Joe Biden’s presidency may be a lot of things, but a restorer of norms and institutions it is not.
Take, for example, Biden’s willingness to embrace the kind of Orwellian language that justifies spending unprecedented amounts of money simply by deeming things to be “infrastructure”—or his misrepresenting the Georgia voter law and referring to it as “Jim Crow.” In a recent Washington Post opinion piece, Gabriel Sterling, the Georgia elections official who heroically stood up to Donald Trump, pleaded with Biden to tone down his rhetoric, writing, “Someone is going to get hurt. Your words matter. The facts matter.”
Biden’s rhetoric is not normal, or fine, but he’s had space to do this as many Americans understandably applaud a president whose speeches don’t end with supporters scaling the walls of the Capitol and beating cops with American flags. But while it is necessary to the maintenance of our democracy to have a president who does not attempt to overturn an election, it is far from sufficient.
