Biden has a historic opportunity to meet the moment with his inaugural address
President- elect Joe Biden has given thousands of speeches but none more important than his upcoming inaugural address. All Americans should be praying he delivers the speech of his life, and it will need to be, given the deeply divided nation he will be facing.
He will need to have an eye on the disaster of last week, the lost lives and the deep disgrace brought upon the nation. But he will also need to summon Americans to return to the politics of the postwar years, when bipartisan debate turned on how best to defend the country so that all could enjoy its blessings.
Moderation is not easy to argue for after the savage attack on the Capitol by the proTrump mob, which included the deaths of a U. S. Capitol Police officer and four other people and the attempt to deter Congress from its constitutional duties. Condemnation of the riot and the attempted insurrection is nearly universal. But there is no calm descending, as typically follows a national convulsion. Voices from both ends of the political spectrum continue to cross swords on social media as though this is just another chapter in the journey from 2015 to last Wednesday.
But it is moderation that we need now. As noted here before, the tone should draw its spirit from Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address, delivered just before the Civil War: “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies.” That will not satisfy the most extreme haters any more than Lincoln’s appeal averted the secession of the Confederacy, but they aren’t the ones who need to hear the incoming president. What matters is a more centrist audience, who can hear an appeal, as Lincoln put it, to “the better angels of our nature.”
Lincoln’s eyes were on the crisis in front of him and also on history’s long record of failed self-government. Though it did little to prevent the events at Fort Sumter, his vision reached past the war that loomed to the peace beyond it. He was certainly capable of imagining a republic bound up by the railroads he pursued, settled under the Homestead Act he signed, and growing into an empire of freedom that helped preserve freedom from global menace many times over. Had Lincoln not been assassinated, he might have curbed the zeal of his party and overseen a Reconstruction that did not end in Jim Crow and the Klan.
The president- elect will have many advisers and talented writers to help him, but he has only a week in which to recraft an address suitable for this unprecedented moment. He can’t achieve that with partisan daggers and sweeping condemnation. He could achieve it with appeals to reason and civility. Both have nearly vanished from the land; President Donald Trump licensed their abandonment by his tweets. Biden could well earn the respect of many of the 74 million of President Trump’s voters (and an easier path in Congress for his program) with an appeal to common citizenship. Generosity of spirit and an extended hand have always been celebrated when passion subsides.
A president who is merely civil would be a huge step forward because, as French-british poet and scholar Hilaire
Belloc noted, courtesy is our most underrated virtue:
“Of Courtesy, it is much less “Than Courage of Heart or Holiness,
“Yet in my Walks it seems to me
“That the Grace of God is in Courtesy.”
Lincoln presided over catastrophe after catastrophe, but four years after his first inaugural address, he delivered a second, far more famous speech that, as inscribed on the inner walls of his memorial, concluded this way: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
It cannot be improved upon. It can be imitated. It will be in the country’s best interest if the new president aims for it. Many with scores to settle would prefer he do anything but look positively at the future. Hopefully, he reads Lincoln and not their tweets.
Hugh Hewitt, a Post contributing columnist, hosts a nationally syndicated radio show on the Salem Network. The author of 14 books about politics, history and faith, he is also a political analyst for NBC, president of the Nixon Foundation and a professor of law at Chapman University Law School, where he has taught constitutional law since 1996.
Biden could well earn the respect of many of the 74 million of President Trump’s voters (and an easier path in Congress for his program) with an appeal to common citizenship.