Juan Williams: Democracy is at stake in this year's midterms

Fightin’ Joe Biden has had enough.  

And so have the majority of Americans — me included.   

But not the hard-right echo chamber. 

They say the president is divisive for calling out MAGA extremists, semi-fascists and people who are “entitled to be an idiot.” 

They say Biden is demonizing the 74 million people who voted against him in the last presidential election.   

They say Biden is the real authoritarian — trying to shut down legitimate criticism. 

This is pure spin. 

It is a cheap attempt to have every Trump voter feel that they’re required to defend all Trump voters. 

To be a member of the club, they must stand by the roughly 25 percent of GOP voters who believe in the twisted QAnon conspiracy.  

They must make excuses for the violent Trump supporters who shut down the Capitol. That means ignoring even those who threatened to hang former Vice President Pence. 

It means not talking about Trump’s recent suggestion of “full pardons with an apology” for many of the people convicted for their actions on Jan. 6, 2021.  

And of course, it is an article of faith for much of today’s GOP to believe the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. Polls show about 70 percent of Republicans join the chorus singing the fiction that voter fraud led to Biden’s victory, and that he is a phony in the White House.   

They also must dismiss the danger of Trump taking classified documents to Mar-a-Lago. 

Biden rightly called out all this spinning, gaslighting and outright lying as a threat to democracy during his recent speech in Philadelphia.  He took care to show respect to conservative Republicans who didn’t vote for him but refuse to go along with the Trump extremists. 

“Not every Republican embraces their extreme ideology. I know because I’ve been able to work with these mainstream Republicans,” he said. 

That’s where Joe went off-track. 

Here’s the rub. 

A lot of the extremism is fueled by self-described moderate Republicans making feeble excuses for bad behavior.   

Too many of these moderate Republicans are choosing to play dumb. 

Biden got back on track when he said too many of these tongue-tied moderates support a party “dominated, driven, and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans, and that is a threat to this country.” 

Biden described the immediate consequence: 

“They’re working right now, as I speak, in state after state to give power to decide elections in America to partisans and cronies, empowering election deniers to undermine democracy itself. 

 “These are hard things. But I’m an American president…And I believe it is my duty — my duty to level with you, to tell the truth no matter how difficult, no matter how painful.” 

 Some Republican moderates are daring to stand apart by signing an extraordinary letter published last week.  

Eight former Secretaries of Defense and five former leaders of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — several of whom served during Republican administrations — warned of an “extreme strain” between the military and civilians. They did not name Trump but they left no doubt about the cost his lies have exacted.   

“Politically, military professionals confront an extremely adverse environment characterized by the divisiveness of affective polarization that culminated in the first election in over a century when the peaceful transfer of political power was disrupted and in doubt,” says the letter. 

Similarly, an NBC News poll taken last month found that 21 percent of voters ranked “threats to democracy” as the most important issue facing the country. “Cost of living” ranked second with 16 percent.  

The Philadelphia speech was the most important of Biden’s presidency. Progressives have been urging him to call out the existential threat to democracy posed by Trump and the MAGA Republicans. 

He is finally naming it and shaming it. And he is right to do so.  

It was as important as any speech made by any American president in my lifetime. 

Yet somehow the major broadcast networks didn’t carry it live. They said it was political.  If the Gettysburg Address or the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech were given in the age of social media, they too would be wrongly labeled as political.  

Some newspapers aren’t doing much better. 

When Trump, in the days before Biden’s speech, bizarrely called for a re-do of the 2020 election, it made few headlines. 

In 2019, in this column, I called out “Trump’s use of a witches’ brew of outright lies and distortion to hold the support of at least one-third of Americans.” 

Since then, the brew has only gotten more corrosive. But somehow too many editors want to be polite, perhaps fearing warnings of violence most recently voiced by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). 

Soon, the January 6 Commission will continue its public hearings meticulously detailing the extent of the Trump-led conspiracy to overturn the election. 

Biden is right to use his bully pulpit to sound the alarm. 

The preservation of democracy is the defining issue of the 2022 campaign. This election is a referendum on MAGA Republicans.  

November 8 is a day for moderates and true Republican conservatives to open their eyes to the extremist threat to American democracy. 

Fight on, Mr. President. 

Juan Williams is an author, and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.