Biden, Putin, Democracy

 I have no idea what is wrong with the Republican Party. Is it the cowardice of those addicted to power they must suppress the vote? have they always favored tyrants? From The New Yorker:

Joe Biden, Vladimir Putin, and the Weight of History

At last week’s summit, on the centenary of the Russian dissident Andrei Sakharov’s birth, Biden tried to reassert democratic values—and to counter Putin’s amoral authoritarianism.

In a week of summiteering, Biden did his level best to reassert a sense of common cause with NATO allies and to promote a foreign policy that seeks a foundation in values as well as in raw interests. “Human rights is gonna always be on the table,” Biden said he told Putin. “It’s about who we are.” It was a relief to hear an American President speak up for human rights again, but it will take a great deal more to exert moral suasion in Russia or anywhere else. U.S. history is hardly saintly: that “shining city upon a hill” is, at best, a destination. Shallow talk of American exceptionalism has, over the years, allowed Putin to call us hypocrites, and to declare, as he told the Financial Times two years ago, that the liberal ideal has “outlived its purpose.”

Biden went to Geneva in large measure to reverse the spectacle of Trump’s famous press conference in Helsinki, in 2018, at which he appeared to side with Putinism over his own government. But, although Trump has left the White House, his legacy persists. The leadership of the Republican Party supports voter suppression, coddles conspiracy theorists, demotes dissenters, downplays the dangers of climate change, and refuses to investigate an insurrection inspired by a sitting President.

In 1968, a year in which the Kremlin sent tanks into Prague to crack down on dissent, Sakharov wrote that “freedom of thought is the only guarantee against an infection of people by mass myths, which, in the hands of treacherous hypocrites and demagogues, can be transformed into bloody dictatorship.” It will fall to Russians, not outsiders, to make Russia more free when Putin passes from the scene. But the only way the United States can hope to set an example is by setting itself right.

And why are the American people letting the Republicans get away with such behavior?