There’s a lot to worry about when you look at a potential Joe Biden presidential candidacy. The gaffes, the age, the lack of enthusiasm from the base. And he’s coming from a long way back, with Bernie Sanders still charging in many Super Tuesday states. But Biden’s comprehensive victory in North Carolina puts him back in the race and what he said after the win should make Americans of all persuasions sit up and take notice.
He dared to speak the message that dare not speak its name at the moment in much of the Democratic base. The message of unity. The message of healing America.
There will be a lot of rebuild after the Trump presidency, however long it lasts. Many of those involve the rights and respect Trump has stripped from those he has abused and mocked. But at the heart of the post-Trump mission will be to find a way of bringing a polarised citizenry back together. If the next president does not get that, then the state of the union could be very perilous indeed.
President Barack Obama used to talk not about red states and blue states, but the United States. He talked about a purple where people can come together.
Tonight I was at a lecture by American historian Ron White, a best-selling biographer of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln was president when the US was its most divided. It wasn’t just insults Americans were firing off at each other, but cannon balls. They weren’t just sticking them with unkind words, but bayonets.
Around three-quarters of a million people died in the US civil war and Lincoln entering his second term looked like he would have the job of trying to bring war-torn states back together. His second inauguration speech is a masterpiece of magnanimity.
Lincoln had the grace to speak of his enemies in the South as victims too. He acknowledged all sought to avert war, both sides deprecated it. Both sides, he said, read the same bible and invoked the same God to aid them in their fight.
He is strong enough to still declare ‘American slavery’ (not just Southern slavery) a sin and to say one side wanted to make war while the other (his) only was forced to accept it.
But he declared those famous words at the end, that Americans should strive “with malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right… to bind up the nation’s wounds” to achieve a lasting peace.
Lincoln’s quality of leadership involved his ability to bring together rivals and show empathy and inclusion. Yet that’s been a rare sight from Democrat candidates this season. Yes, it would be wrong to not be angry in this mockery of a Trump era, but to indulge that anger is to avoid the difficult task of true leadership. Yet the likes of Sanders and Warren seem to suggest that an administration they led would be just as unforgiving of its opponents as Trump has been of his. No, I’m not creating some false equivalence; there are many, many distinguishing factors. But their campaigns feel like a swing from one partisan, non-negotiable world view to another. I cannot see how that ends well for America and does continue the polarisation path it is already on.
So I’ve been looking for examples of leadership that reflect the better angels of the likes of Lincoln and Obama. And while I’m yet to be convinced, I was impressed with what I hard from Biden tonight. Check this out:
“Winning means uniting America not sowing more division and anger. It means not only fighting but healing the country. We have to beat Donald Trump and the Republican Party, but here’s the deal; we can’t become like them. We can’t become more like. We can’t have a never-ending war.”
It might not feel as satisfying as getting one over on Trump and a Republican Party (the party of Lincoln!) that has sold its soul to the egomania and self-interests of a dangerous president. But these are the words of magnanimity that America will need to hear over the next five years, lest the whole experiment in democracy not become irrevocably damaged.