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ONE BIG THING BIDEN’S SOTU GOT RIGHT  
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Zack Beauchamp
March 8, 2024
Vox
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_ The president dodged the “norms trap” by going straight after
Trump on democracy. There is no hypocrisy in defending truth against
lies. _

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During Thursday night’s State of the Union address, President Joe
Biden [[link removed]] issued an unmistakable warning
about the threat Donald Trump
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]],”
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
[[link removed]].

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
[[link removed]] was stolen, he is
lying to create a pretext to overthrow a legitimate election. When
Biden calls Trump’s behavior a threat to democracy, warning that the
former president seeks “to bury the truth of January 6,” he is
telling the truth about Trump’s lies and the dangers they pose to
American democracy.

Fail to appreciate this distinction and you risk falling into what I
call the “norms trap:” prioritizing the appearance of respecting
democracy’s principles over acting in those principles’ defense.

At the State of the Union, Biden recognized this trap and avoided it.

When he warned of the ongoing threat to American democracy, saying,
“My predecessor and some of you here seek to bury the truth of
January 6th,” he did indeed sound an unusually partisan note for the
typically staid affair. This might seem like a violation of democratic
norms, and some conservatives
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to cast
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such. This was the theme of one of Fox News’ top stories after the
speech
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This is hard to take seriously as a good faith objection, especially
given Trump’s State of the Union track record
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As a rhetorical tactic, though, it’s a powerful distraction: an
attempt to shift focus away from the substance of Biden’s warning
about the rising threat to democracy, onto a disingenuous debate over
whether Biden himself is behaving undemocratically.

Yes, it’s rare for a president to in essence campaign during the
State of the Union. But it’s also unusual for the president’s
opponent to be someone who has a stated desire to be a “dictator on
day one [[link removed]],” with a host
of policies
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could bring that vision frighteningly close to fruition. The State of
the Union is supposed to highlight grave national concerns; this is
clearly one of them.

This is not to say that Biden can do or say whatever he wants to fight
Trump. He should not break the law or take actions that meaningfully
weaken American democracy (which Democrats are entirely capable of
doing
[[link removed]]).

But in a world where American democracy is facing an unprecedented
threat from one of two major political parties, it’s reasonable to
risk a too-partisan speech in order to safeguard it. It’s good that
Biden recognized this and devoted a good chunk of the State of the
Union to telling the truth.

_Zack Beauchamp is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers
challenges to democracy in the United States and abroad, right-wing
populism, and the world of ideas. He has received funding awards from
the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting to report on democratic
decline in Israel and Hungary in the field, and was the longtime host
of Worldly, Vox’s weekly podcast on foreign policy and international
affairs. He has appeared on a wide range of television and radio
networks, including MSNBC, CNN, Fox News, BBC, CBC, ABC (Australia),
and Al Jazeera._

_Before coming to Vox, he edited TP Ideas, a section of ThinkProgress
devoted to the ideas shaping our political world. He has a master’s
degree in international relations from the London School of Economics
and grew up in Washington, DC, where he currently lives with his wife,
two children, and (rescue) dogs._

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* Joe Biden
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* Donald Trump
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* democracy
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* autocracy
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