Joe Biden’s Love Letter to the Truth

The new President tried something different: levelling with the American people.

By Susan B. Glasser @ NewYorker.com, Jan. 20

Words matter. Just two weeks ago, Donald Trump’s words—his lies—were powerful enough to send a crazed mob into the Capitol, seeking to overturn the democratic will of the American electorate. Shortly before noon on Wednesday, when Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., was sworn in as the forty-sixth President of the United States, he offered a very different vision of the power of language to remake political reality. His bet was that, if words can divide us, they can bring us together, too. Biden spoke of unity, of national reconciliation, and also—and perhaps most important of all—of the need for leaders “to defend the truth and defeat the lies.”

Only after four years of the Trump Presidency would the mention of “truth” in an Inaugural Address become an applause line. But we are where we are. The country has had so much lying. Much will be made of Biden’s plea to “end this uncivil war,” and of his stirring language about democracy prevailing. But it was his love letter to the role of truth in a free society that rang loudest to me during his twenty-minute speech, which took place under a sunny Washington sky, amid a crisis like no other in our modern history.

Biden did not shrink from the unpleasant facts of the moment; he embraced them. “We must reject the culture,” he said, “in which facts themselves are manipulated and even manufactured.” He did not say Trump’s name; he did not need to. The contrast was all there. Unlike his predecessor, Biden began his tenure by levelling with the American people. He spoke of a “winter of peril,” as well as one of “significant possibilities,” that awaits America, and bluntly said what Trump never could: that as many Americans have now died in the pandemic as in all of the Second World War, and that we must mourn them. He spoke of the threat of “white supremacy”—surely a first in an Inaugural Address—and also pledged to vanquish this new “domestic terrorism.” He spoke of jobs lost and racial injustice. This, after the past four years, is something new and important in and of itself—a strategy of truth-telling, not truth-denying. The road to reconciliation, if there is such a road, must run through it.

Will those words of truth carry the same political force as the Trump insults and epithets, conspiracy theories and falsehoods, that so ripped the country apart for the past four years? Wednesday was not a day for answering that question, or even for dwelling too much on it. After Trump, it was enough that this Inaugural celebration was happening at all, right there in the open air on the West Front of the Capitol, for all the world to see. Biden’s mere presence where pro-Trump rioters had so recently smashed and looted was both a victory for American democracy and a devastating rebuke of his disgraced predecessor.

Inauguration Day began, as we knew it would, with the last few Trumpian outrages:  [....]

dupe of what I just posted elsewhere, on purpose: