Biden’s first words as US president analyzed by the New York Times
In his first speech as President Biden spoke of unity and democracy; not a word on China instead. The New York Times analysis.
In the end, the inauguration triumphed over the insurrection – NYT writes.
President Biden's call for national unity in his inaugural speech on Wednesday had its roots in the belief – born from decades of working within government institutions – that America can return to an era when “We are united enough to move forward all”.
It was an appeal to re-establish the ordinary discord of democracy, with the reminder that "politics does not have to be a raging fire, destroying everything in its path". The words were made even more powerful because they were spoken from the same steps at the entrance to the Capitol, where a violent attack two weeks ago shocked the nation, letting the nation know how far some Americans would go to overturn the results of a democratic election.
Biden's inauguration was notable for its normality, and sense of relief. Yet he has settled amidst so many interlinked national traumas that it is still unclear whether he will be able to persuade the nation to walk together into a new era. To do so, he must lead the country beyond the partisan divisions that have made masking a political act, and be accepted by tens of millions of Americans who have believed a lie that the presidency had been stolen.
Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. is certainly not the first president to take office in a time of national despair and division. Lincoln faced a country that was shattering with a civil war. Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was in his third term when Biden was born, faced a nation mired in depression, with "Hoovervilles" in the shadow of the Capitol.
While Biden does not face a crisis of equal magnitude, he has made it clear – without making comparison – that none of his predecessors have faced such a frightening series of simultaneous tests.
He listed them: a devastating pandemic that killed more Americans in a year than the nation lost in World War II (he could have added Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan), an economic recession that brought with it "unemployment and despair", a crisis of racial justice and another climate crisis, and, for tens of millions of Americans, a collapse of their faith in democracy itself.
And finally, he argued, American healing would require an end to the era of alternative facts.
He never referred to President Donald J. Trump, but spoke clearly about him – and the more than 140 Republicans in Congress who voted not to certify the election results, despite the absence of any evidence of widespread fraud – when he said that "We must reject the culture in which the facts themselves are manipulated and even produced".
Biden's presidency is based on the bet that it is not too late to "end this uncivilized war". Even some of his most ardent supporters and appointees, a generation or younger than him, wonder if his calls for Americans to listen to one another, "not as adversaries but as neighbors," come too late.
"Like Lincoln, Biden comes to power at a time when the country is torn between conflicting views of reality and identity," said Jon Meacham, the presidential historian who occasionally advises Biden and contributed to his inaugural address.
"Too many Americans have been shaped by the lie that the 2020 election was somehow stolen," he said. The challenge – and the opportunity – of the new president is to insist that facts and truth must guide us ”. That one can disagree with one's opponent without delegitimizing his place within the Republic ”.
Biden's speech was about restoring that world, the one that existed in the America he grew up in. It is the argument of a 78-year-old who experienced tragedy after tragedy in public and who, in a reverse order than usual, took on the form of a statesman before returning to being a politician.
But what millions of Americans feel is a heartfelt plea to restore order, millions of others believe it masks a profound bias, or naivety, about what has happened to America in the past four years, or the past twenty.
Indeed, beyond the call for unity, Biden's speech was littered with sentences intended to rekindle these arguments.
His references to the "grip of systemic racism", "white supremacy" and "domestic terrorism", and his insistence that the climate crisis is a major threat to the nation, were meant to signal to the progressive side of his party , who always considered him too conservative and cautious, that new priorities had arrived.
But they are also a trigger for those who oppose him: on Tuesday, his last full day of work, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo delivered a broadside on Twitter, where the president has been silenced, against "the awakening , multiculturalism, all -isms – are not what America is ”.
Biden planned his inauguration to declare otherwise, that they are modern America.
And his planned actions in the early days of his mandate – rejoining the Paris climate agreement and the World Health Organization, vowing to find a path to citizenship for 11 million immigrants and re-enter the Iranian nuclear deal – are meant to reinforce the point.
He added a warning to American adversaries, who have spent the last four years, but especially 2020, filling power gaps around the world as America counted its deaths and took to the streets.
Biden warned them not to confuse the din of the past four years with weakness.
"America has been tested, and we have come out stronger," he insisted, promising to "mend our alliances and once again engage with the world."
But he never once mentioned the country that represents the longest-term challenge to American pre-eminence – China – or any of the smaller challengers' alignments that seek to destroy, build nuclear weapons, undermine the United States by manipulating. their computer networks or using social media.
And in parts of the speech that sounded more like chatter than a spike in rhetoric, he acknowledged that America's diminished status could only be restored by ending the damage at home, and replacing an "America First" swagger with a dose of post-Covid humility.
The extent of that damage could be seen from the western front of the Capitol. Gone are the crowds of hundreds of thousands of people who usually witness, and applaud, a ritual of American democracy that Biden was determined to follow.
As long as the shots were tight, it was like this: the new president and the vice president, the big family of the Bible, the head of justice, the former presidents. But the absence of Trump, the central and disruptive figure in the nation's four-year drama, the first president in over 150 years to refuse to witness the inauguration of his successor, could not be undone. Nor could the prospect of Mr. Trump's second impeachment trial be canceled, an event in absentia that can begin in days, perhaps rekindling the divisions Bidem intends to mend.
Then will come the proof of Biden's statement that "without unity, there is no peace".
And while a host of leaders from both parties flocked to the inauguration and cheered heartily, it's far from clear that the country is truly ready to move forward.
In a nation that does not seem to share a set of common facts, agree on the usefulness of simple face masks, the safety of vaccines, or the presidential vote not being rigged, fulfill Biden's dream of restoring an orderly debate on politics. it may seem like the triumph of hope over lived experience.
"I am desperately grateful to democratic institutions, despite the damage President Trump and his supporters have caused over the past four years," said Kori Schake, a Republican who has held positions at the Pentagon and the National Security Council and is now to the American Enterprise Institute.
"But for President Biden, the challenge will not only be governing, but also restoring strength to the battered institutions of our democracy," said Ms. Schake. "We Republicans have a responsibility to restore public confidence in the integrity of our elections, because it was we who questioned them."
(Extract from the press review of Eprcomunicazione )
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/biden-discorso-inaugurale-presidente/ on Sat, 23 Jan 2021 07:00:27 +0000.