Democracy (Theory and Philosophy)

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      Why the U.S. Is Being Ominously Compared to Hungary and Turkey

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      A conversation with Max Fisher, who covers the decline of democracy around the world.Friday’s newsletter is a discussion with Max Fisher, an international reporter and columnist for The New York Times who covers conflict, diplomacy and the sweeping sociopolitical changes taking place all over the globe.Max often delves deep into the world of ideas and where they intersect with the real world, from the rise of new social movements to the subject of today’s chat: the decline of democracy in the United States and abroad.Here’s our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity:You recently wrote about how democracy is under threat all over the world. What did you find most worrying?That democracy is declining more or less everywhere now. Not necessarily in every country but in every region, in rich and poor countries, old and new democracies. And the decline is incremental but steady, which means that the scale of the change isn’t necessarily obvious until you start looking at the data.We tend to think of democratic decline as something that happens in big dramatic moments — a coup, a government collapsing, tanks in the streets. But that’s not typically how it happens anymore.What happens is more like what has occurred in Venezuela, say, or Turkey or Hungary. Elected leaders rise within a democracy promising to defeat some threat within, and in the process end up slowly tearing that democracy down.Each step feels dangerous but maybe not outright authoritarian — the judiciary gets politicized a little, some previously independent institution gets co-opted, election rules get changed, news outlets come under tighter government control.No individual step feels as drastic as an outright coup. And because these leaders both promote and benefit from social polarization, these little power grabs might even be seen by supporters as saving democracy.But over many years, the system tilts more and more toward autocracy.That doesn’t always end up leading to full-on dictatorship. But that pull toward elected strongmen rulers is something we see happening in dozens of countries. By the sheer numbers, according to a democracy monitoring group called V-Dem, more democracies are in decline today than at any other point in the last century.What did you find most surprising?There’s one chart I think about a lot that was put together by the political scientists Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart. They tracked every election in Europe, at every level, going back decades. And they looked at how populist candidates did, on average in those elections, over time.Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart(Political scientists typically use the word “populist” to describe politicians who champion cultural backlash and oppose establishment institutions. Here’s a definition from the book “How Democracies Die,” by two academics named Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt: “anti-establishment politicians — figures who, claiming to represent the voice of ‘the people,’ wage war on what they depict as a corrupt and conspiratorial elite.”)What Norris and Inglehart found was that, in Europe, populists have been receiving a steadily larger share of the vote, on average, basically every year since 1960. That year is important because it’s roughly when Western countries, as the colonial era ended, collectively began to embrace what we now think of as full, liberal, multiracial democracy. And that is also the moment, it turns out from this research, when populist politics began steadily rising in a backlash to that new liberal-democratic order.That discovery is really important for understanding the threat to democracy. It shows that, for all the ways that we might think of the threat as top-down, it’s also, and maybe chiefly, bottom-up.And though we might tie the rise of populist hard-liner politics to specific events like the global financial crisis of 2007-8 or the refugee crisis of the mid-2010s, this is in fact something much larger.It’s a deeper backlash against the demands of modern liberal democracy — and this is something I’ve written about a lot over the past few years — both among voters who feel that they’re being asked to soften their racial and religious identities and among leaders who are being asked to compromise their political self-interest for the sake of democratic norms.What patterns have you found abroad that you now see in the United States?The United States fits pretty cleanly into what is now a well-established global pattern of democratic backsliding..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.First, society polarizes, often over a backlash to social change, to demographic change, to strengthening political power by racial, ethnic or religious minorities, and generally amid rising social distrust.This leads to a bottom-up desire for populist outsiders who will promise to confront the supposed threat within, which means suppressing the other side of that social or partisan or racial divide, asserting a vision of democracy that grants special status for “my” side, and smashing the democratic institutions or norms that prevent that side from asserting what is perceived to be its rightful dominance.You also tend to see political parties and other establishment gatekeepers, who are in theory meant to keep authoritarians from rising in politics, either weaken or become co-opted. Once populist hard-liners gain enough power to begin eroding democratic checks, such as an independent judiciary or the rule of law, it’s usually a steady slide toward democratic erosion.This trend has really picked up speed, globally, only in the last 20 years or so. So it’s hard to say exactly how common it is for countries that begin on this path to end up like Hungary or Turkey. But very few democracies have begun to slide and then reversed course.You have a new book called “The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World.” In your reporting and research for the book, what sorts of effects on democracy did you find social media is having? I’m old enough to remember when techno-evangelists like Clay Shirky were predicting that social media would unleash a wave of democratization in the developing world. Obviously, that hasn’t happened. Or has it?I had that same arc of initially seeing social media as a democratizing force.So did a lot of Arab Spring activists from the early 2010s, like Wael Ghonim, the Egyptian revolutionary and Google engineer. But, within a few years, Ghonim had come to conclude, he has said in a TED Talk, that “the same tool that united us to topple dictators eventually tore us apart” by “amplifying the spread of misinformation, rumors, echo chambers and hate speech.”A neutral social media really could be a democratizing force, in theory. But the major platforms are far from neutral. They are deliberately designed to manipulate you, and to manipulate your experience on the platform in ways that will change how you think and how you behave. These platforms do this not just by what they show you, but also by eliciting certain emotions and behaviors from you.All this digital manipulation, at the scale of maybe hundreds of hours per year, changes you. And not just online, but in your offline life, too. It changes your emotional makeup, the way that you approach politics, your sense of your own identity — even the way that you process right and wrong.For an individual user — and we now have hard, empirical, scientific evidence for this — the effect can be to make you angrier, more extreme and intolerant, more distrustful, more prone to divide the world between us and them, and more disposed toward hostility and even violence against people outside your social in-group.This might change you just by a matter of degree. But when you multiply this effect out by billions of users, and often among a majority of the population, the effect can change society as a whole, too, and especially its politics, in ways that can be detrimental to democracy.What do you think most people miss about the link between social media and threats to democracy?One thing that social platforms have done — and it’s hard to blame this entirely on Silicon Valley — is to displace the traditional activism that is an important part of bringing about democracy or of preventing an existing democracy from backsliding.That activism used to happen through organizing among real-world networks, like student groups during the civil rights movement in the United States, or mothers’ groups in 1970s Argentina resisting that country’s dictatorship. Now, social media allows a protest group, even a leaderless one, to skip that process and, by going viral online, to activate thousands or even millions of people overnight.That is really effective at driving huge numbers of people onto the street, but not at much else.With the advent of social media, the number of mass protest events in the world shot way up. A million people marching on a capital city became a more common occurrence. But the success rate of those movements fell from about 70 percent to only 30 percent.The Yellow Vests movement in France quickly gained momentum in 2018 before fizzling out.Mauricio Lima for The New York TimesThe Yellow Vests, the French protest movement that began in 2018, exemplifies this. It was this stunning, spontaneous, nationwide uprising for political change. And it had been organized almost entirely through Facebook and other platforms. But it was also internally incoherent. For all its force, it quickly fizzled out, having caused a lot of traffic problems but having changed very little.Partly that was because of what had been lost in the displacement of traditional organizing. But partly it was also because of the distorting effects of those platforms. Those systems, just as they do for users globally, had pulled the Yellow Vests supporters who were gathering on those platforms toward extremes: demands to bar all refugees from the country, to default on the national debt, to replace elected legislatures with fuzzily defined citizens’ councils.It’s not the only reason the Yellow Vests mostly receded, but it is, I think, a metaphor for those platforms’ effects on our societies and democracies broadly.What to read about democracyLuke Broadwater and Michael Schmidt have an update on the long-shot push, led by some members of Congress and nonprofit groups, to bar Donald Trump from running for president in 2024 by invoking the 14th Amendment to establish him as an “insurrectionist.”Writing in The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik asks a provocative question: Can’t we come up with something better than liberal democracy?The editorial board of The New York Times is reaching out to readers to ask: What concerns and confounds you about the state of American democracy? Read about the project here.Thank you for reading On Politics. — BlakeRead past editions of the newsletter here.If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Browse all of our subscriber-only newsletters here.Have feedback? Ideas for coverage? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      Was Biden’s Democracy Speech Too Harsh?

