The president’s rhetoric on democracy is great. It’s the policy that’s the problem.
President Joe Biden’s speech on the anniversary of the January 6 Capitol insurrection was, as a matter of rhetoric, deeply moving. He reminded the country of the brutality of the attack, the absurdity of Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, and the disturbing fact that American democracy remains in grave danger a year later. “I did not seek this fight, brought to this Capitol one year ago today. But I will not shrink from it, either,” Biden said. “I will stand in this breach, I will defend this nation, and I will allow no one to place a dagger at the throat of democracy.” The reviews were positive. “Biden hitting all the right notes here, and hitting them hard. A reminder of how powerful the Bully Pulpit can be,” Washington Post columnist Karen Tumulty tweeted. “Is anyone on the right listening?” But it’s far from clear that the “bully pulpit” is powerful at all. Historically, there’s been little evidence that presidential speeches have advanced legislation or changed the opposing party’s or the public’s mind on major issues. More recently, we have had no shortage of speeches from Biden, Barack Obama, and other Democrats extolling democracy — yet Republicans, Senate moderates, and large swaths of the public remain unmoved. If anything, Biden’s speech is a reminder of the hollowness, even futility, of his pro-democracy rhetoric. Facing a Republican opposition that’s closed ranks around Trump and a 50/50 Senate where pro-filibuster Democrats have veto power, there is only so much the president can do. Tellingly, the speech contained no new concrete policy proposals for protecting democracy from ongoing efforts to subvert it. And in the areas where Biden has the power to act, like rallying Democrats to mount a response to state-level Republican attacks on democracy, he has been strikingly MIA. “In the year since the attack on the Capitol, the Democratic Congress has methodically advanced legislation to safeguard our elections. Up to this point, the president has barely lifted a finger,” Ezra Levin, a co-founder of the pro-democracy activist group Indivisible, tells me (though Senate moderates’ unwillingness to abandon the filibuster has been the bigger barrier). A year after the Capitol insurrection, American democracy remains in disrepair. Biden’s stirring defense of it only underscores how deep the damage runs — and how little has been done to fix it. The limits of presidential rhetoric Biden’s January 6 speech was the highlight of a series of events commemorating the one-year anniversary of the insurrection. And as a presidential address, it checked the boxes it needed to. It had memorable turns of phrase, like “you can’t love your country only when you win.
