Liberty on the Ballot: HOW BIDEN'S FREEDOM AGENDA COULD WIN HIM A SECOND TERM AND SAVE THE REPUBLIC.

• Author: Woodard, Colin
• Position: 2024 United States presidential election

Joe Biden officially launched his reelection campaign in April with a three-minute video laying out the stakes in this election: the survival of the American experiment itself.

"The question we're facing is whether in the years ahead, we have more freedom or less freedom. More rights or fewer. I know what I want the answer to be, and I think you do too," the president said, as images flashed by at subliminal speeds of him speaking to union workers on a factory floor, in the Rose Garden, and at the opening of a new Amtrak railroad tunnel in Baltimore. "This is not a time to be complacent."

He made the case that, as in 2016, we're in a battle for the soul of the country. On his side is a commitment to decency, honesty, respect, democracy, and freedom itself. On Donald Trump's side there's a die-hard embrace of hatred, lies, and repression, illustrated by tear gas clouds and armed insurgents engulfing the Capitol and a lone woman protesting the overturning of Roe v. Wade in front of the Supreme Court. "Around the country, MAGA extremists are lining up to take on those bedrock freedoms ... dictating what health care decisions women can make, banning books, and telling people who they can love, all while making it more difficult for you to be able to vote," he added. Freedom is the most important and sacred thing to Americans, he said, and making sure we're all given "a fair shot at making it" is essential to securing it.

This is how Biden has decided to run for what will almost certainly be a rematch with Trump, who, despite launching a coup attempt two and a half years ago to overthrow the republic, is the likely Republican nominee rather than a prison inmate. As someone who has advocated for an approach like Biden's to repair our democracy since before MAGA was even a thing, I was pleased to see it receive an uncharacteristically warm reception from mainstream commentators, including the columnists E. J. Dionne and Thomas Edsall, the pollster Celinda Lake, ABC News political director Rick Klein, and the union boss Mary Kay Henry.

But Biden has set up a rhetorical foundation that can anchor more than just the near-term defense of the republic against a proto-fascist movement; he is also providing a long term agenda that addresses the root causes of the crisis we've found ourselves in.

As Nicholas Lemann argued in the January/February/ March issue of the Monthly, we absolutely need a new political economy capable of unwinding the untenable concentration of economic power and the staggering inequality and social and political instability that has followed from it. Lemann sketched some general principles--among them, that in a healthy democracy, economic policy isn't left to technocratic experts, as the United States has done for the past half century, but is ultimately settled by the clash of competing interests in the political process, as was the case for most of U.S. history. I'll take that analysis a step further. Even if the Trumpists were vanquished tomorrow, the American experiment will remain vulnerable unless we stop the descent down the laissezfaire crevasse and recommit to building an economy meant to bring shared prosperity.

I'm going to expand on that here, outlining a philosophical framework designed to further our Constitution's stated mission: to "promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty, to ourselves and our prosperity." In other words, to ensure the common good and the individual's liberty, intergenerationally. But first it's important to understand what went wrong and the consequences of not making a significant change of course.

The political class has been waking up to the fact that Trumpism is going to remain a force with or without Trump himself. Even after he tried to stage a coup, hoarded classified records, got indicted for business fraud, promised to pardon convicted January 6 insurrectionists, and was fined $5 million by a jury for sexually abusing a woman and lying about it, Trump remains the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination. Rather than distance themselves from this seditious, corrupt, and amoral man, his rivals within the party emulate him in a race toward fascism, banning books, persecuting transgender people, valorizing vigilantes, and vanishing gays and lesbians from public schools and libraries even as they purge from textbooks mention of why Rosa Parks was asked to move to the back of the bus. They do this because the Republican base wants it. Recent polls show that 68 percent of Republicans still back Trump in his confrontation with the rule of law and two-thirds would vote for him for president even if he was convicted of crimes. Among Republicans, 42 percent say a strong unelected leader is preferable to a weak elected one; 44 percent say the "true American life is disappearing so fast we may have to use force to save it"; nearly 60 percent think the country's changing demographics pose "a threat to white Americans and their culture and values"; more than 60 percent believe transgender people are "trying to indoctrinate children into their lifestyle"; and a majority say the U.S. stands on the brink of civil war. No wonder so many GOP aspirants are emulating the orange man.

Trump and his fellow demagogues have galvanized a populist movement not unlike that of Hungary's Viktor Orban or prewar Vladimir Putin, one that promises to create an illiberal democracy where the aspirations of the so-called majority shall not be inhibited by concessions to the civil liberties of the "others," be they minorities, immigrants, annoying journalists, or political opponents. The movement has elected authoritarians to represent Ohio and Missouri in the U.S. Senate, to serve as chief executives in Florida and Texas, and to hold seats for swaths of northern Georgia, central...