‘No hand-wringing’: Biden embraces aggressive approach to thorny cultural issues

Mikie Sherrill is the type of congresswoman — a moderate Democrat from a battleground district — who in years past might have recoiled at President Joe Biden’s recent call for gun control legislation.

But Sherrill said she supports Biden’s forceful demand to expand background checks and ban assault weapons with “no hesitation.”

“The only place this isn’t bipartisan is in Capitol Hill,” said Sherrill, a New Jersey Democrat, noting her own pledges on gun control that closely mirror the president’s. “We see widespread support for this across the country.”

In the dozen years since Democrats last took control of Washington, lawmakers like Sherrill have led a transformation in how their party handles once-sensitive cultural topics, pushing it to uniformly adopt more liberal positions on issues moderates once gingerly toe-tapped around.

It’s a shift that Biden, once derided as a centrist by his critics on the left, has sought not to temper, but to channel. In 10 weeks since taking office, Biden has embraced a set of expansive positions on the cultural front, often pushing even further to the left than former President Barack Obama on issues ranging from LGBTQ rights (where’s he’s been an unabashed supporter of transgender rights) to immigration policy (where he’s called for a shorter timeframe for undocumented immigrants to receive citizenship).

While the speed and consistency of the approach has raised some political concerns among Democrats, it has excited many activists who previously worried Biden would be too conservative to lead the modern Democratic Party.

“He’s not going to be the one ostensibly pushing the envelope, but he’s not resisting the change,” said Ilyse Hogue, a longtime liberal activist and head of NARAL Pro-Choice America, a group that supports abortion rights.

“It’s very matter of fact,” Hogue added. “There’s no hand-wringing. There’s no over-explaining. There’s, ‘Here’s what we’re doing, it’s the right thing to do.’ Move on to the next thing.”

Biden’s push on the cultural front has flown under the radar compared to his efforts to increase COVID-19 vaccine production or approve trillions of dollars to help boost the economy. It’s also sparked a debate among Democrats about whether the country as a whole, or just their party, has changed its positions on these hot-button issues.

In some cases, including on firearm access, Biden has shown at least some reluctance to move as far or as fast as some members of his party.

But allies say Biden’s overall approach is evidence of a new style of politics that shuns moderation for moderation’s sake in favor of pushing for aggressive and widespread change, enabled by Democratic lawmakers who no longer fear being tied to a White House that embraces these issues.

“The old 90s strategy that you do maybe one symbolically incremental thing for a week with a message around it, that’s just not the world we live in anymore,” said former Rep. Tom Perriello of Virginia. “You need to be advocating for change on a lot of different fronts.”

‘Intersectional lens’

Biden issued a proclamation Wednesday on Transgender Day of Visibility, the first-ever such move from a president. Activists welcomed the gesture, which they say is emblematic of Biden’s approach on transgender rights.

The Biden administration, for instance, reversed former President Donald Trump’s ban on transgender troops within a week of taking power. It also did so with little of the public debate that preceded the 2010 repeal of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy that banned gay men and women from serving openly in the military.

The Biden White House has also unequivocally opposed GOP-backed legislation in some states banning transgender athletes from competing against girls.

“I don’t think I would criticize prior administrations for what they did or didn’t do,” said Alphonso David, the president of the Human Rights Campaign. “But I can say this, we have the most pro-equality administration that we have ever had.”

Biden’s immigration bill, unveiled on his first day in office, also goes further in some ways than the 2013 legislation backed by Obama and congressional Democrats. The legislation would establish a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants in eight years, rather than the 13-year timeframe in the 2013 proposal, and does not include measures to increase border security.

David, who is a gay Black immigrant, said the Biden administration is intent on providing protections for all three groups.

“I have three separate identities that should be protected,” David said. “And the Biden administration understands they have both the legal and moral obligation to all residents. And in doing so, they are honoring all our identities as opposed to simply creating a hierarchy of them.”

He added that the White House is looking at issues of equality through an “intersectional lens.”

Biden, of course, has tempered the party on some issues. Most notably, he opposed calls during the 2020 campaign to defund the police at the height of the racial justice protests spurned by the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

And not every issue he’s championed since taking office has always been kept at arm’s length by Democrats. As a senator, Biden himself pushed legislation to ban assault weapons in 1994 during former President Bill Clinton’s administration.

Political vulnerability?

But gun safety activists point out that by the time Obama arrived in 2009, Democrats had all but stopped talking about regulating firearms in any way, convinced it was a political loser.

“Not only did Congress not legislate on guns, it wasn’t even debated as to whether it was an option,” said Peter Ambler, a U.S. House staffer at the time who co-founded a gun safety group with former Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. “The NRA dominated not just Republican politics, but large elements of the Democratic Party as well.”

Biden’s hesitancy to discuss gun control during the opening weeks of his presidency frustrated some advocates who wanted him to discuss it as a national emergency.

But background check legislation in Congress supported by Biden goes further than a similar bill introduced in 2013, activists say, by further expanding the scope of background checks so that they are mandated universally.

Ambler and others say that Biden’s more progressive posture is at least partially a reflection of a broader shift among Democrats in Congress. At the start of Obama’s presidency, for instance, more conservative Democratic lawmakers still campaigned aggressively on preserving access to guns.

Those lawmakers have since been replaced by Democrats like Sherrill, whose reliance on a more suburban coalition filled with socially liberal millennial voters have helped her make a more aggressive stand on the issue.

“Your median Democratic influential, either someone in the House or in the Democratic-oriented non-profit field, those folks have evolved in a way that is far more unapologetic in pushing big activism,” said Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who has written extensively about demographic change.

Teixeira, unlike many liberal activists, said he worries about the political fallout of Democrats embracing all of these cultural issues. He argues the shift is being driven by a class of white liberals who are not only unrepresentative of the country, but the Democratic Party at large.

“The position of college-educated white liberals … is far different than the average American voter who wants more gun control, if we can use that phrase, but is still quite sensitive about how much and how you’re going to do it,” Teixeira said.

In some polls, a sizable majority of Americans back a ban transgender athletes, and Biden also earns some of the weakest marks of his presidency on immigration.

But Democrats like Periello point to issues like same-sex marriage as proof the public, shaped by an influx of millennial and Generation Z voters, has changed on these issues. It’s a change they say has also caused a transformation within the Democratic Party, and presented Biden the conditions from which he can take more liberal positions on cultural issues.

“History makes the leader at certain points,” he said. “And while it’s probably not useful to wonder what would happen if President Biden were ruling in a time where the economy was stable and adults were ready to do business on the Hill together, you might have seen a different agenda. But that’s not what we face.”