It was the Liberation of Paris, the fall of Ceausescu, the Spice Girls getting back together. It was an explosive moment of elation, the sort that greets news of an armistice or the first patter of raindrops after a drought.
If Simeon himself had read the inauguration oath to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and intoned the Nunc Dimittis on the steps of the Capitol, the sense of deliverance could not have been greater. Grown men wept salt tears and tweeted their lachrymose joy for shared healing. Others declared that they could breathe and see properly again after four long years of suffocating anxiety in an orange-tinted void.
We’re talking here not solely about the reaction of victorious Democrats and their supporters, the celebrating Biden and Harris families and friends, or the inevitable crowd of emoting Hollywood dignitaries in attendance at the installation of the 46th president of the United States.
We’re talking about the response of most of the world’s news media, those professionals whose job it is to chronicle for an information-hungry audience the morally complicated, infinitely diverse warp and weft of the human fabric.
Those solemnly self-important purveyors of facts in a post-truth world were a gaggle of blubbing, gushing, babbling groupies. The BBC’s journalists, whose presence in Washington must have rivalled that of the National Guard, seem to have been given yet another holiday from their supposed obligation to impartiality as they waxed at length about the “historic” scene and its “healing” power.
The American press, whose reporters once revelled in their reputation as cynical, hard-bitten fact gatherers, unreflected by any emotion from their focus on getting the story, were like cheerleaders at a high school football game. One CNN news chief remarked, during a ceremony the night before the inauguration to mark American lives lost to Covid, that the long, parallel lines of illuminations along the National Mall were like “extensions of Joe Biden’s arms embracing America”.
Perilously fractured nation
If you ever wondered what happened to religion in a supposedly secular world, look no farther. These modern evangelists are indeed the messengers of good news for President Biden. His task, as he eloquently laid out in his inaugural address, is to unite a perilously fractured nation.
To watch the spectacle on Wednesday as it was brought into Americans’ homes, you’d think he’d done it already. To listen to the ululations of the commentators, all the country had to do was usher in a Democrat fully signed up to the progressive nostrums of the modern age and the fissures in the American landscape would begin to fill up.
The darkness of ignorance that had held the nation hostage has been illuminated already by a series of day one announcements, such as signing up to the Paris climate accord and suspending construction of the border wall with Mexico. Faith in the American project is being restored.
If only it were that simple.
It’s easy to forget amid the euphoria of the media, perhaps because they want you to, that Mr Biden won the election by a margin of 52-48 per cent. Do those numbers look familiar, by the way, to a British audience? Numbers that were deemed so fragile a mandate in 2016 that they permitted the losers to spend four years trying to undo the voters’ verdict are now said by the same people to be an iron-clad affirmation of the way forward.
Don’t dismiss them as treasonous reactionaries
They aren’t. For all Mr Trump’s manifold malignities, he represented a swath of America that can’t be dismissed as treasonous reactionaries. Mr Biden won’t get to heal the nation by telling the 74 million people who voted for Donald Trump that they were ignorant, deluded dupes or white bigots; that some kind of re-education — de-Trumpification — of half the population is what’s needed to restore cohesion and equilibrium, as many Democrats believe.
There were worrying hints of this in Mr Biden’s inaugural address. The divisions he chose to emphasise were those brought about by “the ugly reality that racism, nativism, fear, demonisation have long torn us apart”. America’s enemies, he said, were “the rise of political extremism, white supremacy [and] domestic terrorism”.
No one would dispute that these are all indeed ugly realities of America’s current and historic condition. But the suggestion that white supremacism is the source of the nation’s problems and the implication that Trump voters are to blame is as dangerous as it is flawed.
As vile as racist extremism is, it’s not Trump voters’ assertion of their white privilege that explains the divided nation. It’s the emphasis by the other side of the political divide – dominant in cultural and business life as well as now in government – on the centrality of racial, gender and sexual identity in American life. These voices call for a rewriting of American history, the elimination of the idea of traditional gender, “defunding the police”, redefining racism to require people to surrender their unconscious white privilege in order to avoid being accused of it, and shamed, marginalised and cancelled if they don’t.
President Biden indeed has an opportunity to begin a healing – Mr Trump’s disgraceful last few weeks in office have weakened (a little) his hold over a large part of the country – but he will squander it if he follows most of the media in insisting that bringing America together will require the former president’s supporters to acknowledge their irredeemable sinfulness.
The Times
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