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      More from our inbox:The Reasons Behind the Teacher ExodusThe Reusable Bag Glut Doug Mills/The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “With Malice Toward Quite a Few,” by Bret Stephens (column, Sept. 7):While declaring Donald Trump to be the “gravest threat American democracy faces” out of one side of his mouth, out of the other Mr. Stephens decries President Biden’s harsh words for the MAGA Republicans fervently supporting Mr. Trump.He can’t have it both ways.Many Republicans in Congress to this day refuse to admit that Joe Biden won the 2020 election. Until these Republicans can bring themselves (and convince the majority of their party) to acknowledge that the presidency was not stolen from Mr. Trump, sharp words to save our democracy are warranted.Lincoln’s “malice toward none” address was given after the insurgents seeking to destroy the Union were defeated, making Mr. Biden’s identification of threats to democracy timely and vital.Carl MezoffStamford, Conn.To the Editor:Bret Stephens nailed it. The threat to democracy is not Republicans or even just MAGA Republicans. It is the sinister and buffoonish Donald Trump, plus his inner circle that pushed his lies in the aftermath of the 2020 election.Even the Jan. 6 riot was not a threat to democracy. Nor was it an insurrection. It was a violent venting that petered out on its own that same afternoon.But what caused that violent venting? Part of it was Mr. Trump’s lies. But a bigger part of it was the left’s actual attempts to steal the 2016 and 2020 elections, not by miscounting votes, but first by the claims of collusion with Russia (a hoax, as I and many others believe) and later by suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story. In between, the Democrats and media did everything possible to evict Mr. Trump from office. If all that was “democracy,” then Watergate wasn’t a crime.Donald Trump is one of the worst sore losers of all time, totally unfit for office. But he was also endlessly pushed and goaded, just as Republicans have been pushed, goaded, demeaned and vilified for decades by the arrogant, condescending left. That’s what brought Mr. Trump to the fore to begin with.Mark GodburnNorfolk, Conn.To the Editor:While I acknowledge the validity of some of Bret Stephens’s criticism of President Biden’s speech in Philadelphia, I take issue with his conclusion: “The gravest threat American democracy faces today isn’t the Republican Party, MAGA or otherwise. It’s Trump.”This overlooks the fact that Trumpism has metastasized and infected the entire Republican Party. And getting rid of Donald Trump won’t eliminate the damage to our politics and electoral system that he leaves in his wake.John J. ConiglioEast Meadow, N.Y.To the Editor:I agree with much of what Bret Stephens says about President Biden’s speech. I was a registered Republican from 1970 to 2016. I left the party the day Donald Trump got the nomination.I think there is one simple litmus test that separates the MAGA deplorables from the regular or moderate Republicans. If you deny that Joe Biden won the election, if you insist that it had to be rigged, if you attended the Jan. 6 riot and acted violently, then yes, you are a MAGA extremist bent on the destruction of our democracy. It’s that simple.Steven SchwartzWest Orange, N.J.To the Editor:Re “Does Biden Truly Think Democracy Is in Crisis?,” by Ross Douthat (column, Sept. 5):Since democracy means that the candidate with the most votes is declared the winner, how could anyone, including Mr. Douthat, not believe that we are in a crisis of democracy, when the other major party candidate and his minions refuse to acknowledge that Joe Biden was the winner?Ross ZuckerCastine, MaineThe writer is a retired professor of political science at Touro University.To the Editor:Ross Douthat questions whether President Biden and the Democrats really believe that Donald Trump and his followers are a threat to democracy, because Republicans are not a majority party. But with the Electoral College, voting restrictions, gerrymandering, a Senate biased toward rural states and a Supreme Court tilted way to the right, our system is quite vulnerable to rule by a minority party.If that party becomes authoritarian, it can indeed be a threat to democracy. Those who don’t take such a threat seriously espouse a dangerous complacency.Chris MillerEl Cerrito, Calif.The Reasons Behind the Teacher ExodusHallsville Intermediate School in Hallsville, Mo. The superintendent of the school district there said the pool of qualified teaching applicants has all but dried up in recent years.Whitney Curtis for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “How Bad Is the Teacher Shortage? It Depends on Where You Live” (news article, Aug. 30):Low pay, as the article indicates, is a major reason that young people are not becoming teachers and that older, experienced teachers are leaving the profession.Consider some other reasons:Parents who harass, verbally abuse and even assault teachers in school parking lots and even outside their homes.Schools so inadequately funded that teachers often have to use their own meager paychecks to pay for classroom supplies.Schools so badly in need of repairs that they are dangerous to the health and well-being of everyone who works in them.The prospect of a gunman with an AR-15 rifle walking into a classroom, forcing teachers to put their own bodies between themselves and their students.Threats that teachers can be fired or even jailed for uttering a perfectly legitimate word or phrase that some politicians deem offensive.Politicians have done more than anyone else to create the teacher shortage — and they will have to fix it.Dennis M. ClausenEscondido, Calif.The writer is a professor of American literature and creative writing at the University of San Diego.To the Editor:Today there is a mass exodus from the classroom by many educators, and I can’t blame them. I was a teacher for 31 years. They can make more money at a different job with less stress.Some of my nonteaching friends have asked, “What can we do to support teachers so they stay in the classroom?”You can volunteer in the classroom, donate classroom supplies, speak up for better teacher pay and smaller class sizes, appreciate the demands and constraints of a teacher’s job, and speak highly of teachers in front of your children.According to the National Education Association, 55 percent of teachers are thinking of leaving the profession. We can’t let this happen.To all of the educators staying in the profession, we can’t thank you enough. Teachers can’t do this alone. They need your support. Thank you to all of the supportive, understanding parents out there. We need you.Deborah EngenSugar Land, TexasThe Reusable Bag GlutExperts calculate that a typical reusable plastic bag has to be reused 10 times to account for the additional energy and material used to make it. For cotton tote bags, it’s much higher.Jeenah Moon/ReutersTo the Editor:Re “New Jersey Bag Ban’s Unforeseen Consequence: Too Many Bags” (front page, Sept. 2):Perhaps the New Jersey supermarkets and online food delivery services could take back the previous delivery’s reusable bags — and reuse them.Marianne VaheyWoodbridge, Conn.To the Editor:I also accumulated many reusable bags while grocery shopping online during the pandemic. I’m giving mine to an organization that provides meals for the homeless. Food banks and nonprofit thrift shops can also probably use them.Betsy FeistNew YorkTo the Editor:My local C-Town supermarket packs groceries for delivery or curbside pickup in the corrugated cardboard shipping boxes that they get food in. They are very efficient in their arrangements, so I generally only need two boxes when I might need six bags.Anne BarschallTarrytown, N.Y. More

