Moving forward in a complicated time

It’s complicated, like seemingly everything else. President Donald J. Trump’s direction of a mob to tear up part of the Congress, one of his theoretical partners in governance of this country, is reprehensible, or at least, further evidence of his unsuitability to be president.

Put another way, of course, the whole institution of American government has become ossified to the point of needing major change to become appropriate to govern a people as diversified as ours. How could our Founding Fathers have fathomed, for example, a mixed-race woman elected as our vice president?

The other idea that is tempting in trying to understand last week’s shenanigans in Washington is the idea that our leadership is no longer the best and the brightest of a vigorous, enlightened, independent group of castaways on a distant, sometimes dangerous shore. That, theoretically, is what our Founding Fathers — note, “fathers,” not “fathers and mothers” — were. We weren’t as raw as the Australians, but we killed the native peoples as enthusiastically as the Australians went after the aborigines, or maybe more so.

Anyway, the American “insurrectionists” last week, although they shouldn’t have been egged on by our ignorant president who only wanted to be elected to a second term, could have been seen to be taking us back to our roots, scraping some of the sanctity off a group of people representatives in institutions who at one time would have been hanged if they had been apprehended by their enemies.

Maybe we have become too tame.

Don’t get me wrong. I can’t stand Donald Trump. He is the personification of ignorance. Electing him president was an act of folly, although the Democrats, in their choice of candidates, invited the deluge we have experienced. Maybe in Mr. Trump, we have seen what can happen when we choose as president the other American all-star, the ruthless, self-proclaimed successful businessman instead of the patriotic statesperson, if he or she still exists.

If Mr. Biden isn’t up to repairing the ship of state, we are really in trouble, because it is only a matter of time until our own vulnerability is recognized by our rivals and enemies in that jungle out there and our position of leadership is challenged and we are displaced at the top of the world heap.

Maybe it’s happening already. Where did the Yankee Trader go? When were we last asked to save a country or a people from tyranny, as opposed to just withdrawing our troops to let nature take its course?

One of Mr. Trump’s party pieces was his clear preference for dictators. Erdogan, Duterte, Putin. Well, he’s almost gone. I don’t think it’s worth the time or distraction to try to impeach him again.

I worry at the smoking ruins of the Republican Party that he is leaving behind. We need a serious opposition party, for alternate ideas, for alternate serious leadership other than the current cast of uninspiring non-leaders.

So now you’re thinking, “Who does he like”? In general, I favor ex-governors. They have had the experience of dealing with legislatures, a judiciary, elections, roads with potholes and the like. I ask you to look at the governors of Michigan, California and New York as options. I also insist that the hometown newspapers in Lansing, Sacramento and Albany pick them apart, unless their families have installed the journalists in question.

I don’t expect you to think that journalists are more honest than politicians, but my experience of them is that they are more, what the British call, bloody-minded, than other groups I have encountered in my own public life. They actually, at their best, relish demolishing public figures.

Mr. Biden as president must be careful not to get sucked into the ritual humiliation of his predecessor. The people don’t care to hear it. Nor should Mr. Trump have been impeached on Wednesday. It isn’t worth the distraction with only days to go in his term.

Instead, Mr. Biden should, first, concentrate on getting us past the virus. It is the barrier both to public health and, thus, to economic health for the country.

I don’t like the chatter about how we will never get back to the way we were pre-Trump. His presidency wasn’t that important. I think we can learn a lesson from his presidency. That is, never to elect anyone like him again.

It was all out there. We just didn’t want to see it, in part from despair looking at the alternatives to him among Republicans and Democrats.

The bad stuff that happened at the Congress last week just needs to be swept up and taken as a serious warning to extremists on either side as to how fragile parts of our governing system are. On the other hand, it will survive this, too. People do.