Many are disillusioned with American democracy. Can Joe Biden win them over?
There’s something exhilarating about hearing someone tell the truth, especially now when so many people seem to believe that the difference between facts and falsehood is a matter of political affiliation or personal opinion. Watching Kamala Harris and Joe Biden speak in the Capitol Rotunda on the anniversary of the 6 January insurrection, hearing the president blame the brutal riot directly on Donald Trump and his supporters – it felt almost like exhaling, after holding your breath for too long. Yes, it’s a lie that the 2020 election was stolen. Yes, it’s a lie that the rioters swarming the Capitol building were genuine American patriots. Those are facts that can’t be stressed enough, that need to be said and repeated by the powerful and the widely respected.
Over the past few days, I’ve watched deeply moving interviews with the Capitol police officers who lived through the riot. Especially affecting was the PBS conversation with Sandra Garza, whose partner, Brian Sicknick, defended the Capitol against attackers and died the next day of a stroke; in Garza’s view, Donald Trump “needs to be in prison”. When I register my own jarringly adrenalized response to even the briefest film clip of the surging crowd calling out for blood, I know that I cannot begin to imagine what those who survived it – and their loved ones – continue to suffer.
So it came as a relief to hear Biden emphasize the gravity and the dangers of political violence, as well as the urgent necessity of defending and upholding the constitution. It seemed vitally important to hear him say that January 6 needs to be remembered; that forgetting the past and moving on (as many Republican senators urge us to do) could conceivably pave the way for a second – and perhaps more catastrophic – assault on our government.
Yet – like many listeners, I imagine – I couldn’t help wondering how many people were being convinced, how many minds were being changed by the reasonableness, the maturity and clarity of the president’s address. It’s not just that, as we keep hearing, Americans now inhabit two entirely alternate realities: one in which the Covid vaccine staves off disease, another in which inoculation causes infertility and ALS. Among the obstacles that stand in
the way of changing hearts and minds is that our problems, as a nation, are older, deeper and more severe than Donald Trump’s megalomania.
So even as it was satisfying to hear Biden hold Trump directly accountable for ramping up his base’s bloodlust, for watching the mayhem on TV and making no attempt to stop it, I kept recalling something I remember people saying in the immediate aftermath of the 2016 election: that the malevolent genie that Trump had unleashed from the bottle was unlikely to go back in. Five years later than seems truer than ever: My sense is that Trump could completely retire from public life tomorrow and the support for him and his ideas would remain undiminished. A half-dozen Capitol rioters were elected to office in November, and two dozen more plan to run in upcoming elections.
What I wished that Biden had acknowledged was the fact that the raging, disruptive genie had inhabited the bottle long before “the defeated former president” ever popped the cork. I wished Biden had followed up his gratifying excoriation of Trump and his supporters with a commitment to seeking out and eradicating the roots of the alienation, resentment and fury that so deeply divide our country.
Why – aside from the lying claims of a stolen election – had the rioters armed and armored themselves and traveled all the way to Washington?
It struck me that many of Trump’s supporters may not be entirely anti-democratic so much as acutely (or unconsciously) aware of our democracy’s imperfections: its oligarchic edge. Biden may have reminded us that each of our votes matters equally. But the one thing I may possibly share in common with the thugs who invaded the Capitol is the pained awareness that my voice is not nearly as audible in Washington as the voices of the chief executives of Pfizer, Delta and Target.
I thought of how, during the Great Depression, Eleanor Roosevelt toured the country, asking beleaguered Americans about their hardships and needs. How little of that seems to be happening now, when the consensus appears to be that our wounds can be healed remotely, by cajoling recalcitrant lawmakers into passing legislation with potential benefits that have so far eluded many Americans’ understanding.
Of all the horrific things that occurred on 6 January, among the most disturbing to me was Trump’s parting speech to the rioters when at long last he advised them to go home. “You’re very special,” he said. “We love you.”
Like any cult of personality, Trump’s impassioned support more closely resembles an (admittedly one-sided) affair of the heart than a reasoned political choice. And, in my experience, few lovers have fallen out of love after being informed that the beloved is an egomaniac and a liar.
Of course the best known cure for love is to find someone else, but what’s more useful, in the long run, is to understand why one became embroiled in a deceptive and unbalanced relationship, and to find a way of designing and inhabiting a brighter future. What I wished I’d heard in Biden’s speech was a persuasive vision of the more fulfilled and less tormented life that, we can only hope, awaits us in the event that the poisonous romance with violence and hatred sputters out – and is finally over.
Francine Prose is a novelist. Her latest book, The Vixen, was published in June