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      The Man Who Won the Republican Party Before Trump Did

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      In May 1992, Pat Buchanan made his way to Smuggler’s Canyon along the U.S.-Mexico border, where migrants passed into the United States. A motley crowd had gathered for his news conference there: reporters still following his flagging campaign for president, Mexican migrants curious about the event (some of whom were running a pop-up refreshment stand to sell soda to Buchanan supporters), members of a far-right white-power group eager to hear a credible candidate make the case for sealing the border.“I am calling attention to a national disgrace,” he told the crowd. “The failure of the national government of the United States to protect the borders of the United States from an illegal invasion that involves at least a million aliens a year.” Mr. Buchanan blamed that “illegal invasion” for a host of problems, ranging from drugs to the recent riots in Los Angeles. He called for a “Buchanan fence,” a trench and a barrier that would block migration from the south and become part of the infrastructure of what critics called Fortress America: a nation bound by impregnable barriers that kept out foreign people, foreign goods and foreign ideas.By the time he arrived at Smuggler’s Canyon, it had been clear for months that Mr. Buchanan stood no chance of wresting the nomination from the sitting president, George H.W. Bush. But Mr. Buchanan was no longer aiming to win the presidency, if he ever was — he was aiming to win the party. He had long believed that “the greatest vacuum in American politics is to the right of Ronald Reagan,” that Reaganism’s days were numbered and that a new right was anxious to be born. He would be the midwife to that new right, a pessimistic, media-savvy, revolution-minded conservatism that took root in the 1990s.And while the new conservatism Mr. Buchanan hashed out in the 1992 campaign never attracted the impressive majorities that Reagan and Bush had won in the 1980s, it nonetheless dislodged Reaganism as the core of the party in the decades that followed. In the process, the right learned that unpopular populist politics could win power even when they couldn’t win majorities. The election of Donald Trump in 2016 showed that a Buchananite politician could seize the presidency; his loss in 2020 showed how tenuous that hold on power could be. The question facing Republicans now is whether, having adopted the Buchanan model, they can rework it to win elections outright, or whether they will continue to rely on its vision of democracy without majorities — or worse, no democracy at all.The notion that the Republican Party would abandon Reaganism seemed absurd in the late 1980s. The wildly popular president left office with what was then the highest approval rating of any departing president since Gallup began tracking it under Harry Truman. For conservatives, Reagan wasn’t just popular — he had redeemed the Cold War conservative movement by blending it with optimism, charisma and an emotional defense of pluralistic democracy.While that defense was often more rhetorical than real — Reagan backed authoritarian regimes as long as they were anti-Communist and dog-whistled about race throughout his presidency — it had genuine policy implications. He regularly emphasized the need for the free movement of people and goods, calling for a North American accord in his 1980 campaign that would lower the trade and migration borders between Mexico, Canada and the United States. He also spoke in stirring terms about the value of immigration and cultural pluralism. “I think it’s really closer to the truth to say that America has assimilated as much as her immigrants have,” he said at a naturalization ceremony in 1984. “It’s made for a delightful diversity, and it’s made us a stronger and a more vital nation.”Yet even as he won back-to-back landslide elections — sweeping 44 states in 1980 and 49 in 1984 as he expanded the party to include the newly designated Reagan Democrats — his broad appeal lost him the support of some on the right. In 1982, Mr. Buchanan bemoaned “the transformation of Ronald Reagan from a pivotal and revolutionary figure in American politics into a traditional, middle-of-the-road pragmatic Republican president.” In fact, Mr. Buchanan was brought in as communications director for the Reagan White House in 1985 to appease a group that called itself the New Right, Reagan-skeptical conservatives who believed the president was too pragmatic and soft, particularly on social issues.Mr. Buchanan’s skepticism remained throughout his years as communications director. He even toyed with the idea of running for president in 1988 to test his theory about the political vacuum to Reagan’s right. But he ultimately left the sideshow campaign to another Pat, the televangelist Pat Robertson. What Mr. Buchanan understood was that 1988 was too soon: Reagan’s star shone so brightly on the right that coming out against his policies, even while praising the man himself, would do little to win over conservatives.But as he watched Bush win the nomination that would end in a third straight landslide win for Republicans, Mr. Buchanan delivered a diagnosis that would shape his own presidential campaigns in the years that followed. Writing about the future of the party for National Review in 1988, Mr. Buchanan concluded, “The Republican moment slipped by, I believe, when the G.O.P. refused to take up the challenge from the Left on its chosen battleground: the politics of class, culture, religion and race.” He would return in four years to take up that fight.When Mr. Buchanan announced his campaign for president in 1991, the world looked very different than it had just a few years earlier. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union brought the Cold War to a sudden end. The geopolitical reality that had governed American politics for nearly 50 years, and defined the Cold War conservative movement that Reagan had led, disappeared overnight. Mr. Buchanan grasped that a new conservatism — or rather, an old conservatism renovated for a new age — was possible.Mr. Buchanan found a freedom in the end of the Cold War. For decades, that geopolitical battle had led to a widespread belief among Americans that the country had to actively engage with the world to halt the spread of Communism, had to embrace a more open and pluralistic society to model the righteousness of the West, had to affirmatively embrace ideas of democracy and freedom and, eventually, equality.As the Cold War came to an end, Mr. Buchanan saw a chance to slip the bonds of those commitments. At the very moment democratic triumphalism was in full force and commentators were musing about the end of history, he began questioning whether democracy really was the best form of government. “The American press is infatuated to the point of intoxication with ‘democracy,’ ” he wrote in 1991. To make his point, he compared the Marine Corps and corporations like IBM to the federal government. “Only the last is run on democratic, not autocratic, principles. Yet, who would choose the last as the superior institution?”He harkened back to pre-Cold-War foreign policy as well. While Bush’s approval ratings soared to unprecedented heights during Operation Desert Storm in Iraq (they would only be surpassed