When Joe Biden raises his hand to take the oath, he will replace a president better known for raising his fist during his inauguration and on January 6th. Biden will soon be on the same steps as his predecessor turned into a crime scene. .
Main halls that used to be filled with school children in backpacks are now filled with the two-awake. Bunting replaced by barrier stripes. Parades with plywood. No amount of American flags will be able to clear the memory of its use in the attack.
“I think the feeling that many Americans have had since the beginning of the pandemic, that we are living through an unprecedented crisis, has really grown into something bigger,” Harvard professor Jill Lepore said.
She uses the word ‘unprecedented’ carefully. She is the author of a comprehensive report on America (“These Truths: A History of the United States”) and has a historically sluggish wrist. But, she says, the word fits into our time.
“I think a comparison would be 9/11, which in many ways is a very different political moment and a very different case of violence,” Lepore told ’60 Minutes’ correspondent John Dickerson. “It’s essentially an act of war. But I think Americans understood at that time that something had changed profoundly.
“I think we will remember the 6th of January in the same way, that it is a day when everything changed, when the unthinkable in the United States became possible.”
“It was, at least by one reading, that the president incited a mob to follow the legislature,” said Jamelle Bouie, a columnist for The New York Times. “Even if the president is out of office very soon, it will still be a crisis, not because he is there, but because we have learned something about the political system. We have learned something about what is possible, and what at least a party of American voters and U.S. lawmakers believe in the nature of our democracy, that is, if they can not win, then the person doing it, or the party doing it, is not legal. ‘
Bouie referred to Abraham Lincoln’s speech “A House Divided” from 1858 (“A house divided against itself can not stand”): “And, you know, like a contemporary discussion of it, or in a popular discussion , ‘house split’ usually refers to a kind of political division. But the literal metaphor was: ‘A house cannot stand like that; it must be one thing, or it must be the other.’
Dickerson said: “Granted, the ‘House Divided’ speech is not, ‘Let’s all come together now; it is,’ One side must win this argument. ‘”
“Reg. And there is no alternative over a long time horizon in which we can have a fraction of Americans who look at the Capitol attack and see it as something to imitate or something to repeat, as something commendable. “As can not exist Constitutional government as we understand it,” Bouie said.
Carolyn Kaster / AP
Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson said: “We have a policy that is currently widely regarded as a team sport. The biggest problem is giving help and comfort on the other side, instead of, as you know, to talk about these differences. “
Gerson was the lead author of President George W. Bush’s inaugural speech in 2001: The speech was after the bitter election in 2000 decided by the Supreme Court:
“America has never been united by blood or birth or land. We are bound by ideals that move us beyond our backgrounds, elevate us above our interests and teach us what it means to be citizens.”
“I went back and read the speech recently,” Gerson said, “and I choked on myself, not just because of the words, but because it was a realistic prospect at the time, that we could get national healing based on shared national values.
“My concern now is that this is a naive approach? Do you know, is the assertion of common values going to be accepted by a country living in different cultures and ways of life?”
The problem, Gerson said, is that President Trump and the Republican Party have ignited politics to such a temperature that it cannot be lowered.
“Well, I think apocalyptic language is one of the worst problems in our politics – this view that, if you lose, the country is lost,” Gerson said. “It’s a way to motivate turnout. It’s also a way to destroy the institutions of the country.”
The apocalyptic theater of President Trump, with himself as the protector of Christianity, played last summer in the same place where Mr. Biden will begin his inauguration day: the St. John’s Church, just a few steps from the White House.
“Politics has to be flexible; there has to be give-and-take,” Lepore said. “You have to be able to tolerate the political opinions of your political opponents. They have to be legitimate opinions. It can not be heresy. And the fusion of religion and politics over the course of the 20th century, you know, we see the cost of that now. . ‘
In 1801, after one of America’s ugliest political campaigns, Thomas Jefferson wanted to dismiss the flame. “Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle,” he said in his inaugural address, promising stability because “errors of opinion can be tolerated if the reason is free to combat them.”
But is reason still the task?
Lepore said: “If you attack the institutions that produce and disseminate knowledge, and if you attack them without knowledge, you come to this moment where you have undermined the idea that there is such a thing as knowledge.”
The new Biden administration can benefit from this by simply providing a steady stream of useful information – potentially reviving the long-forgotten ‘slow news day’.
Lepore said: “You really just have to show up, have real information, bring in people who do their job, and answer the questions that the press and the public have.”
“Just the facts, ma’am ‘that governs?” asked Dickerson.
“Yes,” she laughed. “I think it’s going pretty far.”
The more difficult task for the incoming government is to talk to the voters who fear it.
Gerson said: ‘I think it’s going to be his most important task in this inauguration is to talk to Americans who are not even connected to this experiment anymore and to tell them that they have a share and that they are appreciated in this system. I think you need to make room for people who have supported Trump over the years to find another way to do politics. You know, you can not kill them if infected forever.
“Rhetoric can do a lot to try to create the space for common sense. And that is, I think, what they need to look for now is a way to provide a refuge (a rhetorical refuge) for those who want the country. dien. “
Joe Biden will be inaugurated on the scar of rebellion. But the wound at the Capitol will be on his back. In front? The road to recovery is found in the millions who marched, rallied and voted peacefully; and the officials who protected the vote. They joined a tired army that had already preserved the faith – first responders and our neighbors carried us through a year of the pandemic.
Inaugurations are a major reopening of the American experiment, where hope does not lie in those who have broken with its standards, but those who – while feeling broken – be maintained those standards.
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Story produced by Ed Forgotson. Editor: Remington Korper.