Biden and the road not taken

John F Kennedy was the first US president to have a poet at his inauguration when he invited the great Robert Frost to Washington DC. That was 60 years ago, and a tradition was created, although readers may not be surprised to learn that no poet accompanied Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2017.

Joe Biden revived the tradition, which speaks to a sense of continuity and a view that Trump was a disruption or aberration, a blip in the system. Certainly one could never have imagined Trump and his family enjoying the rhapsodic delivery of Amanda Gorman, an outstanding 22-year-old African American poet who stole the show when she recited her work The Hill We Climb.

The poem was deeply American, drawing on a sense of mission, patriotism and even religiosity that some New Zealanders may struggle with. It was about hope and overcoming, and you could hear echoes of Walt Whitman and Martin Luther King in her words and the way she said them.

The concluding lines spoke to the moment: ‘‘There is always light./ Only if we are brave enough to see it./ There is always light./ Only if we are brave enough to be it.’’

It was important to remember that Gorman delivered those lines only a fortnight after the same site, the US Capitol, was overrun by Trump supporters encouraged by deluded conspiracy theories. Five people lost their lives, including one police officer. The racial struggles of US history were not remote but very easy to grasp.

Only two days before the inauguration, in one of his last acts as president, Trump had released The 1776 Report in response to the New York Times’ controversial 1619 Project. The Times project appeared in 2019 and made slavery the central focus of US history. Trump’s version was a culmination of conservative grumbling over that ‘‘politically correct’’ view of history and reinforced old, dated ideas of US exceptionalism.

American Historical Association executive director James Grossman called The 1776 Report ‘‘a hack job, not a work of history’’. It was ‘‘a work of contentious politics designed to stoke culture wars’’.

So much of the Trump era is summed up in that criticism, both the incompetence and the malice.

The 1776 Report was immediately revoked by Biden in an executive order, along with Trump’s Muslim travel ban, border wall and withdrawal from the Paris climate change agreement.

Those on the left who thought, a year ago, that Biden was too moderate, too centrist and carrying too much political baggage to be effective will have reconsidered their views in the wake of Covid-19 and the Black Lives Matter movement.

Biden is now being seen instead as ‘‘a good liberal’’, as one US left-wing columnist put it. Like Franklin D Roosevelt, who was forced to confront the Great Depression and World War II, the good liberal ‘‘tends to flourish when its habitat includes two historical conditions at once: dire crises and robust social movements’’.

The comparison is fitting. Biden noted in his inauguration speech that Covid-19 has taken as many American lives in one year as the country lost in World War II.

Viewers of the inauguration will have seen that Biden is prepared to speak honestly about the enormous problems and challenges the country faces. Unity will be difficult but his honesty, gravity and seriousness are a refreshing change after four years of dishonesty and divisiveness.

It was about hope and overcoming, and you could hear echoes of Walt Whitman and Martin Luther King in her words ...