by his son’s approval rating after the Sept. 11 attacks), Mr. Buchanan denounced the invasion and Bush’s plans to construct a “new world order.” His presidential campaign even borrowed the slogan “America First” from the anti-interventionist group that had opposed U.S. involvement in World War II, a provocative move given that the group had been tainted by its ties to antisemites like the aviator Charles Lindbergh.Yet Mr. Buchanan’s retro politics was also thoroughly modern. He built his political reputation not through service but through media, a novel approach for a presidential candidate. In 1982, he debuted as a regular panelist on the new PBS series “The McLaughlin Group,” a shouty round-table show that eventually drew millions of viewers. That same year, he also became host of the show “Crossfire” on the fledgling cable news network CNN. The show pitted him against the liberal commentator Tom Braden for a weekly left-right brawl. It quickly became one of CNN’s highest-rated shows.It was that Pat Buchanan, the feisty, anti-democratic, outrageous, race-baiting figure, that Americans came to know over the course of the 1980s and early 1990s. They got to know him not in the echo chamber of right-wing media but through mainstream political programming — the place, in fact, where modern right-wing punditry would be born in the 1990s. Some of today’s most notable right-wing voices became household names not on Fox News but on cable news outlets and political comedy shows like Bill Maher’s “Politically Incorrect.” (Glenn Beck and Tucker Carlson got their television start on CNN, Laura Ingraham and Ann Coulter on MSNBC.)But Mr. Buchanan was not content to be a television star. He wanted to be in the arena, to vie for power in the national spotlight of a presidential campaign. Routinely trading his host chair for the campaign trail, he helped construct the revolving door between punditry and the presidency that now characterizes Republican politics in the United States.In his efforts to fill the vacuum to the right of Reagan, Mr. Buchanan also borrowed directly from the far right. The New Right had drawn inspiration from the campaigns of the Alabama segregationist George Wallace; Mr. Buchanan now drew from the candidacy of David Duke, a former imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan who had become a national name for his efforts to win office in Louisiana. (Mr. Buchanan would disavow him during his 1996 campaign, removing a campaign adviser with ties to Mr. Duke.) After attempting to run as a Democrat for most of the 1980s, Mr. Duke became a Republican in the late 1980s. He then ran in — and won — a special election for a seat in the Louisiana House. (He would go on to lose a campaign for U.S. Senate in 1990, running as a Republican and winning 43 percent of the vote in the general election.)Republican leaders denounced Mr. Duke during the special election campaign, which drew even Reagan out of retirement to make clear the former Klan leader did not have the party’s support. But while Republican elites scrambled to distance the party from Duke, Mr. Buchanan sought to learn from him. “David Duke walked into the political vacuum left when conservative Republicans in the Reagan years were intimidated into shucking off winning social issues so we might be able to pass moral muster with Ben Hooks and Coretta King,” he wrote, naming two Black civil rights leaders. That, he argued, was the wrong approach. Instead, the party should look at why Duke was so attractive to voters and work to appeal to his base.It was a tricky maneuver. Mr. Buchanan seemed to want to mainstream the Klan leader’s issues without the baggage of the white hood, to win the extremist vote without attracting charges of extremism. As his visit to Smuggler’s Canyon in 1992 showed, that was not an easy task.There, mixed in with the crowd at the border for Mr. Buchanan’s news conference, was a group that made clear the cost of courting the Duke vote. Tom Metzger, a former Klan grand dragon and founder of the White Aryan Resistance, gathered with other white-power activists to support Mr. Buchanan’s anti-immigrant speech. The campaign quickly clarified to reporters that the white-power activists were not part of the event. But their presence served as a warning that Mr. Buchanan had little control over how much extremism he invited into the Republican Party. He was not siphoning off extremist ideas; he was opening a floodgate.Mr. Metzger also served as a reminder of Mr. Buchanan’s own extremism. For years, Mr. Buchanan faced accusations of antisemitism: He wondered aloud whether people had really been gassed to death at the concentration camp at Treblinka, denounced efforts to round up fugitive Nazis and called Congress “Israeli-occupied territory.” In an early version of the Great Replacement Theory, he railed against nonwhite immigration as fundamentally anti-American, asking in 1990, “Does this First World nation wish to become a Third World country?”There was more than enough on Mr. Buchanan’s record for reporters to expose his extremism and make clear the roots of his candidacy. Yet it seemed to some, like the Washington Post columnist David Broder, that journalists were going easy on Mr. Buchanan. “The press has treated his campaign lightly, presuming that it is just an interlude before he goes back on CNN’s ‘Crossfire’ and the speaking circuit. That’s a mistake,” he wrote in a piece comparing Mr. Buchanan to Mr. Wallace. “Like George Wallace,” he wrote, “he has a deadly knack for finding the most divisive issues in American life, including race, and a growing skill in exploiting them.” Too many journalists, Mr. Broder feared, believed Mr. Buchanan couldn’t be a crackpot because he was a colleague.Though Mr. Buchanan lost in 1992, and again in 1996 and 2000, his ideas took root immediately. In reaction to his surprisingly strong showing in the 1992 New Hampshire primary, the Republican Party adapted its platform to call, for the first time, for “structures” on the border. California activists took note as well, and a year later, they began working on what would become Proposition 187, a harsh measure that would cut undocumented immigrants off from almost every nonemergency government service, including public education. And while Republican politicians like George W. Bush and John McCain attempted to tamp down that nativist streak in the party, it was the nativists who ultimately won.Mr. Buchanan’s style, too, became a central mode of politics, as politicians learned that headline-grabbing outrage could build a base far more easily than shoe-leather politicking could. Likewise, thinning the line between extremism and presidential politics, which had been considered a vice since the disastrous 1964 campaign of Barry Goldwater, slowly became a virtue: a way of expanding the base and injecting enthusiasm into a campaign.Those dynamics are all at play in today’s Republican Party. Once the party of Ronald Reagan, it is now in thrall to the politics of Mr. Buchanan. Yet it is also at a crossroads. Buchananism was never truly popular. Neither was Trumpism: With Donald Trump, Republicans won power but not popularity — at least, not a popularity they could translate into clear electoral majorities. The simple solution would be to return to Reaganism, to reconstruct that big, if still exclusionary, tent and win huge majorities. But recent efforts to recreate Reaganism and establish a more inclusive Republican Party, like George W. Bush’s appeals to compassionate conservatism and Senator John McCain’s insistence on immigration reform, met fierce opposition from the party’s base.So the party has instead tried to strike a tenuous balance, strengthening counter-majoritarian institutions, appealing to nonwhite men in an effort to bolster its numbers, and scouting for candidates who can speak with a Trumpian patois without the Trumpian excesses that drive more moderate voters away. It is a near-impossible balance to strike, and if it fails, it carries not only the threat of more pseudo-legal efforts to rewrite election outcomes but also the threat of escalating political violence. This is the path the party chose when it traded Reaganism for Buchananism, making Mr. Buchanan’s endless campaign for the presidency, despite its losses, one of the most consequential in American history.Nicole Hemmer (@pastpunditry) is an associate professor of history and the director of the Carolyn T. and Robert M. Rogers Center for the Study of the Presidency at Vanderbilt University and the author of “Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s” and “Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Biden Puts Defense of Democracy at Center of Agenda, at Home and Abroad

