The democracy summit’s challenge for Biden

Unfortunately for him and the rest of us, the world Biden longs for has collapsed — which is one reason the Summit for Democracy is necessary.

WASHINGTON — The most important thing about President Joe Biden’s Summit for Democracy that opened Thursday is that it is happening.

We will see legitimate critiques (and cheap shots, too) about which countries should and should not have been included, how it became a talkathon rather than a forum for action, and which nations — including the United States — are being hypocritical about what.

But it matters that Biden has moved a commitment to democracy to the forefront of U.S. foreign policy, no matter how inconsistent our nation might be in applying its principles.

The world is far better off than it was a year ago because the default position of the president of the United States is to criticize authoritarians and dictators rather than to praise them; to defend human rights rather than to minimize their importance; and to speak of the imperative for democracies to prove their capacity to govern and solve problems.

Yet this last commitment, to showing that our own democracy works, catches Biden in a mesh of contradictions and tensions.

There are two sides to Biden’s instinctive worldview that worked reasonably well together a few decades ago but now confront him with stark and unavoidable choices: His yearning for peaceful cooperation and his understanding of the need for social and political change.

He is right that a democracy built on free speech, a free press, freedom of conscience and regular elections requires forms of civic friendship across our lines of disagreement. Words such as “bipartisanship” define the side of Bidenism rooted in a time when our political parties more or less agreed on the basic rules of the game.

They accepted their obligation to what Thomas E. Mann and Norman Ornstein, the shrewd political scientists who are also my friends, called “institutional patriotism.” All sides took responsibility for making the mechanisms of self-government work. And they accepted basics we never thought would come into question — an agreement to abide by the results of free elections and to condemn those who tried to upend the will of the people through force and violence.

One should not, of course, allow a gauzy nostalgia to blind us to the deep conflicts of the post-world War II era. They were reflected in the fierce labor struggles that followed the war, in Mccarthyism in the 1950s, and in the often-violent battles for civil rights and voting rights in the 1960s. But it is honorable that Biden longs for a restoration of the norms of mutual respect and graciousness among opponents.

Unfortunately for him and the rest of us, the world Biden longs for has collapsed — which is one reason the Summit for Democracy is necessary. Trumpism is a species of right-wing authoritarianism that haunts nearly all of the traditional democracies, with autocrats in Russia and China pointing to distemper in democratic nations as a sign of their decay.

The United States is, to put matters charitably, in a very poor position to paint itself as a democratic model. The rest of the world has taken note of Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, the violence of Jan. 6 aimed at preventing a peaceful transition of power, Republican reticence to confront the anti-democratic cancer in their party, and the ongoing efforts to roll back voting rights in many states.

This means there is no apolitical, nonpartisan approach to advancing democracy and defending it from the threats it now confronts. It means that Biden must fully engage in the Senate battle for voting rights and uncorrupted election administration, including bypassing the filibuster if necessary.

Yes, there is certainly room for cooperation between the democratic left and the democratic right. In fact, the efforts of conservative friends of democracy — abroad as well as in the United States — are more important now than ever. For if the most prominent threat to democracy during the Cold War came from communism, the central danger now, as in the 1930s, arises from a far-right preaching nationalism, intolerance and strongman rule.

Conservatives thus need to be especially brave in confronting anti-democratic elements on their side and in supporting economic reforms that respond to the anxieties of those left behind — apprehensions anti-democracy politicians exploit.

I don’t expect Biden to address all of these challenges, but I hope he doesn’t duck them entirely. And I certainly expect him to hit back hard against those who claim that democracy is somehow negotiable or secondary to other problems we confront.

One voice I had looked forward to hearing from this week belonged to Fred Hiatt, the longtime Post editorial page editor who died on Monday. Fred’s commitment to democracy and human rights was the through line in all his thinking. What he wrote back in 2009 might serve as the inspiration for this summit:

“Every human, no matter how rich or poor, wants and is entitled to a say in his or her government. And very few would willingly accept a delay in enjoying that natural-born right, no matter how well intentioned the reason.”