You made it through another year
If you have gone from cheering the arrival of the New Year to being thankful you survived the last, join the club.
Yet many, including the proprietress here, have considered the unexpected accomplishments of the Biden administration this last year. Digby wrote on Friday that she did not see Dark Brandon coming:
I think some of this success, paradoxically, is because Joe Biden is our oldest president, not in spite of that fact. There’s a certain YOLO quality to many people his age which he seems to have channeled into a willingness to take calculated risks that have largely paid off. Dark Brandon’s seen it all — he doesn’t scare easily.
Biden reminds audiences, repeatedly and forcefully, “It’s never been a good bet to bet against America!” Even among progressive activists (including this one), Biden’s unabashed America boosterism is sometimes cringe-inducing. While glass-half-empty cynics, the nihilists, the MAGAs, the QAnon cultists, and the fascism-curious gnaw like Teredo worms at the nation’s pilings, Biden is still betting on America. Unashamedly fighting the shameless.
As is often the case after Republican administrations in my lifetime, the incoming Democrat is charged with pulling the car out of the ditch. Biden has not just risen to the moment, he has embraced it, especially the foreign policy wreck left behind by Donald Trump. As Heather Cox Richardson observes, the world looked very different one year ago:
It appeared that a global authoritarian movement was coalescing for an attack on liberal democracy and that the leaders of the Republican Party were on the side of the authoritarians. The United Nations was formed after World War II to protect the idea of a rules-based international order so that countries would not unilaterally attack each other for their own advantage and start wars. If Russia, a member of the U.N. were allowed to violate the fundamental principle that had preserved relative peace in Europe since World War II, there was no telling what might come next.
When Russia rolled tanks and troops into Ukraine it appeared the authoritarians might quickly prevail. Surprise.
When the U.S. offered to evacuate Zelensky, he said: “The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride.” Within days, he and his cabinet had recorded a video from Kyiv, demonstrating that the Ukrainian government was still in Kyiv and would fight to protect their country. Ukrainians defied the invaders as the U.S., NATO, the European Union, and allies around the globe rushed in money, armaments, and humanitarian aid. In Brussels, London, Paris, Munich, Dublin, and Geneva, and across the globe, people took to the streets to protest the invasion and show their support for the resisters.
In their fight for their right to self-determination, the Ukrainians and their defenders reminded the United States what cherishing democracy actually looks like.
What the Viktor Orban-loving, extremist right’s response to the invasion and the January 6th Committee’s investigation exposed is how many among us are more Russian than American. The only thing American about them is their birth certificates. But what the November elections revealed is, for all their bilious hatred, domestic authoritarians remain a paranoid, delusional minority. A dangerous one still, a but a minority. Like Ukrainians, so long as the majority retains a will to fight, the authoritarians will not win the fight for the future.
Ukraine reminded us of that. Biden proved it was possible to launch an effective legislative counteroffensive against enemies of democracy even with the narrowest of congressional majorities. Don’t count America out. It’s not a good bet.