Opinion: Biden just threw down the democracy gauntlet
Biden noted in his remarks that the former president started spreading election lies long before the November 2020 election, preemptively looking for an excuse should he be defeated. “He’s not just the former president,” Biden declared, “He’s a defeated former president; defeated by a margin of over 7 million of your votes.”
The piercing jabs kept coming: “The former president of the United States has created and spread a web of lies … He’s done so because he values power over principle.”
His words and delivery were quite a contrast from the Biden whose speeches, especially those dealing with democracy and the future of the nation, have tended to emphasize national unity and reconciliation. The shift reflected a recognition that the insurrection of January 6 is not simply a part of the past, but a looming threat into the future.
It was the rhetorical equivalent of grabbing the country by the lapels and forcing us to look at the facts. Great nations, Biden said, “don’t bury the truth. They face up to it.”
By adding January 6 to that list — and with Biden making it clear that responsibility for those events rests with the former president — the administration has thrown down the gauntlet. And Harris’s framing reflects the reality that January 6 — like other days that have gone on to “live in infamy” — has now become a yearly marker and reminder of this wound on national collective memory.
His speech in National Statuary Hall, the heart of the US Capitol, suggests he has come to the realization that a different strategy is needed. The effort to restore normalcy and end the threat to democracy has not been sufficient in the face of the relentless campaign by the former president and his allies to rewrite the history of the last election and set the stage for a more effective push to seize power — for a successful coup — if they lose at the ballot box next time.
Biden pointed implicitly at Trump and his GOP supporters as culpable for January 6 and its ongoing repercussions. “Those who stormed this Capitol and those who instigated and incited, and those who called on them to do so held a dagger at the throat of America, at American democracy.”
Having laid out the gravity of the threat, Biden vowed in soaring words to take it on with all his might. “I did not seek this fight,” he declared, “but I will not shrink from it.”
Biden has taken the mantle of the warrior in the effort to lead the country out of the existential crisis he described. Now he has to show how exactly he plans to win that battle for the soul of America, the campaign to save American democracy from an ongoing menace.