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      WASHINGTON — It is the element of President Biden’s foreign policy that overlaps most significantly with his domestic agenda: defending democracy.His drive to buttress democracy at home and abroad has taken on more urgency as Russia wages war in Ukraine, China expands its power and former President Donald J. Trump and his Republican supporters attack American democratic norms and fair elections.In a speech in Philadelphia last week, Mr. Biden warned about the threat to democracy in the United States and said American citizens were in “a battle for the soul of this nation.”Even as he hammers home that message ahead of the U.S. midterm elections, Mr. Biden’s efforts to bolster democracy abroad are about to come into sharper focus. The White House is expected to announce a second multinational Summit for Democracy. And the National Security Strategy, which could be released this month, will highlight reinforcement of democracies as a policy priority, officials say.On his most recent overseas trip, Antony J. Blinken, the secretary of state, announced in the Democratic Republic of Congo that the United States would help the country with “preparations for next year’s free, fair and on-time elections” — an emphasis on the sanctity of elections that echoes Mr. Biden’s defense of the 2020 U.S. presidential election against Mr. Trump’s persistent attempts to undermine its results.Pursuing parallel policies to strengthen democracy at home and abroad allows the Biden administration to focus on a single central message, while the president’s political aides shape the identity of the Democratic Party around it.And it gives Mr. Biden the standing to claim he is the torchbearer of an American foreign policy tradition that contrasts sharply with Mr. Trump’s isolationist “America First” approach and praise for autocrats. That tradition, liberal internationalism, revolves around the idea that global stability comes from democratic systems, free markets and participation in American-led multinational organizations.“I think the rhetorical — and I would say sincerely moral — emphasis is welcome, as is the effort to draw democracies together,” said Larry Diamond, a scholar of democracy at Stanford University.But in recent years, liberal internationalism has come under criticism from politicians, policymakers and scholars well beyond the Trump camp, and Mr. Biden risks being seen as naïve or imperialistic in centering his foreign policy on strengthening democracies.Critics point to the disastrous wars and nation-building efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan that were carried out in the name of democracy. And they say the decades-long American push for free trade and open markets has fueled global inequality, environmental catastrophe and the empowerment of authoritarian figures and groups like the Chinese Communist Party, which now presents an anti-democratic but materially successful governance model to the world.Officials in the Biden administration say they are approaching the defense of democracy with a sense of humility and are open to learning from other nations.During a trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken announced the United States would help the country with “preparations for next year’s free, fair and on-time elections.”Pool photo by Andrew HarnikOn his travels last month, Mr. Blinken unveiled a new U.S. strategy for Africa that has democracy support at its core. But he also said at a news conference in Kinshasa, Congo’s capital, that the United States did not “want a one-sided, transactional relationship.”He praised Congo for being a “strong participant” in the Summit for Democracy that Mr. Biden convened in Washington last year.The Biden PresidencyWith midterm elections approaching, here’s where President Biden stands.On the Campaign Trail: Fresh off a series of legislative victories, President Biden is back campaigning. But his low approval ratings could complicate his efforts to help Democrats in the midterm elections.‘Dark Brandon’ Rises: White House officials recently began to embrace this repackaged internet meme. Here is the story behind it and what it tells us about the administration.Questions About 2024: Mr. Biden has said he plans to run for a second term, but at 79, his age has become an uncomfortable issue.A Familiar Foreign Policy: So far, Mr. Biden’s approach is surprisingly consistent with the Trump administration’s, analysts say.Congo is a nascent democracy. After a troubled presidential election in 2019, it had its first peaceful transfer of power. Mr. Blinken promised the country an additional $10 million “to promote peaceful political participation and transparency” in elections next year, for a total of $24 million in such programs overseen by the United States Agency for International Development.Mr. Biden’s aides say their approach emphasizes “democratic resilience” rather than “democracy promotion,” unlike efforts by earlier administrations. They argue they are strengthening democratic nations and cooperation among them rather than pushing for changes of political systems or governments.The framing is defensive rather than offensive, with a recognition that democracies are under threat, often from internal forces, in ways they have not been in decades.And the officials also say global challenges like climate change, the pandemic and economic recovery are best addressed by democracies working in concert.Furthermore, they argue, no other recent administration has had to rally partners and allies urgently to confront the challenges posed by both China and Russia, which in different ways are undermining what U.S. officials call the “rules-based international order.” Administration officials say there is a competition between democracies and autocracies to demonstrate which can deliver for their people and the world.But in tackling those broad issues, the Biden administration will have to determine on a case-by-case basis whether to work with authoritarian nations or prioritize the principles in its “democracy versus autocracy” line.