Photo by Tim Mossholder
Democrats are focusing their 2024 campaign on two themes: first, condemning everything Trump proposes to bring to the presidency, especially the destruction of American democracy if elected, and second, the strong domestic performance of a Biden administration with notable gains for the American people, including jobs and wages, climate, energy policy, Social Security, gun control and a record-high stock market.
Missing from this rosy image of America and the Democratic Party narrative is a deafening silence on foreign policy, with no arguments or explanations. It’s as if the Democratic leadership wants voters to forget that there is a world beyond our borders. And there is good reason for this evasive approach, especially in an election year.
Yet this national posturing seems odd, given that in the decades following the collapse of the Soviet Union more than 30 years ago, the United States invested heavily in military power to ensure global dominance. As a result, the United States is currently involved in controversial wars that rage in Ukraine and Gaza. Even Biden seems hesitant to assert U.S. support for Israel and Ukraine in the domestic arena, preferring to speak in general terms about America’s greatness as a nation whose future is bright except to the extent that it has been darkened by the emergence of the threat of Trump and Trumpism. This tendency to ignore the world should be more troubling to American voters than Biden’s refusal to leave the presidential arena in light of the slightly negligible obstacles of age and mental health that are endangering his 2024 presidential candidacy. Such an evasive pattern expresses an absurdly grandiose, yet distorted, assessment of the current broad political situation.
President Biden’s speech on the 3rdrd The anniversary of the January 6th attack on the Capitol is a classic example. After a lengthy and persuasive warning about Trump’s threats, Biden launched into some eccentric general statements, beginning with a startling reiteration of his personal belief in America’s future: “I have never been more optimistic about the future of our country.” There is no explanation for why, and even an Orwellian metaphor would not explain it. There is no mention of questionable wars, mass homelessness, dangerously high inequality, the prevalence of mass shootings, rising tensions between immigrants, the backsliding carbon emissions and the resulting increase in extreme weather, the numerous signs of a growing risk of a future major war with China or Russia that could well lead to the use of nuclear weapons, the severe violations of academic freedom that often involve punitive infringements of freedom of dissent and expression, or the most intense and divisive social polarization since the Civil War. I confess that I have never been more pessimistic about the future of this country in my life. At the very least, one would have expected a self-described liberal like Biden to speak candidly about addressing the unresolved illiberal challenges that have permeated his time in the White House and about his plans to do so if Democrats take power in November.
Biden also used the same opportunity to childishly boast: “We are the greatest country on earth.” Then, perhaps revealing his uncertainty, he quickly added, without elaborating: “We really are.” And so he began to display the kind of arrogance that has long haunted the twilight of past, faded empires. Contrary to history, Biden said, “We know America is winning. That’s American patriotism.” This is the basis for a broader assertion that invites doubt and opposition outside the West: “There is no country in the world more positioned to lead the world than America…Remember who we are. We are the United States of America, for God’s sake.” It is the ideological leaders of the Western (non-)liberal democracies that have been lending a helping hand to Israel in recent months while it carried out its genocidal attacks on 2.3 million helpless and vulnerable civilians in the tiny Gaza Strip. The US-led complicity in what many in the world perceive as outright genocide was declared so in the rationale expressed by Israel’s political leaders, the policies pursued, and the brutal acts carried out by its military. While Biden claims to “protect the sacred cause of democracy,” he has not respected his people enough to acknowledge, explain, or apologize for Israel’s policies facing unprecedented challenges at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC). We must ask ourselves whether such an act of not including the people in an assessment of a foreign policy that many of them oppose is consistent with an existential commitment to a democratic style of governance. Or whether cooperative security agreements and friendly relations with governments such as India, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt can be reconciled with the goal of promoting a democratizing world.
Nearly 250 years after the founding of the republic, American democracy has a constitutional arrangement that emphasizes the division and balance of the three main branches of government, complemented by a guiding principle that even presidential acts are not exempt from legal constraints and accountability procedures. Today, both of these important pillars of a functioning democracy are crumbling and on the brink of collapse. The U.S. Supreme Court has never been more strayed from defending society’s values and democratic character, not only in denying women’s reproductive rights but also in upholding the rule of law in regulating presidential actions and corporate misconduct. Congress has become so captive to the pressures of well-funded lobbies and the interests of the wealthiest Americans in many key areas of public policy that leading commentators have argued that plutocracy has come to more accurately represent a form of government than democracy. To be optimistic in the face of such developments seems to be playing the role of a fool.
For me, a clear sign that the governing process is alienated from its people is the bipartisan invitation to Israel’s embattled Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address a joint session of Congress scheduled for late July. Such a major honor for a foreign leader who has been recommended an “arrest warrant” by the usually cautious ICC will be further strengthened by a meeting with the president at the White House. The meeting will undoubtedly be accompanied by a televised moment of harmony between the two leaders, including a display of unconditional support and shared values. Such an inappropriate gesture of recognition is an insult to the many Americans who have opposed Israel’s Gaza policies in recent months, and especially to the young Americans who have protested on college campuses across the country and have faced police violence and career-damaging punishment for their activism by education administrators under pressure from donors and politicians. Netanyahu’s invitation is an enlightening metaphor that confirms the dark premonitions of a skeptic like me who is critical of America’s international role since the end of the Cold War and deeply pessimistic about the country’s future. From that perspective, Biden’s outlandish optimism and the tactics of the Democratic establishment are not reassuring. Rather, I see these patterns as a dangerous form of escapism from the unpleasant realities of the nation’s situation and powerful evidence of the stubborn pretensions of vanity of a failing leader.
