OPINION:
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The House voted overwhelmingly last week to prevent the Biden administration from shipping $6 billion to the regime in Iran. Unfortunately, 118 Democrats and one Republican voted against the measure and, by extension, for the mullahs in Iran and their financiers in the White House.
It will come as a disappointment but not a surprise that the legacy media almost entirely ignored the vote and the underlying issue.
It also will surprise no one that the Iranian regime, which was almost certainly responsible for atrocities carried out by its Hamas proxies on Oct. 7 — mutilating dead bodies, raping women, beheading children, etc. — took note of the House vote by having their proxies fire on multiple ships, including a U.S. naval vessel in the Red Sea a day or two later.
I mention this because the president’s reelection campaign, having abandoned “Bidenomics” as its organizing principle, has made “defending democracy” a pillar and keystone of the pitch.
That should worry everyone.
Over the last 75 years, anytime the U.S. government has decided to defend something or wage war on something, especially of the rhetorical variety, the results have not been good. Ask the Vietnamese about containment or the Iraqis about the war on terrorism.
This is especially true if the objective of the war is a concept — such as democracy — or a poorly defined inanimate object such as illicit drugs.
The problem is bipartisan. Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson bumbled into the disaster that was Vietnam. In the inaugural effort in the war on terrorism, President George W. Bush and his team dissembled us into the pointless and endless conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.
President Richard Nixon decided that his martial objective would be drugs. How did it go? A little more than 7,000 people died from drug overdoses in 1970. Last year, that number was more than 100,000, and Americans’ continuing thirst for illicit drugs has all but destroyed our neighbor to the south.
Given that history, it seems like the Biden administration and its stooges in the legacy media would be better off not framing their looming contest with former President Donald Trump as a defense of democracy.
Apart from any other consideration, such a frame almost guarantees political violence if Mr. Trump (or anyone other than President Biden, really) should win. If one side is defending democracy, it stands to reason that the other side must be attacking it. That’s fun campaign rhetoric, but it is lethal to the ability of anyone to rule the country.
Indeed, the legacy media have been sharpening their divisive and extremist rhetoric for a while now, having routinely identified legitimately elected leaders elsewhere — Viktor Orban in Hungary, Javier Milei in Argentina, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, Giorgia Meloni in Italy — as being part of the “far right” without pondering how “far right” they could really be if they won with majorities or pluralities of the vote.
If Mr. Biden wants to defend democracy, he might want to start with his besties in the press.
The second and more immediate problem is that if you are going to define yourself as a defender of democracy, you should probably stick to it across a range of actions.
The vote to prevent the Biden administration from shipping cash to the mullahs so they can invest in their proxy-killing of Americans and Israelis made clear that the administration has funded and is funding the war against Israel.
Iran is not a democracy. Israel is, and the only one in the region.
Given their warm embrace of the business partners in Tehran, it should come as no surprise that many Biden administration officials are not all that enthusiastic about defending democratic Israel. Last week, for instance, Secretary of State Antony Blinken gave one of the more epic news conferences ever, in which he essentially told the Israelis that the United States would be very disappointed if they did anything further to defend themselves with respect to Gaza or Hamas.
People are unlikely to take you seriously about defending democracy when you pick and choose when democracy is defended and when it isn’t.
Which brings us back to the intellectually bankrupt notion of waging war over concepts like terror or democracy. The reality is that terror is a human emotion. It will always be with us. Similarly, anywhere people organize themselves into societies — which is to say, everywhere — there will always be some element of democracy. Even the power of kings was limited by the tolerance of their subjects or the religious authorities.
The Biden administration needs to focus on things it might be able to achieve, like getting its friends in the press to at least pretend to be neutral about duly elected leaders or telling the mullahs that there will be no more cash until they stop killing.
• Michael McKenna is the president of MWR Strategies. He was most recently a deputy assistant to the president and deputy director of the Office of Legislative Affairs under former President Donald Trump.
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