As Republican candidates gathered in California for the party’s second primary debate of the 2024 campaign season, US President Joe Biden signaled he’s already focusing on the general election in a speech in neighboring Arizona.
One candidate was notably absent from the GOP event, but his presence in Biden’s speech was unmistakable even when he wasn’t invoked by name: for the fifth national election cycle in a row, American voters will submit a verdict on former US President and 2024 contender Donald Trump.
This time is different, claimed Biden in yet another preview of his upcoming campaign, because the vote is a referendum on a core aspect of American society and the country’s place in the world.
“There is something dangerous happening in America,” said Biden forebodingly at an event honoring the late Republican Senator John McCain. “There is an extremist movement that does not share the basic beliefs of our democracy. The MAGA Movement.”
“Their extreme agenda, if carried out, would fundamentally alter the institutions of American Democracy as we know it,” continued Biden. “The decisions we make today will determine the course of this country – and the world – for decades to come.”
The argument isn’t new for Biden, who has frequently cast politics as a contest for the “soul” of the country during his presidency. In a speech on the anniversary of January 6, 2021, he characterized the events of that day as an existential threat to American democracy.
He spoke again on the subject that year at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, and once more before last year’s midterm elections.
Biden’s team believes the message was a political winner, contributing to Democrats’ better than expected performance last November. Now the argument is forming a key part of his presidential reelection campaign. But will the argument hold up in the context of next year’s vote?
Clearly, Biden thinks it will. With his opponent currently facing four indictments, including two relating to his challenge of the 2020 election, Biden’s advisers are betting the unprecedented chaos created by Trump will remain present in voters’ minds.
The issue may also simply be of personal significance to Biden himself. With a number of crises currently facing the United States – immigration, inflation, abortion and workers’ rights – there is no shortage of obvious issues he could run on.
The focus on something as potentially abstract as “democracy” may offer particular insight into the octogenarian politician’s frame of mind. With even large numbers of Democratic voters expressing concern over his continued fitness to serve, Biden may see his advanced age and experience in Washington as making him uniquely capable of winning a battle he sees in such stark terms.
Political scientist Robert Paxton defined fascism as “the application of colonial violence to the imperial core” – the Germans perfected brutality in their African colonies before the Nazis unleashed it on European Jewry. America has certainly committed its share of colonial violence, and neocolonial violence. Currently the country is funding a major war against a geopolitical foe it thought it had vanquished more than three decades ago.
Meanwhile, a candidate who gleefully promised to take Syria’s oil rises in the polls.
Biden may be able to win the struggle for his vision of the democratic soul of America, if voters see him as capable of delivering on his rhetoric. That may include knowing when to pull back on the country’s increasingly unpopular neocolonial ambitions, listening to workers in Scranton rather than their rulers in Langley.
If he tries to preserve America’s democracy and its empire he may endanger both.