Biden calls for ‘unity,’ warns against ‘lies’
President comes into office facing multiple crises
There was never a doubt President Joe Biden would call for unity at his swearing-in - the declaration that “we are the United States of America” peppered his speeches throughout the long presidential campaign.
“Unity” appeared a dozen times in Wednesday’s 21-minute speech and as the topic of a proclamation for a Day of Unity that the new president signed shortly after he took the oath.
But at an inauguration surrounded by high fences and troops, amid unprecedented levels of security to protect against potential attack by supporters of his defeated predecessor, in the shadow of a Capitol still marred by a deadly riot just two weeks ago, Biden this time coupled those calls with something sterner:
“The recent weeks and
months have taught us a painful lesson. There is truth and there are lies lies told for power and profit,” he said.
“Each of us has a duty and a responsibility,” he added, “to defend the truth and defeat the lies.”
Biden comes to office facing multiple crises of a severity few presidents have encountered so early in their tenures and with only narrow congressional
majorities to back him. His inaugural address offered clues to how he will attempt to build a mandate for carrying out his policies - reaching out to those Americans who did not vote for him, but also drawing a bright line that seeks to separate at least some of those voters from President Donald Trump.
Biden is “temperamentally a man of healing,” said Princeton University
historian Sean Wilentz. His ability to express empathy created a contrast to Trump that helped propel him to the White House.
But a desire to heal “can lead you down a dangerous path” if that’s all a president offers, Wilentz said, especially in the face of a “threat to American democracy.”
Wednesday’s speech appeared to acknowledge that challenge.
In a first for any inaugural address, Biden openly named “white supremacy” as a threat, along with “domestic terrorism that we must confront and we will defeat.” He decried the “harsh, ugly reality that racism, nativism, fear, demonization have long torn us apart.”
Biden called for lowering the temperature of the national debate, saying that “politics doesn’t have to be a raging fire, destroying everything in its path” - a line that repudiated the last four years, but may also have served as a warning to the more confrontational voices on the left of his own party.
But he coupled that with saying that “we must reject the culture in which facts themselves are manipulated and even manufactured.”
At its worst, “unity” can be a clich or an excuse to ignore accountability.
That wasn’t Biden’s meaning, said Dylan Loewe, a former Biden speechwriter. The president was not arguing that Americans should unify at the price of putting aside principles. A key line in the speech, Loewe said, was Biden’s declaration that at crucial moments in American history, “enough of us, enough of us have come together to carry all of us forward.”
The speech aimed to “add some content to what ‘unity’ means,” said Julia Azari, a political scientist at Marquette University in Milwaukee. Biden used the term to mean a sense of shared national purpose and then “described who lies outside that,” she said.
Defining unity in that manner “can include a whole lot of people,” she said, but adds the requirement of “a shared set of values.”
“That means you can’t have a seat at the bargaining table and use lies. Lies are anti-democratic; white nationalism is anti-democratic” she said. Biden’s speech “drew a boundary around unity” and invited listeners to think about “what the borders are.”
Beyond his own supporters, Biden appeared to be reaching out to at least some Republicans by drawing a line that would “carve out Trump and Trumpism as an exception,” said University of California, Berkeley political science professor Eric Schickler.
Biden’s ability to get his program through Congress will depend to a large extent on whether Republicans unite in opposition to him. He takes office, however, with the opposition badly split because of Trump. That creates a potential opening for the new president.
With Trump hoping to remain a major force in the party, the speech served to politely, but forcefully widen that division in the opposition’s ranks.
Biden “didn’t draw divisive lines” by dwelling on specifics of policy, Schickler noted. Instead, the implied message was that “we can disagree about policy, but share a broad set of values.”
“While he works to unite the country, he’s going to go to war with the notion of alternative facts,” said Rob Stutzman, a Republican consultant who has been a Trump critic.