The reality-based wing of the Republican leadership must work with Biden
On Wednesday, Joe Biden will become the 46th US President, but he is inheriting a political landscape more destabilised than at any time in a century and, arguably, since the Civil War.
This unprecedented, although long-festering, national rupture, along with the coronavirus and economic crises, provide Mr Biden a rare contemporary opportunity to achieve historic greatness. No recent US president has confronted such existential national challenges.
Yet he must traverse an exceptionally volatile minefield of bitter disputes, mutual incomprehension and unanswered – possibly unanswerable – conundrums.
The paramount task, reforming and repairing the US political system, is probably unattainable in the context of present divisions. The creaky, sometimes barely functional and painfully anachronistic US political system has been exposed as vulnerable and ill-suited to modern democratic governance.
It is burdened with procedures and institutions that have become conducive to minority rule, legal vagaries that require honesty and good faith to function properly and the extreme difficulty of holding a president accountable. The guardrails haven’t shattered, but they are alarmingly rickety and brittle.
The past few weeks demonstrated how realistically, with the connivance of a few well-placed state officials and federal judges, an incumbent US president could usurp an election while technically acting within the letter of the law, albeit in bad faith.
While many necessary reforms are obvious, they mostly require a strong majority in the legislature to enact. So, they will probably have to wait.
Mr Biden’s domestic agenda was salvaged by the Georgia runoffs that gave his party the narrowest control of the Senate. But his more ambitious economic recovery plans, such as a massive infrastructure overhaul initiative, will likely require some Republican support. Recent experience suggests that even national emergencies cannot seem to secure bipartisan agreement.
The new president also faces a now solidly ultra-conservative Supreme Court poised to invalidate anything truly ambitious he secures.
Republicans will be guided by an increasingly bitter power struggle between diehard supporters of outgoing President Donald Trump and the traditional party leadership increasingly eager to get rid of him.
The deadly January 6 mob assault on Congress instigated by Mr Trump and which resulted in his immediate and bipartisan second impeachment by the House of Representatives has provided a golden opportunity for them.
Unlike with his first impeachment a year ago, this time enough Republican senators may well vote to convict Mr Trump, strip him of post-presidential amenities and ban him from holding federal office again. But it won’t be easy. Mr Trump has transformed large wings of his party into a kind of personality cult, as reflected by the 2020 Republican party “platform”, which merely pledged to follow his every lead.
Already his supporters are fighting back, attacking Congress from the outside, while inside it his House allies still trumpet the groundless myth of a “stolen election” and press to unseat Liz Cheney, a senior party member and critic of Mr Trump, from her position of leadership.
Mr Trump remains immensely popular with the party base. But in the aftermath of the attack on Congress, his general public popularity has plummeted to unheard of depths for any sitting president, a mere 29 per cent approval.
Logic suggests the “Make America Great Again” movement has finally run out of steam. But millions of Americans have subscribed to articles of faith like the “stolen election” myth and even the fantastical conspiracy theory QAnon. So perhaps not.
Democrats also face a festering internal struggle between left-wing progressives and Mr Biden’s centrists. It’s relatively subdued at the moment, especially compared to the Republican internecine vendetta, but that probably won’t last.
It’s widely recognised that the US is culturally and politically divided between coastal and urban liberal areas versus mainly interior and rural or exurban conservative ones. These Americans inhabit separate and conflicting information ecosystems that produce increasingly irreconcilable narratives and perceptions.
Mr Biden wants to begin healing this schism. He knows he can’t get Americans to agree on much, but he seeks to restore basic trust among compatriots and in national institutions, and to re-establish a set of commonly accepted baseline facts from which even sharp political disagreements can be reasonably contested.
Yet as long as powerful actors believe they benefit from propagating falsehoods intended to produce discord, and from perpetuating the dysfunctional political structures that stoke such bitterness, real healing may prove elusive.
Americans are approaching a national schism so dire – and deeply rooted in deceptions that have been yoked to genuine, deep-seated fears about demographic, cultural, economic and technological transformation – that some form of “truth and reconciliation” process may be required.
There are several restorative initiatives that could, hypothetically, be adopted. A major infrastructure project and other measures could bolster the middle class, especially outside major cities. A host of actions could reverse the unconscionable economic stratification between the super-rich and everyone else. Mandatory national service could act as a generational unity programme. But adopting any of these would be very difficult.
Reasserting the indispensability of truth is even more important, and yet far more daunting. Truth can be ineffectual when people fear reality. Emotionally satisfying lies become appealing, and eventually delusion a way of life.
Ultimately, irrationality triumphs and up becomes down – as on January 6 when a police officer was murdered in the name of “law and order” and Congress besieged by insurrectionary hordes chanting “USA”.
Truth must be shown to produce tangible benefits. Otherwise, seductive, poisonous lies will remain potent among the enraged and the fearful.
The reality-based wing of the Republican leadership must recognise that its only hope of prevailing against the blitzkrieg of unhinged lies besieging its party and country is to abandon obstructionism for now and to work with Mr Biden to demonstrate that truth can deliver significant results for most Americans.
Otherwise, the attacks on the election, the Constitution and Congress will be just the beginning.
After the attack on Congress, Mr Trump’s approval ratings fell to an unheard of 29 per cent for a sitting President