When Joe Biden raises his hand to take the oath of office, he will replace a president better known for raising his fist at his inauguration and on January 6. Biden will soon be on the same staircase that turned his predecessor into a crime scene. .
Main halls that were once filled with school children in backpacks are now filled with bivouacs. Replace flag line with barricades. Parades with plywood. No amount of American flags can clear the memory of using them in the attack.
“I think the feeling that many Americans have had since the start of the pandemic, that we are living through an unprecedented crisis, has really exploded into something even greater,” said Harvard professor Jill Lepore.
She uses the word “unprecedented” carefully. She is the author of a comprehensive account of America (“These Truths: A History of the United States”) and has the slow pulse of a historian. But, she says, the word is appropriate for our time.
“I think a comparison would be 9/11, which is in many ways a very different political moment and a very different example of violence,” Lepore told “60 Minutes” correspondent John Dickerson. ‘It is essentially an act of war. But I think the Americans at the time understood that something had changed dramatically.
“I think we’ll remember January 6 in the same way, that it’s a day when everything changed, when the unthinkable became possible in the United States.”
“It was, at least by one reading, the president who incited a crowd to go after the legislature,” said Jamelle Bouie, a columnist for The New York Times. “Even if the president is absent 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 is at least one thing. faction of US voters and US lawmakers believe in the nature of our democracy, which is that if they cannot win, the person who does or the party that does is not legitimate. ”
Bouie was referring to Abraham Lincoln’s 1858 ‘A House Divided’ speech (‘A house divided against itself cannot stand’): ‘And, you know, a contemporary discussion of that, or in the popular discussion,’ house divided ‘usually refers to kind of political division. But the literal metaphor was: ‘A house cannot stand like this; it has to be one thing or it has to be the other. ‘ ”
Dickerson said, “Right, the ‘House Divided’ speech is not, ‘Let’s all get together now,’ it’s, ‘One side has to win this argument.”
‘Right. And there’s no alternative over a long time horizon where we can have a faction of Americans watching the Capitol attack and seeing that as something to mimic or something to repeat, as something to be commendable. Like, that can’t co-exist. Constitutional government as we understand it, ”Bouie said.
Carolyn Kaster / AP
Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson said, “We have a politics that is very much seen as a team sport at the moment. The biggest problem is offering help and comfort to the other side, instead of, you know, talking about those differences. . “
Gerson was the lead author of President George W. Bush’s inaugural speech in 2001: The speech came after the bitter 2000 elections ruled by the Supreme Court:
“America has never been united by blood, birth or earth. We are bound by ideals that take us out of our background, lift us above our interests and teach us what it means to be citizens.”
“ I went back the other day and read the speech, ” Gerson said, “ and I found myself choking, not just because of the words, but because that was a realistic prospect at the time, that we could have national healing based on shared national values.
“I’m concerned now if that’s a naive approach? You know, is the claim of common values accepted by a country that lives in different cultures and ways of life?”
The problem, Gerson said, is that President Trump and the Republican Party have fueled politics to such a temperature that it cannot be lowered.
“Well, I really think apocalyptic language is one of the biggest problems in our politics – this view that if you lose, the country is lost,” Gerson said. “That’s a way to motivate the turnout. It’s also a way to destroy the country’s institutions.”
President Trump’s apocalyptic theater, with himself as the protector of Christianity, took place last summer where Mr. Biden will begin his inauguration day: St. John’s Church, a stone’s throw from the White House.
“Politics must be flexible; there must be give and take,” said Lepore. “You have to be able to tolerate the political opinions of your political opponents. They have to be legitimate opinions. They cannot be heresies. And this amalgamation 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 tried to turn down the flame. “Any disagreement is not a difference in principle,” he said in his inaugural speech, pledging stability because “a disagreement can be tolerated where reason remains free to challenge it.”
But is reason still up for the task?
Lepore said, “If you attack the institutions that produce and disseminate knowledge, if you attack them because they have no knowledge, you will come to this moment that you have undermined the idea that there is such a thing as knowledge.”
Biden’s new government could benefit by simply offering a steady stream of useful information – reviving the long-forgotten “day of slow news.”
Lepore said, “You really just have to show up, have current information, bring in people who are doing their jobs and answer the questions of the press and the public.”
“‘Just the facts, ma’am’ reigns?” Asked Dickerson.
“Yes,” she laughed. “I think that is going quite far.”
The more difficult task for the incoming administration will be to talk to the voters who fear it.
Gerson said, “I think that’s going to be his main task in this inauguration, speaking to Americans who don’t even feel related to this experiment anymore, and telling them that they have an interest and that they are appreciated in this system. that you have to give space to people who have supported Trump over the years to find another way to do politics, you know, you can’t dismiss them as forever tainted.
“Rhetoric can do a lot to try to make room for common sense. And that, I think, what they need to be looking for now is a way to give a refuge (a rhetorical retreat) to those who have it. country. “
Joe Biden will be inaugurated on the scar of the rebellion. But the wound in the Capitol will be in his back. In front? The way to recovery was found in the millions who marched, gathered and voted peacefully; and the officials who protected the vote. They joined a tired army that held all the faith – first responders and our neighbors who helped us through a year of the pandemic.
Inaugurations are a grand reopening of the American experiment, where hope lies not in those who broke with the norms, but in those who – though they felt broken – enforced those standards.
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Story produced by Ed Forgotson. Editor: Remington Korper.