10 The New York Review

sideshow or a distraction, but rather
as the foundational act for the new
regime. Everybody knew that Trump
would not be convicted because his
party remains, well, his party. But this
did not make the trial meaningless. On
the contrary, it functioned superbly as
an act of definition. It was, in effect,
“for the record,” but that record is a
vividly awful enactment of what Lin-
coln’s “rule of a minority, as a perma-
nent arrangement,” looks like in the
flesh—and sounds like to the ear. When
the lead House impeachment manager,
Jamie Raskin, spoke of “a sound I will
never forget: the sound of pounding
on the door like a battering ram,” he
was composing the real overture to
the Biden presidency. That pounding
on the door is the bassline over which
the president must write his own song.
It should not be muted or muffled by
false amity or forgotten for the sake of
unachievable harmony.
But to insist on the crudeness of what
the GOP has become is not a merely neg-
ative proposition. The great opportu-
nity for the new administration is to aim
for basic decency, not just as an ethic of
conduct, but as a governing idea. Trump
made America an indecent proposal
and much of the country accepted (and
still accepts) it. Biden must—and can—
make a counteroffer of decency, not
only in public life but in the lives of all
citizens. Decency is civil and evidence-
based discourse. But it is also access
to health care and education. It is true
equality under the rule of law. It is a liv-
ing wage and a habitable environment.
Many commentators have reason-
ably compared Biden’s task now to that
of Franklin Delano Roosevelt when he

assumed office in 1933. There is one

respect, though, in which Biden’s job is

conceptually more difficult than FDR’s.

In 1933 there was one all- consuming

crisis: the Great Depression. The pres-

ident could tell a single story of rescue

and recovery. At Biden’s inauguration,

he named no fewer than six “cascading

crises of our era”: the pandemic, climate

change, gross economic inequality, ra-

cial injustice, the decline in America’s

global standing, and the Trumpian at-

tack on truth and democracy.

He was undoubtedly right to do so.

The problem, though, is that a cascade

of crises threatens to wash away any

unifying narrative. To fight on so many

fronts is to risk the loss of any clear

idea of what the fight is about. One sign

of this trouble was the somewhat con-

tradictory signals Biden sent about the

emotion that Trump both generated

and exploited: fear. On the one hand,

Biden acknowledged its dominance in

the contemporary American psyche: “I

understand that many Americans view

the future with some fear and trepida-

tion.... I get it.” On the other hand, he

promised to “write an American story

of hope, not fear.” There is a disjunction

here. If so many Americans are prey to

trepidation, is it enough to tell them a

story about aspiration? It is necessary,

rather, to enter the dark, to confront

fear and give it a new political meaning.

Biden, shadowed as he is by grief

and tragedy, seems uniquely placed

to do this.^2 He was, as Obama’s vice-

president, the handmaiden to Hope

personified. But when he accepted the

Presidential Medal of Freedom from

Obama at the end of their period in of-

fice in January 2017, he did not reach

for his favorite Seamus Heaney quote

about hope and history rhyming. He

used another one, from Heaney’s

“From the Republic of Conscience”:

“You carried your own burden and very

soon/your symptoms of creeping privi-

lege disappeared.” It would have been

interesting just then, a week before the

inauguration of Donald Trump, to have

continued on to these lines:

At their inauguration, public

leaders

must swear to uphold unwritten

law and weep

to atone for their presumption to

hold office.

Biden has carried his burdens of mourn-

ing and, even if he did not actually weep

at his inauguration, he did speak to and

for a nation then reeling from some

400,000 deaths from Covid- 19. He also

began to tell Americans the truth that

Trump had refused to articulate or act

on—that they damn well ought to be

afraid of the coronavirus.

Democrats, contrary to the advice of

FDR, have tended to be afraid of fear

itself, to assume that, as a collective

emotion, it favors the reactionaries.

Hence the prophylactic of hope. But

the uses of fear in political life are not

necessarily negative. It was the terror of

what happened to democracy in much

of the Western world in the 1930s that

produced the social democratic consen-

sus of the postwar decades. It was the

dread of communism that forced capi-

talism to control its own rapacity and

accept that at least a large proportion of

the wealth it produced must be shared.

