Biden recalls the beauty of America’s ideals

Michael A. Lindenberger says the inaugural speech sought to give back a bit of the idealism we’ve lost over the past four years.

Strolling through the U.S. Capitol on some errand or another a few years back, I came across a stout bust of Winston Churchill, one of scores of sculptures in those majestic halls. Churchill stared straight ahead with his famously rotund and scowling face and on a lark, I did my best bulldog impression and took a selfie with my twin.

It was a lighthearted moment in what was usually a solemn experience traipsing through those long corridors during my time as a Washington correspondent.

Over time, though, I came to marvel and deeply appreciate the beauty not just of the Capitol but throughout our nation’s capital city.

I’d often take the bus to work, leaving from U Street, and roll down 16th Street the dozen-plus blocks to Lafayette Square, and then on foot past the White House and Treasury building, with its statue of Alexander Hamilton. In the spring there would be flowers, including cherry blossoms, and in the fall the ancient trees near the White House would shed their brilliance, like wise men distributing gifts.

In one moment, I’d pass a statue of a sandal-footed Gandhi, and in another walk by statues honoring Simon Bolivar, Albert Einstein or Thurgood Marshall.

Or, riding the escalator up from the

DuPont Circle Metro stop, I’d be gobsmacked for the 100th time by Walt Whitman’s recollection of bedside vigils as he tended the Union wounded, etched in the wall: ‘I sit by the restless all the dark night — some are so young; some suffer so much — I recall the experience sweet and sad.”

These moments brought to mind how beautiful a collection of ideas and better instincts this nation really is. It’s what F. Scott Fitzgerald was after, in the closing lines of “The Great Gatsby.” It’s what we all feel when we recall the sacrifices so many have made in our long history.

As I watched Joe Biden take the oath of office, these memories came back bittersweet. The flags on the Mall were inspiring, but also reminders of the missing crowds. In their place, thousands of soldiers were doing the necessary but dispiriting work of keeping the peace. Biden’s speech gave back to me — and maybe to all of us — a bit of the idealism we’ve lost over the past four years. But nothing could shake the grimness of the moment, this “winter of peril” as he called it.

Four years ago, President Donald Trump delivered a speech that forecast the changes to America he’d sow. We’ve become darker, smaller and less idealistic. He promised the world that America

would judge every decision by what was in it for us, casting aside any notion advanced by his predecessors that this nation and its people — what Lincoln called in an 1862 message to Congress, “the last best hope of Earth” — stood for something larger than ourselves.

How distant then seemed the language of President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural, his talk of the torch having passed and a pledge to “bear any burden” in service of freedom. This distance grew to a chasm by the end of Trump’s term, when the ugly images of the Capitol under attack were seared into our minds.

The sight of those soldiers patrolling the streets around the Mall only deepened the disconnect between Kennedy’s idealism and the relentlessly banal and transactional feel of the Trump era.

Biden has pledged to bring us out of the valley of despair. And I applaud the effort. Will it work? We can’t know.

Lincoln is more famous for his second inaugural — it’s engraved on his memorial after all — but his speech in 1861 feels more appropriate now. Civil war, he told Americans, lay in their hands alone, and with it the future of our nation.

“We are not enemies, but friends,” he implored his countrymen. “We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

Beautiful words, and heartfelt. But the better angels did not prevail. We can only hope and pray that we as a people do better than our forebears did so long ago.