As a matter of rhetoric, President Joe Biden's statement on the anniversary of the January 6 Capitol insurgency was very touching. He reminded the public of the attack's violence, the silliness of Donald Trump's 2020 election falsehoods, and the alarming truth that American democracy is still under grave risk a year later.
"I did not desire this struggle, which began one year ago today in this Capitol. But I'm not going to back down," Biden declared. "I will stand in this chasm, I will protect this country, and I will not allow anyone to put a knife in the democratic heart."
The feedback was overwhelmingly good. "Biden is hitting all the right notes, and he's striking them hard here. Karen Tumulty of the Washington Post tweeted, "A reminder of how strong the Bully Pulpit can be." "Is anyone on the right side of the room listening?"
However, it is far from evident that the "bully pulpit" has any real influence. There has been no indication that presidential addresses have advanced legislation or altered the minds of the opposition party or the general public on significant topics in the past. More recently, Biden, Barack Obama, and other Democrats have given speeches celebrating democracy, but Republicans, Senate moderates, and vast swathes of the public remain unimpressed.
Biden's speech, if anything, highlights the hollowness, if not futility, of his pro-democracy rhetoric. There's just so much the president can do when he's up against a unified Republican opposition and a 50/50 Senate with veto authority for pro-filibuster Democrats. Surprisingly, there were no new specific policy ideas in the address to safeguard democracy from persistent attempts to undermine it.
And in areas where Biden has the potential to act, such as organizing Democrats to organize a response to Republican attacks on democracy at the state level, he has been conspicuously absent.
"In the year following the Capitol attack, the Democratic Congress has worked diligently to pass measures to protect our elections." "The president has scarcely raised a finger up until this point," Ezra Levin, co-founder of the pro-democracy action organization Indivisible, says me (though Senate moderates' refusal to abolish the filibuster has been the biggest hurdle).
A year after the Capitol uprising, American democracy is still in shambles. Biden's rousing response just emphasizes how extensive the damage is — and how little has been done to repair it.
The limits of presidential rhetoric.
The climax of a series of activities celebrating the one-year anniversary of the insurgency was Biden's statement on January 6. And, as a presidential address, it ticked all the boxes.
It contained famous phrases like "you can't love your nation just when you win," and "you can't love your country only when you win." It debunked erroneous charges of voting fraud and rightly placed blame on the Republican Party's institutional leadership. It utilized meticulous detail to counter right-wing attempts to portray the assailants as patriots, alluding to "American flags on poles being used as weapons, like spears," and "the crowd ransacking the Capitol... actually defecating in the halls."
However, no wordsmith has the power to change political reality. And the people Biden needs to persuade to make a difference — Republican leaders, Democratic moderates, and the general public — all have reasons for their positions.
The great majority of the Republican Party's institutional leadership is either viscerally pro-Trump or too terrified of offending him to speak out. Reps. Liz Cheney (WY) and Pete Meijer (MI), for example, have received demotions and death threats for doing so. Nothing Biden says appears to be able to break Trump's lock on the GOP's grassroots or shift the party's political incentives.
Biden can only hope to pass pro-democracy legislation like the Freedom to Vote Act on a party-line vote, given the Republican opposition. That means counting on Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, both fervent filibuster supporters who have demonstrated a willingness to oppose Biden's agenda. It's a fair bet that another rousing proclamation of democracy from the presidential platform won't sway them.
The greatest data we have shows that the general people will be unimpressed as well.
Texas A&M political scientist George Edwards III examines the effects of presidential speeches on poll numbers and legislative agendas in his book On Deaf Ears and finds strikingly little evidence that presidential speeches can rally voters to a president's priorities across multiple administrations.
When their party is out of power, partisans become more energized and enraged. There's a reason the Tea Party and the #Resistance, two of the most powerful political groups in recent memory, arose in direct opposition to an incumbent president. In a related vein, polls routinely show that Democrats are less concerned about dangers to American democracy than Republicans, which is a tragic irony given that Republican bogus election fraud ideas are the fundamental source of today's most serious challenges to democracy.
A particular obstacle for any Biden administration efforts to rally the public, according to Theda Skocpol, a Harvard professor who analyzes social movements: Covid-19. She claims that because of the polarization around the epidemic, Republicans are having an easier time than Democrats getting their supporters active in politics.
"The reddest regions of the nation, where people are less vaccinated, have more disease yet refuse to accept restrictions on public activities," she explains, "while the bluer sections, where people are far more vaccinated, are nonetheless full of extremely worried individuals." "Capacity for all types of group activities has been reduced."
When seen in this light, it's easy to see why Biden hasn't been able to generate much grassroots support for democracy — and a speech is unlikely to change that.
Biden could still do more.
But there are things Biden could be doing in addition to speeches to strengthen American democracy.
Biden made a conscious decision in his first year to prioritize his economic agenda — Covid relief, the bipartisan infrastructure package, and the omnibus Build Back Better social spending bill — at the top of the congressional agenda, devoting the majority of the White House's lobbying and legislative efforts to it.
As a matter of policy, you can concur or disagree; Covid relief, in particular, appeared to be a pressing issue. But it's a choice that runs counter to Biden's portrayal of democracy as in jeopardy, with the biggest threat to its mechanics since the Civil War, thanks to Republican efforts to destroy it.
Furthermore, the White House has made no significant attempt to mobilize a Democratic reaction to local attacks on democracy.
Republican state lawmakers are seeking legislation that will make elections more politicized throughout the country. Grassroots Republican activists have been competing for formerly neutral election administration posts and volunteering en masse for precinct-level election activities, strong believers in electoral fraud falsehoods promoted by agitators like Steve Bannon.
As party leader, Biden might persuade the Democratic Party to take this mobilization seriously and conduct its own counter-offensive. There's no evidence that they've made much progress thus far.
In December, Dartmouth political scientist Brendan Nyhan told me, "The Democratic coalition is focused on conventional coalition politics and governing, which is acceptable in some ways but also ignores the mounting threat." "Without elite indications, the public isn't paying attention to these concerns."
The question raised by Biden's speech on January 6 is not whether it will persuade anybody significant to think about these topics differently, but rather whether it will persuade anyone to think about them differently. It's unlikely to happen.
Instead, the issue is whether it's a sign of a reversal: if the Biden administration will start acting on its high language and take more tangible efforts to address the rising risks to democracy. More than the speech itself, this will define the legacy of the Biden administration in American democracy.
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