The disappearance of that threat al-

lowed these imperatives to evaporate.

It is this kind of alarm bell that Biden

needs to keep ringing. Without an ur-

gent anxiety about the near- death of

the American republic, about the pan-

demic, about the terrors of climate

change, about the insupportable nature

of racial injustice, about the incompat-

ibility of gross inequality and democ-

racy, there can be no hope. He has to

adjust the ratio of threat to promise.

The latter word, both as noun and verb,

has given Biden the titles of two books:

Promises to Keep and Promise Me,

Dad. But the pledge is weak without

the warning. The message that needs to

be heard is not about what his adminis-

tration would like to do for Americans,

but about what it must achieve because

the alternative is self- destruction.

Democrats like to think that they win

when they shift public discourse from

darkness to light. This is sometimes

true. History suggests, though, that

much more often, they win when every

sentence they speak has an implicit “or

else” at the end. Change happens when

the cost of continuity outweighs the

risk of transformation.

Trumpism—its apotheosis on Janu-

ary 6 and its continuing hold over the

GOP—has altered this calculation deci-

sively. It has conjured, before our eyes,

America’s “or else.” What the footage

exhibited at Trump’s trial so terrifyingly

showed is not just a very recent past but

a highly plausible future. Anarchy and

despotism are not vague possibilities.

They are the default option if society

and the economy stay as they are.

The opposite of fear is not really hope.

It is security. The challenge for Biden is

that this is a concept Republicans have

owned. Yet he has the chance to take

it from them. The new administration

can attack them at their strongest point.

There is a way of bringing Biden’s nat-

ural emollience together with the need

for a bold political departure—by at

once embracing and redefining safety.

Between them, the events of January

6 and the terrible toll of the pandemic

have made the Republicans dangerous

to both law and life. This opens the path

to a paradoxical progressive program:

radical reassurance. The only path to

security lies through large- scale change.

This opportunity arises from a

deeper history than that of Trumpism.

Postwar American conservatism, like

its counterparts in Europe, understood

security as having five dimensions:

“national security,” “law and order,”

religious and cultural continuity, eco-

nomic stability for most workers, and

regulation for safer products and a less

dangerous environment. The last two

of these were just as important as the

others. Perhaps more new regulation

was imposed on the American econ-

omy under Richard Nixon than at any

time since the New Deal, from a raft

of environmental laws to income guar-

antees for elderly and disabled citizens

to large increases in Social Security,

Medicare, and Medicaid.

To put it crudely, the story of Amer-

ican conservatism since the 1980s is

the narrowing of the idea of security

by stripping away these last two di-

mensions and upping the ante on the

other three. Two ways of reassuring cit-

izens—giving them a safe environment

and reducing the risk of falling into

poverty—were ditched. To compen-

sate, national security—from Ronald

Reagan’s dirty wars to the invasions

of Iraq and Afghanistan to the “war

on terror”—was fully weaponized as a

partisan property; law and order (aka

“the war on drugs”) was deployed as a

proxy for racial oppression; religious

reaction was embraced. Many Dem-

ocrats responded by accepting—and

trying to compete on—these terms: we

can be more hawkish, we can do mass

incarceration. The only ground on

which they would fight was that of cul-

ture and the place of religion in politics.

That era is over. Starting wars is not

an easy option when both the cold war

and the period that followed it of un-

challenged American hegemony are in

the past. Even Trump understood this.

Law and order as a flag of convenience

for systematic racism still has a potent

appeal, but it is fiercely contested. The

only real offer that the right has on se-

curity is the promise of an imagined

religious and cultural stability, with

all the racial and nativist overtones of

“culture.” Having given up on strength-

ening the economic safety net and de-

clared, under Trump, open season on

environmental regulation, just one of

the five dimensions of security remains

at the core of right- wing politics.

Such is Biden’s chance: to occupy this

abandoned territory by both reclaim-

ing and redefining each of these dimen-

sions—and by adding another one. The

new aspect is the safety of democracy

itself, threatened by a mass movement

that, as Trump put it after his acquittal,

“has only just begun.” As a good start,

national security is already being radi-

cally reshaped by the new administra-

tion. Biden quickly issued an executive

(^2) See my “The Designated Mourner” in
these pages, January 16, 2020.
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