When Joe Biden raises his hand to take the oath of office, he will replace a president best known for raising his fist, in office and on January 6. Biden will soon be on the same steps that his predecessor turned into a crime scene. .
The main corridors once full of students in backpacks are now full of campers. Bunting replaced by barricades. Plywood parades. 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 experiencing an unprecedented crisis, has really exploded into something even bigger,” said Harvard professor Jill Lepore.
She uses the word “unprecedented” with care. Author of an extensive account of America (“These Truths: The History of the United States”), she has a slow historian pulse. But, she says, the word fits our times.
“I think a comparison would be 9/11, which in many ways is a very different political moment and an entirely different instance of violence,” Lepore told “60 Minutes” correspondent John Dickerson. “It is essentially an act of war. But I think, at that time, Americans understood that something has changed profoundly.
“I think we will remember January 6 in the same way, which is a day when everything changed, when the unthinkable became possible in the United States.”
“It was, at least for one reading, the president urging a crowd to pursue the legislature,” said Jamelle Bouie, a columnist for The New York Times. “Even with the president’s departure very soon, it will still be a crisis, not because he is there, but because we learned something about the political system. We learned something about what is possible, and what at least some faction of American voters and legislators believe in the nature of our democracy, which is that if they cannot win, then the person who wins or the party that wins is not legitimate. ”.
Bouie referred to Abraham Lincoln’s 1858 speech “A House Divided” (“A house divided against itself cannot stand”): “And, you know, how, the contemporary discussion about it, or in the popular discussion, ‘home divided ‘usually refers to the type of political division. But the literal metaphor was:’ A house cannot be like this; it must be one thing, or it must be something else. ‘ “
Dickerson said: “Okay, the ‘Divided House’ speech is not ‘Now, let’s all get together’; it’s ‘One side has to win this discussion.'”
“Okay. And there is no alternative in a long time horizon where we can have a faction of Americans who look at the Capitol attack and see it as something to emulate or something to repeat, as something laudatory. with constitutional government as we understand it, “said Bouie.
Carolyn Kaster / AP
Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson said, “We have a policy that is seen as a team sport now. The biggest problem is helping and comforting the other side, rather than, you know, talking about these differences.”
Gerson was the principal editor of President George W. Bush’s inaugural address in 2001: The address was given after the bitter 2000 election, which was decided by the Supreme Court:
“America has never been united by blood, birth or soil. We are limited by ideals that move us beyond our origins, elevate us above our interests and teach us what it means to be citizens.”
“I went back and read the speech recently,” said Gerson, “and found myself gasping, not just because of the words, but because that was a realistic prospect at the time, that we could have a national cure based on national values.
“My concern now is: is this a naive approach? Do you know, the affirmation of common values is going to be 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 ignited politics at such a temperature that it cannot be reduced.
“Well, I really think that apocalyptic language is one of the worst problems in our policy – this view that, if you lose, the country is lost,” said Gerson. “This is a way to motivate participation. It is also a way to destroy the country’s institutions.”
President Trump’s apocalyptic theater, with himself as protector of Christianity, took place last summer in the same place where Biden will start his inauguration day: St. John’s Church, just steps from the White House.
“The policy needs to be flexible; there needs to be an exchange of ideas,” 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 that fusion of religion and politics throughout the 20th century, you know, we see the cost of that. now. “
In 1801, after one of America’s ugliest political campaigns, Thomas Jefferson sought to reduce the fire. “Any difference of opinion is not a difference of principle,” he said in his inaugural speech, promising stability because “error of opinion can be tolerated where reason is left free to fight it.”
But is the reason still up to the task?
Lepore said, “If you attack the institutions that produce and disseminate knowledge, if you attack them as having no knowledge, you kind of come to a point where you undermined the very idea that there is something called knowledge.”
The new Biden administration can benefit from simply offering a steady stream of useful information – potentially reliving the long-forgotten “slow news day”.
Said Lepore: “You just need to show up, have real information, bring in people who are doing their job and answer the questions that the press and the public have”.
“‘Just the facts, lady’ ruling?” asked Dickerson.
“Yes,” she laughed. “I really think that goes a long way.”
The most difficult task for the next government will be to speak to voters who fear it.
Gerson said: “I think this will be your main task at this inauguration, is to talk to Americans who no longer feel related to this experiment, and tell them that they have a stake and that they are valued in this system. I think you have to give space for people who have supported Trump over the years to find a different way of doing politics. You know, you can’t dismiss them as contaminated forever.
“Rhetoric can do a lot to try to create the space for sanity. And that is, I think, what they should be looking for now, is a way of giving a refuge (a rhetorical refuge) to those who want to serve the country. “
Joe Biden will be inaugurated on the scar of the uprising. But the wound in the Capitol will be on your back. In front? The road to convalescence found in the millions who marched, gathered and voted peacefully; and the officials who protected the vote. They joined a tired army that was already maintaining faith – the first respondents and our neighbors carrying us through a year of pandemic.
The inaugurations are a great reopening of the American Experiment, where hope lies not in those who have broken their standards, but in those who – although feeling broken – sustained those standards.
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Story produced by Ed Forgotson. Editor: Remington Korper.