptional shared consensus around the principles of egalitarian democracy, but by an ongoing conflict over whether or not “We, the people” should actually be defined in accordance with those egalitarian democratic ideas. “I know the American story,” the president declared: “Again and again, I’ve seen the contest between competing forces in the battle for the soul of our nation, between those who want to pull America back to the past and those who want to move America into the future.”

From insisting that the “soul of the nation” is incorruptible and indisputably democratic to emphasizing the defining conflict between two fundamentally incompatible visions for what “America” should be. That shift really matters, for at least three reasons:

First of all, such a narrative is, analytically speaking, more accurate and persuasive. There has simply never been a consensus that America is defined by egalitarian ideas, and the central fault line in U.S. history has been the one between those who do abide by these ideas and those who aren’t willing to envision America as anything but a land defined by white Christian patriarchal domination, by discriminatory hierarchies of race, wealth, gender, and religion. The reality of American politics is that one party is dominated by reactionary forces that do *not* believe in equal representation and equal rights, that a sizable portion of the electorate is not willing to accept those values and favors white conservative rule instead. Both sides are claiming to be “We, the people” – but the key conflict has always been over who gets to delineate the boundaries of “the people,” who gets to claim equal rights as a member of the body politic.

Secondly, such a narrative is better suited to combating the complacency towards the authoritarian threat that is inherent to the myth of American exceptionalism. Joe Biden ended last week’s State of the Union by insisting that he has “never been more optimistic about our future than I am now.” If that is so, it should not, on the basis of his own speech, be an optimism grounded in the myth that “It cannot happen here.” If we agree the American story has always been defined by a struggle between those who envision an egalitarian democracy and the forces who define “real America” in opposition to such ideals, then we must acknowledge that the outcome of this conflict is not predetermined, that the latter could absolutely triumph over the former – as they in fact have for much of U.S. history.

Myths of American exceptionalism have often blunted the response to anti-democratic threats. To a considerable degree, the fate of democracy will depend on whether or not the country’s political and societal elite can finally move past the false reassurances that these exceptionalisms offer. It is not easy to leave traditional certainties behind, and since the rise of Trump, liberal America has been wrestling with history, national identity, and what remains once we can no longer seek solace in the mythical ideas of inevitable progress and the fundamental goodness of the American soul. It’s undoubtedly a painful process – but from a democratic perspective, it is also urgently necessary.

Thirdly, this narrative of the American story might provide the basis for a truly transformative political vision. Over the past few years, the Biden-led anti-MAGA coalition has brought together groups and people from a wide ideological spectrum, ranging from Never Trump conservatives all the way to Bernie Sanders and AOC, with vastly different ideas of what needs to be done to prevent a dark autocratic future. This is the defining conflict within the – nominally, at least – pro-democracy camp: Is the call to “defend democracy” ultimately just a fig leaf behind which a coalition of restoration is determined to merely restore the pre-Trump “normal”? Or is the resistance to Trumpism under the banner of “democracy in crisis” tied to a transformative vision that could actually move us beyond the status quo ante?

As long as Trump is conceptualized as merely an aberration, an accidental departure, it might seem plausible to focus on weathering the storm until things return to what they were before America took the wrong turn in 2016. But if the rise of Trumpism is a manifestation, rather than the cause, of forces and ideas that have always prevented the nation from living up to the egalitarian vision it has often proclaimed, from realizing its truly democratic aspirations, then restoration is not enough. The answer, based on this acknowledgment, can’t possibly be to merely restore the deeply deficient pre-2016 type of “liberal” democracy, to just turn the clock back to a situation that resulted in Trump’s rise in the first place. If the danger is truly as great as Joe Biden says, must we not look for a response that is commensurate with such an immense threat – one that propels America forward and transforms it into something closer to the kind of egalitarian multiracial, pluralistic democracy it never has been yet?

The anti-fascist consensus, re-imagined

Last week, Joe Biden insisted he would not walk away from the egalitarian ideal that all people are created equal, that he would fight against those who envision an America “of resentment, revenge, and retribution.” Trying to turn his age from a liability into an asset, the president proudly declared: “I was born amid World War Two, when America stood for the freedom of the world.” Deliberately or not, by referencing the global war against Hitler, Mussolini, and Imperial Japan, Biden invoked the anti-fascist consensus that has indeed crumbled. In post-1945 America, it was certainly never enough, in and of itself, to turn the nation from a racial caste system to a fully realized multiracial, pluralistic democracy. But it did provide those who desired egalitarian pluralism with a strong argument they could deploy in their struggle against rightwing extremism – it helped police the boundaries of what was considered acceptable within mainstream politics. If Joe Biden can help us re-imagine an anti-fascist consensus not in service of a purely restorative project, but as a reminder of the nation’s egalitarian aspirations, as a plea to finally defeat those anti-democratic forces in our midst and push America forward, I am all for it.