[ Joe Biden’s call for unity is a stretch, but that doesn’t
mean progress is off the table.] [[link removed]]

GARBAGE OUT; GOVERNMENT IN  
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Harold Meyerson
January 20, 2021
The American Prospect
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_ Joe Biden’s call for unity is a stretch, but that doesn’t mean
progress is off the table. _

Classic Joe Biden, Photo by afagen

 

Joseph R. Biden’s presidential inauguration came as a golden oldie,
a restoration of the familiar even as it broke new ground by also
inaugurating Kamala Harris as his veep.

But January 20th was a day when new ground was broken simply by the
necessity of invoking values so old that merely to affirm them is, in
normal conditions, boilerplate, lip service, cliché upon cliché.
Yes, we value democracy. Yes, we need and value truth.

Affirming those values today, however, wasn’t lip service. That’s
how grotesque things had become during the misrule of Donald Trump.

“There is truth and there are lies,” the new president said. The
right-wing “intellectuals” who’ve been bemoaning postmodernism
for years finally had a president who refuted its central creed. That
president, however, was unmistakably referring to the postmodern (or
premodern, pre-Enlightenment, pre-empiricism) demagoguery routinely
spouted by the Goebbels-esque combine of his predecessor, senators
like Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, congressmembers like Kevin McCarthy and
Steve Scalise, Rupert Murdoch’s many henchmen, and the whole of the
counterfactual American right.

Biden’s was far from the most eloquent of inaugural addresses, but
it surely was among the most heartfelt. It didn’t soar, but it
movingly beseeched, calling for an end to the demonization of
political differences, to the scourge of white supremacism, to the
“uncivil war” that has defined our times. That he personally felt
these missions, and the need to mount an effective federal response to
the pandemic and the economic havoc it has wrought, was made clear,
however inadvertently, by his lapsing into his own Bidenesque forms of
sincerity. I can’t recall an inaugural address (and I’m old enough
to have heard a whole lot) so punctuated by a new president’s use of
the word “folks” as a form of direct address. It’s Biden’s way
of suggesting that we’re all in this together—a reflexive, rather
than a strategic, word choice; a word that prefaces his appeals to all
of us to get serious, a word that signals he thinks of himself as one
of us and hopes that we’re part of that “us,” too.

There was a more eloquent statement of Biden’s themes in today’s
ceremony; to my surprise and, I suspect, that of virtually everyone,
it came from the inaugural’s designated poet, performing what is
usually a pro forma part of the services. There was nothing pro forma,
though, about 22-year-old Amanda Gorman and her poem, which sounded
Biden’s calls for inclusiveness, justice, and democratic norms in a
rap-like tempo, making a hoped-for history rhyme. As Biden spoke as
the “folksy” grandpa trying to bring the nation around to a more
commonly shared sense, so Gorman spoke as the quicksilver street kid
demanding a better tomorrow—but both, somehow, sounding the same
message and affirming the same values.

Donald Trump, of course, was absent from the ceremony. He had begun
the day by rescinding his own executive order that had forbidden
former members of his administration from quickly going to work as
lobbyists, particularly as lobbyists for foreign powers. This
recission followed hard upon his pardoning of Steve Bannon, who now,
freed from the looming threat of justice, can go to work directly for
Vladimir Putin, or, perhaps, Putin, the Mercer family, Rupert Murdoch,
and My Pillow simultaneously.

The transition from Trump to Biden signals many changes, not least of
which is a refocusing of government away from the personal needs,
hates, and fears of the president himself. During Trump’s term, the
Republican Party essentially became the action arm of the
president’s psychological deficiencies—in the past several months,
of his inability to see himself as a loser, his rejection by the
American electorate notwithstanding. By the time he left office, the
base of his party had itself embraced that inability.

If that’s not a prime example of mass psychosis, I don’t know what
is. When coupled with the party’s failure to produce a platform in
2020, what the nation is left with is a party defined by raging
resentments, fear of our multiracial future, and the hungry swallowing
of lies that reinforce those fears and resentments. And precious
little else.

That puts Biden’s hoped-for unity well out of reach, though some
more temperate Republicans have fled or are now fleeing their former
political home. What it doesn’t put out of reach is
progress—toward a more efficient distribution of vaccines; toward
greater racial, gender, and economic equity; toward a political system
less dominated by big money. Getting there will require scrapping the
ability of a Senate minority to block a Senate majority, which is to
say that one of the democratic norms this nation has yet to realize is
real majority rule. That’s one more value to which we’ve given lip
service but never actualized, one of those old values to which old Joe
Biden must give new meaning if his presidency, if his nation, is going
to succeed.

_Harold Meyerson is editor at large of The American Prospect._

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