Joe Biden began his presidency on Wednesday with the same animating philosophy that guided his campaign: The center can hold.
That’s a big wager. American society is more brittle now than it has been in years. It is unequal, unhealthy and politically radicalized. A pandemic is raging nearly unchecked. The economy is in tatters. The climate is in crisis. Residents of red and blue America can’t even agree on the reality before their eyes, let alone demarcate the common ground they share.
Mr. Biden, now the 46th president, acknowledged all that in his Inaugural Address, calling for comity. “Let’s begin to listen to one another again, hear one another, see one another,” he said. “Show respect to one another. Politics doesn’t have to be a raging fire, destroying everything in its path. Every disagreement doesn’t have to be a cause for total war, and we must reject the culture in which facts themselves are manipulated and even manufactured.”
It was a sanguine message to deliver from the steps of the U.S. Capitol, two weeks to the day after the building was sacked by a mob trying to overturn the results of the election. Because of the continued threat of violence, tens of thousands of National Guard troops were on hand Wednesday to provide security for a crowd that was sparse because of the coronavirus contagion.
Mr. Biden spoke to the bleak gravity of the moment, noting that democracy is as precious as it is fragile. “Without unity, there is no peace,” Mr. Biden said, “only bitterness and fury, no progress, only exhausting outrage. No nation, only a state of chaos.”
The past four years have been nothing if not exhausting and chaotic. Donald Trump began his term from the same rostrum in 2017, decrying the “American carnage” caused by urban poverty, lost manufacturing jobs, drugs and crime. After four years of Mr. Trump waging ceaseless battle against his political opponents, the country is still shot through with all those maladies and is even more unmoored from the political traditions that once bound it together.
In his last act as president, Mr. Trump and the first lady flew to Florida rather than share the stage with Mr. Biden and participate in the pageantry of a peaceful transition of power. But there was the faintest flicker of decency. “I wish the new administration great luck and great success,” Mr. Trump told supporters who watched his departure from Joint Base Andrews. “I think they’ll have great success. They have the foundation to do something really spectacular.”
Inaugurations are, by their nature, the closing of one chapter in the nation’s story and the beginning of another. Now at the helm of the executive branch, along with Kamala Harris — the country’s first female vice president, first Black vice president and first Asian-American vice president — Mr. Biden has a chance to test the firmness of common ground. For the new president and the nation to succeed, there must be enough like-minded leaders willing to put prosperity over party and the good of the nation above all else.
Mr. Biden’s call for unity was not a demand that Americans agree, but rather that they live in mutual tolerance, recommitted to the democratic process and to peacefully adjudicate their differences until the next inauguration. All Americans should be able to agree on that.
— The New York Times