“It makes it more difficult when you’re framing it this narrowly to reach out to those states you might need,” said Emma Ashford, a senior fellow on foreign policy at the Stimson Center. “It might leave out space for more global issues — the things you might need to talk to autocracies about.”In the Middle East, Mr. Biden has visibly calibrated his position on autocracies, meeting in July with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia despite vowing earlier to make that nation a “pariah” for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a columnist for The Washington Post, by Saudi operatives. Mr. Biden’s aides said the president was focused on working with Saudi Arabia on diplomacy with Israel, global energy security, competition with China and ending the Yemen war.And the officials say the United States still needs to find ways to cooperate with Russia and China on certain issues: the nuclear programs of Iran and North Korea, climate change and the pandemic, for starters.To oppose Russia’s war in Ukraine, the Biden administration has had to work closely with Hungary and Turkey, countries that, though members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, have become synonymous with the erosion of democracy.Residents outside a bombed building in Sloviansk, Ukraine.Tyler Hicks/The New York TimesViktor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary, presents a complicated challenge. As he dismantles his country’s democratic norms and promotes nationalism based on ethnic and religious identity, he has emerged as a role model for many American conservatives. Last month, he got a hero’s welcome when he spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas.And prominent American conservative political figures, including Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former adviser, have said they want to create alliances between right-wing populist groups in Europe — which often embrace anti-democratic values — and ones in the United States.This growing intersection of politics abroad and in the United States brings into sharp relief what a senior Biden official calls the “interconnected” foreign and domestic policy efforts in the administration to strengthen democracy.But Mr. Diamond said there is a shortfall in the material resources the administration has devoted to bolstering democracy abroad. For one thing, he said, the United States must ensure it and its democratic partners are perceived as militarily stronger than their autocratic rivals. That means not only repelling the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he said, but also accelerating weapons deliveries to Taiwan so the island can deter a potential invasion by China.He added that the Biden administration also needed to increase its public diplomacy efforts to turn international opinion against Russia and China, pointing to the difficulties that U.S. officials have had in getting member states of the United Nations to approve resolutions condemning Russia for the war in Ukraine.“Russia and China, with their vast propaganda apparatuses, have made very significant inroads, particularly in terms of elite opinion and dialogue,” Mr. Diamond said.Mr. Biden has requested hundreds of millions of dollars from Congress for pro-democracy initiatives, including two programs aimed at supporting anti-corruption efforts, independent journalism, elections and pro-democracy activists.Officials around the world will be watching to see exactly how the United States carries out those programs — and whether Washington can now avoid the pitfalls that Western powers have had in trying to spread ideas and practices abroad.At a news conference with Mr. Blinken in Pretoria, the foreign minister of South Africa, Naledi Pandor, said the United States should work with African nations as equals and use tools already developed by Africans.“To come in and seek to teach a country that we know how democracy functions and we’ve come to tell you, ‘You do it. It’ll work for you’ — I think it leads to defeat,” she said. “So we need to think in different ways.”Some analysts note that several African nations with strongman rulers were excluded from Mr. Biden’s democracy summit in December, including Rwanda and Uganda, to the potential detriment of U.S. policy on the continent.“That selectivity already puts leaders and countries in a state of criticism to the U.S.,” said Bob Wekesa, a scholar at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. “They are on a collision path already.”Lynsey Chutel More

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      Does Biden Really Believe We Are in a Crisis of Democracy?

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      Strip away the weird semi-fascist optics, the creepy crimson lighting and the Marines standing sentinel, and the speech Joe Biden gave on Thursday night outside Philadelphia’s Independence Hall could have been given by other prominent Democrats throughout the Trump era.The song is always the same: On the one hand, dire warnings about Trumpian authoritarianism and the need for all patriotic Republicans and independents to join the defense of American democracy; on the other, a strictly partisan agenda that offers few grounds for ideological truce, few real concessions to beliefs outside the liberal tent.In this case, Biden’s speech conflated the refusal to accept election outcomes with opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage — implying that the positions of his own Catholic Church are part of a “MAGA Republican” threat to democracy itself — while touting a State of the Union‌-style list of policy achievements, a cascade of liberal self-praise.The speech’s warning against eroding democratic norms was delivered a week after Biden’s own semi-Caesarist announcement of a $500 billion student-loan forgiveness plan without consulting Congress. And it was immediately succeeded by the news that Democrats would be pouring millions in advertising into New Hampshire’s Republican Senate primary, in the hopes of making sure that the Trumpiest candidate wins through — the latest example of liberal strategists deliberately elevating figures their party and president officially consider an existential threat to the ‌Republic.The ultimate blame for nominating those unfit candidates lies with the G.O.P. electorate, not Democrats. But in the debate about the risks of Republican extremism, the debate the president just joined, it’s still important to judge the leaders of the Democratic Party by their behavior. You may believe that American democracy is threatened as at no point since the Civil War, dear reader, but they do not. They are running a political operation in which the threat to democracy is leverage, used to keep swing voters onside without having to make difficult concessions to the center or the right.It’s easy to imagine a Biden speech that offered such concessions without giving an inch in its critique of Donald Trump. The president could have acknowledged, for instance, that his own party has played some role in undermining faith in American elections, that the Republicans challenging the 2020 result were making a more dangerous use of tactics deployed by Democrats in 2004 and 2016.Or his condemnations of political violence could have encompassed the worst of the May and June 2020 rioting, the recent wave of vandalism at crisis pregnancy centers or the assassination plot against Brett Kavanaugh as well as MAGA threats.Or instead of trying to simply exploit the opportunities that the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision has created for his party, he could have played the statesman, invoked his own Catholic faith and moderate past, praised the sincerity of abortion opponents and called for a national compromise on abortion — a culture war truce, if you will, for the greater good of saving democracy itself.You can make a case for Biden refusing these gestures (or a different set pegged to different non-liberal concerns). But