A Democrat Doing It Doesn’t Make It Okay
Yesterday on Twitter, I saw an old tweet resurface from Jen Psaki, Biden’s Press Secretary. It reads “Also what is the legal authority for strikes? Assad is a brutal dictator. But Syria is a sovereign country.” This came after the Trump Administration’s questionable bombing of Syria in April of 2017. But when Biden ordered similar strikes just a few days ago, those words came back to bite her, and the entire administration.
Similarly, we’ve also seen news recently of the same “cages” for migrant children that Biden sought to end, but have been reopened under his watch. Not a great look.
So why then, am I seeing my fellow progressives defend him? Sure, you can say that these bombings are justified, or that the “cages” are a higher quality than under Trump. Those are valid arguments. But what then separates us from the cultism of Trump’s base?
Accountability. We can have both a progressive president, and yet hold him accountable to his actions. We can applaud him for joining the Paris Climate Agreement and yet criticize him for bombing a foreign country instead of getting relief to American families. We can celebrate him taking the pandemic seriously through mandates, and yet push him to work on immigration reform. We can do both.
What we can’t do is blindly worship our leader. Moreover, we shouldn’t make a gold statue out of him and defend his every action (A false idol if I’ve ever seen one, but that’s a story for another time!). Let me be piercingly clear—if we don’t hold the administration we elected accountable, there’s a slippery slope into the blind-follower mindset that got Trump elected. We can’t let that happen again.
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