One of Joe Biden's central election
campaign themes was restoring unity to an angry and divided nation. Twelve
months after assuming office, things aren't any better, writes Nick Bryant.
Long before the sun had risen over the
dome of the US Capitol on the day that Joe Biden was sworn in as president,
technicians on the inaugural platform tested the teleprompter he would later
read from by scrolling through America's most celebrated sermon:
"Four score and seven years ago, our
fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are
engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so
conceived and so dedicated, can long endure."
When I first saw the lines of the
Gettysburg Address on those screens in front of the presidential podium, I
thought it must be some kind of sick joke. However, the words of Abraham
Lincoln could hardly be described as being out of place. Washington, after all,
looked that morning as a military encampment.
Troops had slept overnight in the
corridors of Congress to protect it from seditionists, just as their forebears
had done in Lincoln's day. The scaffolding of the inaugural platform had been
used only two weeks before as a staging post for the January 6th insurrection.
The Confederate flag had even been held aloft in the halls of US power, as
Americans once again fought American.
So the question posed by the country's
16th president seemed especially pertinent as the 46th occupant of the office
prepared to assume power - could this country long endure?
Rather
than speaking that day of national renewal, a platitudinous staple of
presidential inaugurals, Joe Biden focused on national reunification. And
though it was three words from his address that instantly entered the history
books, "democracy has prevailed," it was three short sentences that
set out his presidential mission statement: "Bringing America together.
Uniting our people. And uniting our nation."
A year on,
however, that plea for national unity sounds more like magical thinking. Far
from coming together, the United States is in an even more perilous state of
disunion. Often it feels as if the only thing that unites the nation is mutual
loathing. America seems to be engaged in a forever war with itself.
Over the
past 12 months, tensions have escalated over longstanding points of divergence,
such as abortion rights. The country has found new things to argue about, such
as vaccine mandates. It has also discovered new ways of fighting old battles.
The conflict over critical race theory, the latest front in the country's
left-right culture wars, is a novel way of carrying on the centuries-old debate
over the legacy of slavery and segregation.
During the
past year, moments with the potential to help bridge divides, namely the
conviction of Derek Chauvin, the former police officer who murdered George
Floyd, have been supplanted by events that ended up hardening divisions. The
trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenager acquitted of murder after shooting dead
two men during racial unrest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, was an obvious case in
point.
To those who believed he should be
convicted, Rittenhouse was a homicidal vigilante who recklessly waded into a
racial protest carrying a military-style semi-automatic weapon. To his
supporters, he was a patriot and American hero - one far-right website labeled
him "Saint Kyle".
The teenager became the latest poster boy of
polarisation. The debate surrounding his trial degenerated into a rage-filled
ruckus of overlapping and interlocking arguments about gun control,
self-defense laws, policing, and double standards in the criminal justice
system. As is now the norm in US society, policy questions involving complex
and nuanced issues were thrashed out in the midst of a firestorm, often in the
most binary and emotive terms.
On the Richter scale of the American division,
however, the Rittenhouse trial was only a moderate quake. The aftershocks of
January 6th continue to be far more seismic. Rather than becoming a moment of
Trumpian repudiation, the Capitol Hill insurrection ended up having a
radicalizing effect on the conservative movement. The so-called "big
lie" that Trump won the election, a fringe conspiracy theory in the hours
after Joe Biden was declared the victor, has since been adopted as mainstream
Republican thinking.
What we are now witnessing is something
without precedent in modern America - a former president, who continues to
enjoy widespread backing from his party, refusing to accept the result of a
clear-cut presidential election. Nor did the assault on democracy, its
defenders would argue, end on the night of January 6th.
In the past year, Republican-controlled
legislatures in more than a dozen states have passed restrictive voting laws.
Laws have also been enacted making it easier to interfere in a partisan way
with election administration, part of what Democrats claim is a slow-motion
coup to regain the White House at the next presidential election. Polling
suggests, however, that more Republicans think that democracy is
under attack than Democrats, another measure of disunity.
Free and fair elections, the very
mechanism designed to peacefully resolve disputes in civil society, are
themselves now at the center of a society-splitting dispute. And at the core of
that row is something even more fundamental, the failure to agree even on
incontrovertible facts - in this case, the objective truth that Biden won. How
can there be unity, in a country stewing in misinformation and conspiracy
theories, when there is no longer a shared sense of reality? Truth is usually a
prerequisite of reconciliation.
Some fear that January 6th was a
foreshock, a prelude to an even more deadly eruption.
That explains the attention being paid to
a series of recent books raising the specter of further civil conflict and
political unrest. In How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them, the political
science professor Barbara F Walter describes her country as an
"anocracy", a mix between a democracy and an autocracy, and warns of
further militia violence. In Divided We Fall, David French, an Iraq War
veteran, fears states might even decide to secede from the union, the
precipitant in the mid-19th Century of the American Civil War. The intellectual
descendants of the plethora of books written since the turn of the century on
US decline, they form part of a new genre - studies devoted to the prospect of
American disintegration.
Few American scholars think the country is
on the verge of a full-scale conflagration, a Civil War 2.0, in which
compatriots would take up arms against each other on fields of battle that
would become modern-day equivalents of Fort Sumter and Antietam. The more
likely scenario, given the uptick in militia activity and the incendiary tone
of political discourse, is of sporadic acts of political violence akin to the
white supremacist rally in Charlottesville or the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
Yet even this lesser possibility is alarming.
Late in the 2020 presidential campaign,
Joe Biden actually traveled to Gettysburg to sound the alarm about the violent
potentialities of division. "The country is in a dangerous place", he
warned, speaking against the backdrop of a battlefield where tens of thousands
of Americans ended up as casualties. "Once again, we are a house
divided." Yet a president who cast himself as a consensus-builder, with
bipartisanship in his bones, has not even managed to unite his party, still
less his country.
As Biden is well aware, more battles loom
on the near horizon. Sometime in 2022, the Supreme Court will deliver its
highly anticipated ruling in Dobbs vs Jackson Women's Health Organisation,
which could overturn the constitutional right to abortion and lead to an even
more balkanized America. The mid-term congressional elections are another
potential flashpoint. Even in the event of a conflict with Russia over Ukraine
or a clash with China over Taiwan, it is hard to imagine a patriotic surge
strong enough to bring the country together. On the contrary, much like the
coronavirus pandemic and January 6th insurrection, a military confrontation would
more likely expose the nation's fissures.
On inauguration day a year ago, you could
almost hear the relief in Joe Biden's voice when he reassured his country, and
the world, that democracy had prevailed. But in his two set-piece speeches of
this new political year - one marking the anniversary of January 6th and the
other delivered in Georgia demanding the passage of voting rights legislation -
it was possible to detect both an air of resignation and a strident partisan
tone. Both may well be an indication that he knows in his heart of hearts that
his reunification project has failed and that national healing is beyond him.
Historians may one day view this as a personal failing. But I suspect many will
be more sympathetic. After all, could any president heal a broken land that
looks increasingly ungovernable?
Maybe the best that can be hoped for as the country approaches its 250th anniversary on July 4th, 2026, is for it to remain in a state of largely peaceful co-existence: that its cold civil war will never become hot. As for whether the country can long endure? It is still an open question.
Written by
Nick Bryant is the author of When America
Stopped Being Great: A History of the Present. He now lives in Sydney
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