that case requires private beliefs that diverge from Biden’s public statements: In particular, a belief that Trumpism is actually too weak to credibly threaten the democratic order, and that it’s therefore safe to accept a small risk of, say, a Trump-instigated crisis around the vote count in 2024 if elevating Trumpists increases the odds of liberal victories overall.For actual evidence supporting such a belief, I recommend reading Julian G. Waller’s essay “Authoritarianism Here?” in the spring 2022 issue of the journal American Affairs. Surveying the literature on so-called democratic backsliding toward authoritarianism around the world, Waller argues that the models almost always involve a popular leader and a dominant party winning sweeping majorities in multiple elections, gaining the ground required to entrench their position and capture cultural institutions, all the while claiming the mantle of practicality and common sense.As you may note, this does not sound like a description of the current Republican Party — a minority coalition led by an unpopular chancer that consistently passes up opportunities to seize the political center, a party that enjoys structural advantages in the Senate and the Electoral College but consistently self-sabotages by nominating zany or incompetent candidates, a movement whose influence in most cultural institutions collapsed in the Trump era.If Jan. 6 and its aftermath made it easier to imagine a Trumpian G.O.P. precipitating a constitutional crisis, they did not make it more imaginable that it could consolidate power thereafter, in the style of Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan or Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez or any other example. Which in turn makes it relatively safe for the Democratic Party to continue using crisis-of-democracy rhetoric instrumentally, and even tacitly boost Trump within the G.O.P., instead of making the moves toward conciliation and cultural truce that a real crisis would require.Such is an implication, at least, of Waller’s analysis, and it’s my own longstanding read on Trumpism as well.That reading may well be too sanguine. But in their hearts, Joe Biden and the leaders of his party clearly think I’m right.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram. More

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      Democrats and Republicans Agree That Democracy Is in Danger

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      WASHINGTON — The good news is that deeply divided Americans agree on at least one thing. The bad news is they share the view that their nearly two-and-a-half-century-old democracy is in danger — and disagree drastically about who is threatening it.In a remarkable consensus, a new Quinnipiac University poll found that 69 percent of Democrats and 69 percent of Republicans say that democracy is “in danger of collapse.” But one side blames former President Donald J. Trump and his “MAGA Republicans” while the other fingers President Biden and the “socialist Democrats.”So when the president delivers a warning about the fate of democracy as he did on Thursday night, the public hears two vastly different messages, underscoring deep rifts in American society that make it an almost ungovernable moment in the nation’s history. Not only do Americans diverge sharply over important issues like abortion, immigration and the economy, they see the world in fundamentally different and incompatible ways.“Sadly, we have gotten away from a common understanding that democracy is a process and does not necessarily guarantee the results your side wants, that even if your team loses an election, you can fight for your policies another day,” said Michael Abramowitz, the president of Freedom House, a group that promotes democracy globally and recently has expressed concern for it at home as well. “That’s a huge challenge for the president, but also for all politicians.”The chasm between these two Americas makes Mr. Biden’s task all the more pronounced. While he once aspired to bridge that divide after he evicted Mr. Trump from the Oval Office, Mr. Biden has been surprised, according to advisers, at just how enduring his predecessor’s grip on the Republican Party has been.And so, instead of bringing Americans together, the president’s goal has essentially evolved into making sure that the majority of the country that opposes Mr. Trump is fully alert to the threat that the former president still poses — and energized or scared enough to do something about it, most immediately in the upcoming midterm elections.That calculation meant that Mr. Biden knew he would be hit for abandoning his stance as the president who would unite the country. With the legislative season basically over pending the election, he no longer needed to worry about offending Republican members of Congress he might need to pass bipartisan bills. Instead, he has communicated with voters much as he did in 2020, reaching out especially to suburban women and other key groups in swing states like Pennsylvania.The Republicans’ reaction to Mr. Biden’s speech was remarkable. For years, they stood quietly by as Mr. Trump vilified and demonized anyone who disagreed with him — encouraging supporters to beat up protesters; demanding that his rivals be arrested; accusing critics of treason and even murder; calling opponents “fascists”; and retweeting a supporter saying “the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat.” But they rose up as one on Thursday night and Friday to complain that Mr. Biden was the one being divisive.“It’s unthinkable that a president would speak about half of Americans that way,” said Nikki Haley, who was Mr. Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations. “Leaders protect the Constitution,” added Mike Pompeo, who was Mr. Trump’s secretary of state. “They don’t declare half of America to be enemies of the state like Joe Biden did last night.”Aided by an eerie red speech backdrop, Republicans described Mr. Biden in dictatorial terms, as “if Mussolini and Hitler got together,” as Donald Trump Jr. put it.When it comes to democracy in America, there is no real equivalence, of course. The elder Mr. Trump sought to use the power of his office to overturn a democratic election, pressuring state and local officials, the Justice Department, members of Congress and his own vice president to disregard the will of the people to keep him in office. When that did not work, he riled up a crowd that stormed the Capitol, disrupting the counting of Electoral College votes and threatening to execute those standing in Mr. Trump’s way.Former President Donald J. Trump has frequently used rallies to disparage his critics.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesSince leaving office, Mr. Trump has continued to demand that the election be reversed and even suggested that he be reinstated as president, all based on lies he tells his supporters about what happened in 2020. He has forced Republican officeholders and candidates to embrace his false claims and sought to install election deniers in state positions where they can influence future vote counts.When Mr. Trump’s supporters express fear for democracy with pollsters, it is not about those actions but about what Mr. Trump has told them about election integrity, even if what he says is wrong. They also see Mr. Biden’s administration as far too liberal, expanding government to the point that it will invariably restrain their own freedoms. More

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      Americans Think Our Democracy Is on the Brink. So Does Biden.

