Biden met with historians who warned him about threats to democracy

Fresno CA

Description

President Joe Biden privately met with a group of historians at the White House last week who warned him about ongoing threats to democracy, The Washington Post reported Wednesday. Sources familiar with the August 4 meeting, which was said to have lasted nearly two hours, told the outlet the experts described the current moment as among the most dangerous to democracy in modern history. The outlet reported the scholars compared the current state of affairs to the era that preceded the American Civil War, as well as the period before World War II when fascist movements emerged, specifically noting Abraham Lincoln's 1860 election and President Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1940 election. Historians have publicly been sounding the alarm on threats to democracy in recent years, especially since the Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021. The historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat told Insider's Charles R. Davis in June that the Capitol attack, which she described as an attempted coup, still posed a threat to US democracy. Ken Hughes, another historian, who is an expert on Watergate, told Insider's Erin Snodgrass in July that democracy was in a "dangerous" position as the systems that usually protected against a presidential abuses of power were no longer functioning.