Democratic institutions face slide, says Biden
Washington, Dec. 9: President Joe Biden on Thursday opened the first White House Summit for Democracy by sounding an alarm about a global slide for democratic institutions and called for world leaders to “lock arms” and demonstrate democracies can deliver.
Biden called it a critical moment for fellow leaders to redouble efforts on bolstering democracies. In making the case for action, he noted his own battle win passage of voting rights legislation at home and alluded to the United States’ own challenges to its democratic institutions and traditions. “This is an urgent matter,” Biden said in remarks to open the twoday virtual summit.
“The data we’re seeing is largely pointing in the wrong direction.” The video gathering, something that Biden had called a priority for the firstyear of his presidency, comes as he’s repeatedly made a case that the US and like-minded allies need to show the world that democracies are a far better vehicle for societies than autocracies.
The premise is a central tenet of Biden’s foreign policy outlook — one that he vowed would be more outward looking than his predecessor Donald Trump’s “America First approach.
The summit was billed by the White House as an opportunity for leaders and experts from some 110 countries to collaborate on defending against authoritarianism, fighting corruption and promoting respect for human rights. But the gathering already has drawn backlash from the United States’ chief adversaries and other nations that were not invited to participate.
Ahead of the summit, the ambassadors to the US from China and Russia wrote a joint essay in the National Interest policy journal describing the Biden administration as exhibiting a “Cold-War mentality” that will “stoke up ideological confrontation and a rift in the world”.
The administration has also faced scrutiny over how it went about deciding which countries to invite. Biden told the virtual gathering this is a moment when a profound diminishment of freedoms is trending around the globe, calling it “the challenge of our time”.
The US may be at it’s own pivot point. Local elected officials are resigning at an alarming rate amid confrontations with angry voices at school board meetings, elections offices and town halls. States are passing laws to limit access to the ballot, making it more difficult for Americans to vote.
And the January 6 attack at the Capitol has left many in Donald Trump’s Republican party clinging to his false claims of a stolen election, eroding trust in the accuracy of the vote. —