After the chaos, restoration has arrived
Biden brings hope and stability to a fractured U.S., Andrew Cohen writes.
Four years after the triumph of a demagogue, two weeks after the storming of the Capitol and the ratification of an election, one week after the impeachment of the president and the repudiation of an insurrection, the restoration has arrived.
On Jan. 20, the republic founded in blood and revolution did something majestic. In the dizzying span of a Washington morning, it observed the sullen departure of one president and the joyful installation of another.
The United States of America marked the inauguration of Joseph Robinette Biden as it has those of his 45 predecessors over 232 years. It did it without accident or incident, despite high anxiety. The occasion was embroidered with the usual flourishes and rituals, with conventional rhetoric, honeyed with folksiness. And with prayer, poetry and song, too, the national anthem rendered hauntingly by the unconventional Lady Gaga.
Most important, this 59th inauguration sealed the peaceful transfer of power with that old oath — to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States” — now rippling with meaning amid the chaos, corruption and cruelty of the last four years.
In this inauguration like no other, let us remember, the new president is the oldest and just the second Catholic to take office. The vice-president is the first woman, Black, of South Asian descent. She is married to a Jew.
At any other time in the country's 2½ centuries, Wednesday's bloodless succession would not be extraordinary. It has always been done this way, despite war, depression and social unrest.
In 1797, George Washington left office after serving two terms, refusing to become the foreign king the colonists had overthrown. Abraham Lincoln faced a dissolving union in 1861 (several states had already seceded) and Franklin Roosevelt encountered a collapsing economy in 1933, as did Barack Obama, to a lesser degree, in 2009.
In many ways, the dangers faced by the republic were greater than those today. But it is not the American fondness for hyperbole to say that Biden faces an unprecedented suite of threats: a raging pandemic that has killed 400,000 people; a sputtering, indebted economy; seething racial unrest; and deep dissatisfaction among a third or so of the country, which led the most militant to assault the Capitol on Jan. 6.
To this, Biden brings a balm of hope and stability. This Irishman from Scranton, Pa., can talk about loss, pain and faith like no other politician today. When he declared that “my whole soul is in it” and invited critics to “take a measure of me and my heart” and reminded all that “there's no accounting for what fate will deal you,” he was all authenticity.
The message was the man himself, who, finally, after a life in public service, has met his moment. He revisited an old phrase (leading “not merely by the example of our power, by the power of our example.”) He channelled Kennedy in reminding Americans that the inauguration isn't about politics but freedom. He coyly invoked “folks” twice amid “my fellow Americans.”
He talked, as always, about unity, and he is now its champion. In effect, he is telling this overwrought, anxious country to calm down. Not every crisis is existential, not every tragedy is biblical, not every grievance is Messianic, not every cause is divine.
So there he was — emperor of empathy, consoler-in-chief, tribune of unity — the guy who took the train to the office, and now lives above it in the most famous home in the world. His story is American — persistence, hope, fortune, second chances — in a country reeling from incompetence and malfeasance and bleeding in anger, its boasts of exceptionalism ringing hollow.
He spoke his self-evident truth. Then he went to Arlington National Cemetery to pay his respects and after that, he went to work, restoring America.