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      We examine the president’s speech in Philadelphia with Zolan Kanno-Youngs, a White House reporter.In a new national poll this week from Quinnipiac University, 67 percent of American adults said they thought the country’s democracy was “in danger of collapse.”That’s a huge number. And, as Quinnipiac noted, it is an increase of nine percentage points from its January survey, when 58 percent of Americans said the same thing.One noteworthy caveat: “Adults” is not the same as “likely voters,” which is what political pollsters use to estimate who will turn out to vote in the next election. Figuring that out is as much art as it is science, as any pollster worth their salt would acknowledge.In January, Quinnipiac found that 62 percent of Republicans, and 56 percent of Democrats, agreed that America’s democracy was in danger of collapse. In the latest poll, the partisan breakdown is dead even: Sixty-nine percent of Republicans and Democrats alike share that fear.So Democrats have caught up to their Republican counterparts. But their views of who might be responsible for that potential collapse differ greatly, as Peter Baker writes in a forthcoming story analyzing the data in greater detail.The numbers are “disturbing,” Larry Sabato, the longtime director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said in a tweet reacting to the Quinnipiac poll. It doesn’t mean that American democracy is collapsing or will collapse; we’ve arguably endured far worse at various times in our history, and yet, like Tom Brady, we’re still here.But it does mean that people’s confidence in our system of government is declining to an alarming degree.In December, most of the Democratic and Republican political strategists I spoke with said democracy wasn’t a huge topic in their private polling and focus groups and wasn’t likely to move votes in the midterms.Some Democrats also told me then that they worried that drawing too much attention to the issue of “threats to democracy” (as Democrats describe the topic) and “electoral integrity” (as Republicans describe it) would help Republicans, as Donald Trump’s baseless conspiracy theories and election falsehoods seemed to be a powerful motivator for voters in his party’s base.If more voters are indeed starting to prioritize democracy over other issues, that is big news in the political world. But the evidence for that notion is thin at the moment.More Coverage of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsAn Upset in Alaska: Mary Peltola, a Democrat, beat Sarah Palin in a special House election, adding to a series of recent wins for the party. Ms. Peltola will become the first Alaska Native to serve in Congress.Evidence Against a Red Wave: Since the fall of Roe v. Wade, it’s hard to see the once-clear signs of a Republican advantage. A strong Democratic showing in a New York special election is one of the latest examples.G.O.P.’s Dimming Hopes: Republicans are still favored in the fall House races, but former President Donald J. Trump and abortion are scrambling the picture in ways that distress party insiders.Digital Pivot: At least 10 G.O.P. candidates in competitive races have updated their websites to minimize their ties to Mr. Trump or to adjust their uncompromising stances on abortion.Examining Biden’s speechPresident Biden laid out his own concerns about American democracy with a prime-time address on Thursday at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. My colleague Zolan Kanno-Youngs was there to capture it along with Michael Shear, his frequent collaborator.I asked Zolan to unpack Biden’s speech — why he made it and what the White House’s political calculations might be, alongside the serious concerns the president laid out in his 24-minute address. (Be sure also to read Peter Baker’s analysis and Jonathan Weisman’s takeaways.)Our Slack chat, lightly edited for length and clarity:You’ve been following President Biden’s focus on threats to democracy for a while now, including his idea for a summit rallying the world’s democracies and Thursday’s speech in Philadelphia. What’s your read on why he is doing this?President Biden has said all along that it is this threat against democracy that motivated him to run for president. For him, this battle began when he saw neo-Nazis and white supremacists marching through Charlottesville in 2017.From the conversations I have had with sources in and around the White House, the president is genuinely concerned about the rise of autocracy overseas and about extremism within the United States. He came into office expecting that people would leave Trumpism behind and that his message of unity and national healing would resonate. That obviously hasn’t happened.Some of his supporters found that assumption to be out of touch with the current polarized state of the nation. He had been planning Thursday’s speech since early this summer because of persistent false claims of election fraud and the impending midterm elections, according to officials familiar with the matter.When you talk to people at the White House, do they say that there is a political upside to Biden’s emphasis on saving democracy from the Republican Party, or that it is purely about substance? Because the political portion of my brain wonders why he keeps returning to a swing state for these speeches. More

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      A Rematch of Biden v. Trump, Two Years Early

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      Dispensing with his unity message, President Biden reached into the 2020 file cabinet and vowed to win “a battle for the soul of this nation,” the cornerstone of his successful election.WASHINGTON — By this point in his term, President Biden figured things would be different. His predecessor would have faded from the scene and the country would have restored at least some semblance of normalcy. But as he said on Thursday night, “too much of what’s happening in our country today is not normal.”And so the president who declared when he took office that “democracy has prevailed” declared in a prime-time televised speech that in fact democracy 19 months later remained “under assault.” Former President Donald J. Trump “and the MAGA Republicans,” as Mr. Biden termed his predecessor’s allies, still represent a clear and present danger to America.If it sounded like a repeat of the 2020 campaign cycle, in some ways it is, although the incumbent and likely challenger have changed places. A country torn apart by ideology, culture, economics, race, religion, party and grievance remains as polarized as ever. Mr. Biden has scored some bipartisan legislative successes, but he has been singularly unable to heal the broader societal rift that he inherited. It may be that no president could have.With an opposition party that has largely embraced the lie that the last election was stolen and remains in thrall to a twice-impeached and defeated former president who encouraged a mob that attacked the Capitol to stop the transfer of power, Mr. Biden’s appeals to national unity have found little traction. Some Republicans have argued that his efforts to build consensus were fainthearted at best, while some Democrats complain they were excessive.Either way, they have made little difference in the national conversation. And so with the midterm congressional campaign getting underway in earnest, Mr. Biden has dispensed with the unity message, at least for now, reaching into the 2020 file cabinet and bringing out the call to win “a battle for the soul of this nation” that was the cornerstone of his successful election.The immediate strategy is self-evident. Rather than a referendum on his own presidency, which has been hurt by high inflation and low public morale, Mr. Biden wants to make the election a choice between “normal” and an “extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic,” as he put it on Thursday.If he has his way, it would be a rerun of Biden vs. Trump without either man actually listed on the ballot. If Americans are asked whether they support Mr. Biden, they may say no. If they are asked whether they support him over Mr. Trump, they may say yes. At least, that is the theory in the White House.It is a view borne out by recent opinion surveys. In the wake of a string of legislative and policy victories, Mr. Biden’s anemic approval ratings have ticked upward, though they remain in the 40s. But when pitted against Mr. Trump in a new Wall Street Journal poll, Mr. Biden came out on top in a theoretical 2024 rematch, 50 percent to 44 percent.Mr. Trump has arguably helped Mr. Biden set the stage for such a political showdown with his highly visible efforts to maintain his grip on the Republican Party. But it means that Mr. Biden will take on a more confrontational posture for the next two months, undermining his desire to be a conciliator.That left him in the odd position of being accused on Thursday night of being divisive by allies of the most divisive president in modern times. Trump Republicans argued that Mr. Biden was the one tearing the country apart and threatening democracy, not the other way around. He had insulted, in their contention, the 74 million Americans who voted for Mr. Trump. More