Biden should defend U.S. democracy as aggressively as he is defending Ukraine

Biden should defend U.S. democracy as aggressively as he is defending Ukraine

Perry Bacon Jr. — Read time: 4 minutes

Yesterday at 9:00 a.m. EDT

President Biden has been forcefully defending the Ukrainian people from an unjust invasion and repudiating the radical, anti-democratic behavior of Russian leaders. That’s the right policy. I just wish the administration were fighting anywhere near as hard for democracy at home.

The contrast in the Biden administration’s handling of the two situations is easy to spot. Before Russia invaded, it took the unusual step of announcing U.S. intelligence findings that undercut Russian President Vladimir Putin’s claims and worked to lay the groundwork for the unified Western response that we have seen. Since Russian forces entered Ukraine, Biden and his team have focused intently on this issue.

But as red-state Republicans have passed numerous laws over the past year that both undermine our core democratic values, particularly the right to vote in fair elections, and specifically target Black and LGBTQ Americans, the administration’s response has been lackluster.

Where was the effort to get ahead of what state-level Republicans were doing? The administration and Democratic Party were caught flat-footed by a wave of GOP laws restricting voting and teaching about racism, along with other radical measures. And where is the forceful response now that it is clear the GOP has reacted to the 2020 elections by moving even further right? The president gave a few aggressive speeches blasting the new voting laws, but his message was contradicted by his emphasis on bipartisanship.

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Biden allies frequently blamed the filibuster and more conservative Democratic senators for the lack of action on democracy issues. But as we’ve seen with Ukraine, new laws aren’t the only way a president can have influence. The administration’s broadcasting of its unequivocal condemnation of Russia helped make defending Ukraine a top priority of both Americans and people around the world.

Biden can’t stop state-level Republicans from passing radical laws, nor can he prevent Russia from ultimately winning this war. But he’s at least trying really hard to prevent the latter.

The situations are obviously different. The conflict in Ukraine is simpler to understand than what’s happening in the United States — a large nation is invading a smaller one without justification. Many Republican officials share Biden’s position on Ukraine. Most important, a full-blown war is clearly, viscerally dangerous. No one is dying in Florida because of Gov. Ron DeSantis’s moves to make the state less democratic.

But I think something deeper — and older — is at play, too. Long before Biden entered the Oval Office, the U.S. government fought democratic abuses abroad while ignoring them at home. Even as Jim Crow policies severely restricted the rights of Black Americans in the South for the better part of a century, the United States cast itself as a beacon of freedom, most notably in taking on Germany in World War II and the Soviet Union in the Cold War.

More than that, America’s nongovernmental institutions are united behind Biden on Ukraine, but not on the democracy conflict at home.

The way the Ukraine conflict has played out in the United States reminds me of the summer of 2020, after Minneapolis police killed George Floyd. The media, business community, churches and other generally nonpartisan institutions interjected themselves into an issue with a single message — in this case, Russia is bad and the Ukrainians must be defended. On paper, Biden is America’s leader, but in reality, he often follows the lead of the broader U.S. society. Other institutions are pushing Biden toward aggressive action to help Ukraine, reinforcing the administration’s own posture.

Compare that to Republican Party radicalism. While the political press is increasingly covering the GOP’s worsening anti-democratic tendencies, the media still often employs its both-sides approach when covering the Democrat-Republican conflict over voting rights. There is no vocal nongovernmental consensus to steer the president.

Finally, the contrasting approaches to these issues unfortunately reflect some of this president’s personal shortcomings. Biden often appears to be a politician trapped in the 1970s, ’80s or ’90s. In that era, it was broad conventional wisdom that Russian leaders were anti-democratic, while few people saw the Republican Party that way. I worry that Biden’s experiences make it easy for him to grasp Putin’s destructiveness but slow to accept the radicalism of Republican officials.

Biden’s long tenure in politics might also have left him with an outdated view of the presidency itself. Biden appears eager to play the role of an American president leading an international coalition against a rogue dictator. That was what presidents did in his youth, after all — think, Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy. But in 2022 an American president, only 15 months from an attempt by his predecessor to overturn an election, should feel called to build a domestic coalition to fight for democracy at home. Biden hasn’t picked up that obvious mantle.

I’m really glad that Biden is trying to stop the 44 million people in Ukraine from having their country taken over by a regime that they didn’t vote for and that threatens their rights and freedoms. But more than 28 million of the people who voted for Biden, including me, live in America’s red states, where a more gradual, less visible effort to take away our rights is well underway. A majority of the nation’s Black voters, nearly all of whom voted for Biden, live in the GOP-dominated South. The Biden administration should bring the same kind of passion to its defense of these Americans as it is bringing to aiding the Ukrainians.