32 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER16, 2020
Trump-Biden debates, an opera-buffa
display that was relieved only when
Biden turned to the camera and be-
seeched the public, with an expression
usually reserved for hostage videos. Con-
fined to two-minute statements, with
frequent interruptions, the debates ad-
dressed only narrow aspects of the pres-
ent distress. There was no mention of
Trump’s declaring “when the looting
starts, the shooting starts,” his invention
of an “Obamagate” conspiracy, his taunt-
ing women of color in Congress (“Send
them back”), or his funnelling federal
money into his golf courses and ho-
tels—much less his expansion of oil-
drilling rights in Alaska or his failure
to address school massacres. After the
candidates’ second debate, in which
Trump was subdued by the moderator’s
ability to cut off his microphone, Chris
Lehane, a Democratic political consul-
tant, conceded that it was “not exactly
Lincoln-Douglas.” He told the Times,
“One guy showed he was not a thug for
about seventy-five minutes out of ninety
minutes. And the other guy showed he
was not senile.”
It’s not clear that many people would
have been susceptible to persuasion.
At the Fund for Peace, a think tank in
Washington, researchers ranked the po-
litical “cohesion” of various countries be-
tween 2008 and 2018; they measured the
entrenchment of factions, trust in the
security forces, and the level of popular
discontent. The United States recorded
the largest drop in cohesion among any
of the countries studied, including Libya,
Mali, and Bahrain. In 2009, Barack
Obama’s first year in office, the number
of anti-government “patriot” groups
more than tripled, according to the
Southern Poverty Law Center. Since
2001, right-wing terrorists have killed
more people in America than Islamic
extremists have. In a paper presented
two years ago, the political scientists
Nathan Kalmoe and Lilliana Mason
found that fifteen per cent of Republi-
cans and twenty per cent of Democrats
believed that the U.S. would be better
off if large numbers of the opposing
party “just died.”
For nearly four years, Trump has gov-
erned in the register of force. “You have
to dominate,” he told state governors in
June, as protests expanded in the wake
of George Floyd’s killing. “Most of you
are weak.” In the run-up to the election,
Republican leaders in Congress aban-
doned even the pretense of restraint,
in pursuit of enshrining minoritarian
rule by a party that is older and whiter
than the country at large. They hustled
a conservative Supreme Court nomi-
nee through confirmation at breakneck
speed, filed scores of suits to bar the
casting or the counting of ballots, and
curtailed a census that would record
growing populations in diverse, Dem-
ocratic-leaning areas. It was a brazen
acknowledgment that, without a signifi-
cant intervention, Trump lacked the
public support to remain President. Days
before the election, a caravan of trucks
and cars surrounded a Biden campaign
bus on a Texas highway, trying to run
it off the road. Trump tweeted, “These
patriots did nothing wrong.”
Larry Diamond, a political scientist
at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and a
former adviser to the Coalition Pro-
visional Authority, in Iraq, told me,
“There’s no other way to say this: the
Republican Party, with notably few ex-
ceptions, has become a party of semi-
loyalty to democracy. If you want to
stop this, the answer is very simple. The
Republican politicians who know bet-
ter, in the House, the Senate, and the
governorships, have to speak up. If they
don’t put the preservation of democ-
racy and civility over their own politi-
cal careers, we’re going to keep sliding
down this path.”
As Americans confront the uncer-
tainty of the next four years, it’s not
clear if the tradition of force or of rea-
son is ascendant. Some theorists and
philosophers are optimistic, beginning
to map out plans to revive social cohe-
sion and common purpose. Others fear
that the cleavages will only widen, until
Americans reckon with a culture of po-
litical warfare that comes ever closer to
actual combat.F
rom the beginning, the people
who built America were seeking
to improve on “what kings and popes
had decreed,” the Stanford historian
Caroline Winterer wrote in “American
Enlightenments,” from 2016. “Wield-
ing the gleaming razor of human rea-
son, sharpened by empirical evidence,
common sense, and withering sarcasm,
they would slash away at traditions thatrested on nothing but the dust of con-
vention and privilege.”
Early Americans formed literary sa-
lons, subscription libraries, and scien-
tific societies, animated by the spirit of
the Enlightenment. Benjamin Franklin
gathered what he called “ingenious Ac-
quaintances” into a “Club for mutual
Improvement.” Known as the Junto, it
was devoted to rigor, training, and the
spread of the printed word, an ethic that
the club called “Reason’s eye.”
By the mid-nineteenth century, the
country was in the midst of a vibrant
literary outpouring. In Washington,
orators such as Henry Clay and Daniel
Webster gained influence through
speeches that drew huge crowds. “Elo-
quence, in this empire, is power,” a jour-
nalist observed. A generation of writers
and politicians—Margaret Fuller, Eliz-
abeth Peabody, Frederick Douglass, Walt
Whitman—produced impassioned writ-
ings and speeches that they hoped would
reform the young Republic, giving rise
to what the scholar James Perrin War-
ren later called a “culture of eloquence.”
On the lyceum circuit, they travelled
from town to town, an adult-education
campaign offering lectures on everything
from physical exercise to the moral cri-
sis of slavery. Alfred Bunn, an English-
man visiting in 1853, said that it was “a
matter of wonderment” to see “the over-
tired artisan, the worn-out factory girl”
rush from work to “the hot atmosphere
of a crowded lecture room.” Even as the
country slid toward the Civil War, the
lectures continued, rooted in the belief
in what Warren called “the word as a
means toward reform.”
At the same time, America was em-
barking on a surge of political violence,
much of it directed at Black people, im-
migrants, Native Americans, and abo-
litionists. Between the eighteen-thirties
and the outbreak of war, there were at
least thirty-five major riots in the North-
east. One of them began in June, 1857,
when three nativist gangs—the Chun-
kers, the Rip-Raps, and the Plug Ug-
lies—attacked Catholic immigrants in
Washington, D.C., as they tried to cast
ballots. The U.S. Marines, called in to
quell the unrest, ended up responsible
for a number of deaths.
But the most ominous sign for the
Republic was the growing brutality
among some of the country’s most pow-