During Thursday night’s State of the Union address, President Joe Biden issued an unmistakable warning about the threat Donald Trump poses to American democracy. The speech also implicitly made a more subtle point about democracy: that defending it can require uncomfortably blunt talk.
One of democracy’s core premises is that elections are not like armed conflict, where either you win or you die. Since all parties accept the basic rules of the game, like competitive elections and free speech, the stakes of elections are not existential. Political opponents are less enemies than rivals; disagreement isn’t disaster.
Authoritarian populists like Donald Trump win by attacking this foundational democratic norm.
They demonize their opponents, arguing repeatedly that their opponents are not rivals but rather monsters bent on the country’s destruction. They claim that the system is in the enemy’s corrupt hands and not to be trusted, that their faction and our leader deserve absolute power (“I alone can fix it,” as Trump said in 2016). The nefarious plans of the domestic enemy must be resisted by any means necessary, even ones that might seem extreme.
“We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” Trump said, infamously, in his speech on the morning of the January 6 attack.
For those committed to democracy, this kind of radical attack might seem to pose a dilemma. If you ignore or downplay your opponents’ rhetoric, you fail to alert the public to the danger. But if you correctly point out that it threatens democracy, you risk coming across as a hypocrite: demonizing your opponents in the same way they’re demonizing you.
But this supposed dilemma is no dilemma at all. The reason is deceptively simple: There is no hypocrisy in defending truth against lies.
When Trump says the 2020 election was stolen, he is lying to create a pretext to overthrow a legitimate election. When Biden calls…
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