This article, written by TNR deputy editor Jason Linkins, first appeared on newrepublic.com and in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter. Sign up here.

President Joe Biden’s response to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has thus far been a sit in how to play a difficult hand well. To year, he has either done or facilitated facilitate most of the things he can do: He’s spotlighted the lies that Putin has deployed to justify his invasion and built consensus between our Western friends; together, they’ve imposed significant sanctions on the Russian regime. Notably, Biden has also shown restraint in avoiding doing things he shouldn’t–such as imposing a no-fly zone over Ukraine or dedicating American boots to Eastern European ground. He’s had to resist these announces, and likely will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. But the world is better for it, as these actions would almost surely cause a more dangerous conflict with a nuclear power.

Biden’s deftness hasn’t gone wholly unnoticed. As The New Republic’s Tim Noah wrote the coming week, ahead of the president’s State of the Union address, one large-hearted root of praise for Biden has come from disaffected “Never Trump” Republicans. The Bulwark’s Jonathan V. Last-place has been among the sharpest of these expressions: “The West is stronger because of the actions of the Biden administration and Russia is weaker because of them, ” he wrote, adding, “The last-place month has represented America’s best showing in foreign policy in a generation.”

Still, Noah couldn’t help but notice a spread: “I’m surprised by how little notice radicals and the left have given Biden’s strong accomplishment on Ukraine.” It’s possible that Biden’s address to the nation will catalyze a stronger positive response from his Democratic peers. Writing in his newsletter, The Big Tent, Crooked Media’s Brian Beutler saidthat it was long past time for Democrat to “do the kind of demagoguing and line-drawing that simply startles them”–that is, the way Republican do.

As Beutler mentioned, the midterm ballots stir the bets of figuring out how to rally Democrat around Biden’s response to the war extremely high: “The urgency to revoke[ Republican] dominance has just grown significantly, because if they acquire we can’t count on them to be on the side of global republic in another war against dictatorship that just turned hot.” To Beutler’s mind, Democrat urgently need to launch a “rhetorical counteroffensive” against the GOP’s Putin pussyfooting and, more broadly, imparting the “fascist temptation overtaking the party out into the light-headed, and[ question] the public to reject it.”

History should remind us of how important it is to confront these “fascist temptations, ” because, in years too recent for convenience, the government has flowered on these shorings, threatening some dark turns. In 1939, as Europe was about to plunge into its Second World War, New York City’s Madison Square Garden played host to a Nazi rally, sponsored by the German American Bund and legislation as a revival for “Americanism.” Happenings such as this one were recently chronicled in an Academy Award-nominated documentary short-lived by Marshall Curry, A Night at the Garden. In a Q& A, Curry noted on how easy “its for” onlookers in the United Government to be swayed toward fascism when the war seemed so far away. “When the Nazis began killing American soldiers, we started erasing the fact that any Americans has in the past shared their doctrine, ” he said. “In the end, America attracted away from the cliff, but this rally is a reminder that things didn’t have to work out that way.”

I thought about that night at Madison Square Garden this weekend, as Republican lawmakers Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar attended a lily-white nationalistic rally in Orlando, Florida, staged as a adversary to the slightly less batshit Conservative Political Action Committee, or CPAC. The America First Political Action Conference, or AFPAC, was founded by the far-right extremist Nick Fuentes, and as Laura Jedeed, who covered the conferences for The New Republic , memorandum, Fuentes “is not coy about what he belief. In his own texts:’ All I crave is a total Aryan victory. All I demand is reprisal … I’m just like Hitler.’” Gosar and Greene received merely a slap on the wrist from Republican leadership for their attendance( The Washington Post primarily characterized it as an “indirect chiding” ). If this is the best Republicans can do, then Beutler is right: Democrats must do them one better.

It’s understandable that Democrats might be queasy with a robust display of rallying around the flag on Ukraine. The storages of the fumbled pullout from Afghanistan still loom enormous. Furthermore, the fighting in Ukraine is likely to go some perilous turns, and Biden’s efforts to bring Putin to heel could neglect. It’s likewise the event that Democrats will have to confront a batch of unreckoned-with hypocrisies that substantially debilitate our moral stand up and give gasoline to Putin’s whataboutism–the War in Afghanistan, our hand in a same ongoing outrage in Yemen, and our disappointments to preserve and attack republic at many levels at home.

Nevertheless, a obscurity historical turn is upon us, like it or not: The threat of a global war hangs overhead; autocrats and fascists are enjoying themselves in the sunshine. The best channel to avoid the world countries from dashing into something truly despairing is to start forcefully expressing what a more only life should look like, and isolate its antagonists, at home and abroad. The hour is late, but let’s start now.

This article first appeared on newrepublic.com and in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter. Sign up now.

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