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**JANUARY 14, 2021**

Meyerson on TAP

1861 and 2021: A Troubling Resemblance

CNN reports

that security officials have convinced President-elect Biden not to
travel on Amtrak from Wilmington to Washington for his inauguration,
which Biden had planned to do as a way of re-emphasizing his
40-plus-year commuting routine, which has always been part of his
"Regular Joe" persona. Fearful that far-right domestic terrorists might
attack him either en route or at D.C.'s Union Station, they have
convinced a reluctant Biden to make the trip by other,
unspecified-for-security-reasons means.

This shift in commute uncannily echoes Abraham Lincoln's arrival in
Washington on the eve of his own inauguration. Allan Pinkerton, then a
private detective engaged by the Pennsylvania Railroad, had discovered
irrefutable evidence that Southern sympathizers had detailed plans to
assassinate Lincoln when his train stopped at Baltimore en route to the
capital. Overcoming Lincoln's initial objections, Pinkerton persuaded
him to steal away, under the cloak of-well, under the cloak of a
cloak-from his inaugural train, from whose rear deck he had made
multiple public appearances during the journey from Springfield to D.C.
Pinkerton then had Lincoln board a different train, whereon he slipped
undetected through Baltimore in the middle of the night to arrive,
unharmed and unheralded, in Washington later that morning.

If this isn't an ominous historical parallel, I don't know what is.
We have the abandonment of the inaugural train in favor of a safer,
unpublicized means. We have threats from, in both cases, terrorists in
the cause of white supremacy, who now as then constitute one wing of a
major political party (then, a Democratic Party rooted in the white
South; now, a Republican Party rooted in the white South). We have
malign fantasies spun about the party and president about to take the
power conferred on them by the electorate by mendacious media
outlets-then,

**The Charleston Mercury**; now, Fox News and right-wing radio.

Sixty-two years after Lincoln's inauguration and 98 years before
Biden's, William Butler Yeats, writing of his own time's Irish
conflicts, authored the poem "Meditations in Time of Civil War," two
lines from which provide a decent guide to how American conservatism
devolved into terrorist apologism:

We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart's grown brutal from the fare ...

The Irish poet Biden likes to quote is Seamus Heaney, particularly his
poem "The Cure of Troy," which contains the lines:

But then, once in a lifetime
The longed for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.

How we get from the world of Yeats's vision to the world of Heaney's
is by no means clear, but we have to incessantly try.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

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Reanimated Corpse of Antonin Scalia Tries to Stop Student Debt
Cancellation

Almost every citation in an Education Department analysis on why debt
cancellation would be illegal comes from the late conservative jurist.
BY DAVID DAYEN

Using Tax Policy to Promote Rural Development

We could shift the failed tax preference for opportunity zones into a
targeted strategy to create more jobs for rural America. BY ORLI
AVI-YONAH & REUVEN AVI-YONAH

Democrats Must Federalize Medicaid

A signature piece of Joe Biden's campaign agenda should be part of the
first major economic package. BY JON WALKER

Unsanitized: The Democratic Policy-Smorgasbord Mistake

Democrats are talking themselves into trying to pass their entire agenda
at once. There's a far easier path. This is The COVID-19 Daily Report
for January 14, 2021. BY DAVID DAYEN

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