President Joe Biden is calling a “democracy summit” today meant to address a democracy “recession” playing out amidst “a time of rising authoritarianism around the globe and extraordinary strains on foundational institutions in the U.S.,” the Associated Press reports:
The two-day virtual summit that starts Thursday has been billed as an opportunity for leaders and civil society experts from some 110 countries to collaborate on 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.
China and Russia are peeved that they were not invited. Vladimir Putin holds elections, right? The guy who manipulated ours in 2016 feels disrespected.
The Biden administration, for its part, says the virtual gathering is a critical meeting at a moment when a profound diminishment of freedoms is trending around the globe. Biden has said that confronting that dynamic is “the challenge of our time.”
The world might be better off if the United States led by example rather than by holding a virtual summit where the world’s beleaguered democracies can commiserate.
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 Jan. 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.
The U.S. Congress has failed so far this year to pass legislation protecting voting rights under systematic attack across the country, or to quash state laws passed to allow Republican legislatures to overrule majority rule, or to fully investigate the roots of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and bring to justice conspirators and funders. Federal courts have so far handed out wrist-slaps to insurrectionists while Congress seems unable even to compel testimony from key allies of The Big Lier-in-Chief.
The purpose of the House Jan. 6 committee investigation is to fully document what happened so democracy might better defend itself from antidemocracy. Yet, we collectively seem unlikely to manage that before American democracy faces its next challenge in November 2022.
But Zooming? After almost two years of global pandemic, we’re hell at Zooming.
If someone is keeping a list of challenges of our time, I have not seen it. But climate change might want a word with Biden’s press office.