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. (1) [my emphasis]
What he describes there is a picture of Biden’s 1970s political instincts to try to be “bipartisan” and cater to conservatives while still staying (mainly) on the Democratic side of issues. It’s the orientation that led him to make his notorious "they're about to knock my mother on the head with a lead pipe" speech in 1993 in support of a draconian crime bill, sneering at the idea that anyone should lose a moment on thinking about the larger context of violent crime. (2)
However, Zimmer may also be overstating his case a bit.As Alexander Cooley and Daniel Nexon wrote in 2022:
Shortly after his inauguration, US President Joe Biden began to speak of a "battle between democracies and autocracies" over the "suitability" of the respective system for the 21st century. He thereby joins in with the widespread notion that democratic liberalism is threatened from within as well as from within. Authoritarian states and illiberal democracies seek to undermine essential elements of the liberal world order. And those who are seen as pillars of this order, especially the United States, are in danger of succumbing to illiberalism at home. (3) [my emphasis]
After Trump’s coup attempted that culminated in the January 6 attack on the Capitol, it was obvious to everyone that democracy was threatened from within. Biden could hardly avoid that. But it is also true that he tried to fold it in to the more complicated question of the liberal international order and liberal democracy within states. The two are not identical. But that was the creed of the both liberal-interventionist post-1989 approach taken by the Clinton and Obama Administration and, in its more militaristic and cynical neoconservative variation during the Cheney-Bush Administration. A liberal democracy in the United States can and does violate the “liberal” international order and was and is willing to support or impose some remarkably illiberal internal orders in states in which it is particularly interested. Start by asking any country in Latin America.
Zimmer is struck by the current dilemma in which a Trump victory in November would actually be an immediate danger to liberal-democratic institutions in the US. But at the same time, it’s difficult for the Democrats to turn this broad framing into persuasive campaign issues.
How can we convince enough people that democracy itself – not merely in a formalistic way, but with all the fundamental rights and demands to respect pluralism by which it should be defined – is on the ballot in November?
How can we convince enough people that democracy itself – not merely in a formalistic way, but with all the fundamental rights and demands to respect pluralism by which it should be defined – is on the ballot in November?
Right now, we are failing that task. Few people are actually aware of what the Right has publicly vowed to do to America the next time they get the chance, or of Trump’s most aggressive authoritarian threats. And more generally, Americans tend to see the two major parties as equally extreme in ideological terms – if anything, the trend is for the Democratic Party, not the party of Trump, to be seen as more extreme. [my emphasis]
The Democrats have a remarkably hard time focusing on the framing problem that George Lakoff has been harping on them about for years. He has been trying to convince Democrats to not rely on laundry-lists of issues but to also create a larger narrative, the “framing” of the issue that creates a wider context of vision and emotion in which voters can understand them.
The Democrats have a remarkably hard time focusing on the framing problem that George Lakoff has been harping on them about for years. He has been trying to convince Democrats to not rely on laundry-lists of issues but to also create a larger narrative, the “framing” of the issue that creates a wider context of vision and emotion in which voters can understand them.
In a Substack column he co-authors, Lakoff has expressed approval for what he calls Biden’s “focus on freedom as the theme of his 2024 campaign.” (4)
But the frame also has to be tied effective to motivating issues. In Biden’s State of the Union address, he did manage to offer specifics of what democracy vs. anti-democracy means: democracy to defend women’s rights, democracy to protect Social Security. The voting rights issue he emphasized fits particularly well, i.e., we need democracy to protect our right to vote as part of a democracy.
But Biden and the Democrats also need to go after the Republican framing of issues like immigration, which Trump and the Republicans have made clear they will use as their main fear-and-hate issue in 2024. And Biden has a long way to go here.
His stunt of offering Republicans basically all the draconian anti-immigrant measures they want in exchange for war funding for Ukraine and Israel is a classic peace of the Bill Clinton/”New Democrat”/triangulation strategy on which the Democrats got so lost on their ability to define a larger framing. When Biden tells people he wants to be as anti-immigrant-rights as the Republicans, what people who aren’t certified “MSNBC liberals” hear Bide saying is something like this: “Trump is right that we have a terrible border problem! It’s all happening during my Presidency! And there’s nothing I can do about it!”
Credit to Sam Seder who has been very good about emphasizing that very point on his Majority Report online show
Effective framing on that issue means defining immigration to the US for what it is: a critical part of the economy. Insist we approach it realistically. For God’s sake, here is one place that he could legitimately invoke the Republican icon St. Reagan and the Comprehensive Immigration Reform he signed into law as a decent example on how to frame the issue!
Biden can’t afford to let a Christian nationalist whack-job like Alabama Sen. Katie Britt putting on her Fundi Baby Voice (5) and telling nice-Southern-Klan-lady stories about Mexican rapists - and lying ones at that! (6) - be the one to set the framing on this.
He needs to do both: insist on a realistic immigration narrative and tell people that Trumpistas are sleazy liars who are trying to play voters for fools on the issue.
Hot-button fearing-mongering narratives like “immigrant crime” have to be shot down, not “coopted”. Unless you’re actually intending to surrender the issue and let them score on the Democrats using it - and refusing to fight for what is both right and practical. Biden giving speeches of the “Mexican drug dealers are about to rape your mama!” type would accomplish the exact opposite.
Judd Legum and Tesnim Zekeria just did a column about what real-world facts can be brought to bear by decent people on the issue. But it takes both framing (this is the reality and not the Stephen Miller hate fantasies) and pushback (the Trumpistas are lying like dirt because they think you voters are dumb suckers).
Notes:
(1) Zimmer, Thomas (2024): What Does “Defend Democracy” Actually Mean? Democracy America <https://thomaszimmer.substack.com/p/what-does-defend-democracy-actually> 03/13/2024. (Accessed: 2024-13-03).
(2) Joe Biden in 1993 speech warned of 'predators on our streets'. CNN Politics 03/05/2019. <https://edition.cnn.com/videos/politics/2019/03/05/joe-biden-tough-on-crime-speech.cnn> (Accessed: 2024-13-03).
(3) Alexander Cooley, Alexander & Nexon, Daniel H. (2022): Der Siegeszug des Illiberalismus: Wie die Demokratie ihren Feinden in die Hände spielt. Blätter für deutsche und internnationäle Politik 2:2022, 66. My translation from the German.
(4) Framelab (2023): Framing Freedom: Biden's 2024 campaign plan. Framelab Substack 05/11/2023. <https://www.theframelab.org/p/framing-freedom-bidens-2024-campaign> (Accessed: 2024-13-03).
(5) Bolgona, Caroline (2024): 'Fundie Baby Voice' Seems To Be Everywhere Now. Here's What You Should Know. Huffpost 03/12/2024. <https://www.huffpost.com/entry/fundie-baby-voice_l_65eb6b2fe4b05ec1ccd9e9b9> (Accessed: 2024-13-03).
(6) Whitmire, Kyle (2024): Britt blamed Biden for assault that happened during Bush admin in Mexico. AL.com 03/09/2024. <https://www.al.com/news/2024/03/did-britt-blame-biden-for-assault-that-happened-during-bush-admin-spokesman-doesnt-say.html> (Accessed: 2024-13-03).
(7) Legum, Judd & Zekeria, Tesnim (2024): New data explodes myth of crime wave fueled by migrants. Popular Information 03/12/2024.
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