The institutions have stood firm. But the invasion of Congress on January 6 revealed the vulnerability of American democracy. From Beijing to Tehran, dictators and autocrats snicker at will.
He won’t be officially inducted until next week, but Joe Biden became President of the United States on Wednesday, January 6, mid-afternoon, when he spoke impromptu from his headquarters in Delaware. In the midst of chaos on Capitol Hill, hours after Donald Trump galvanized his supporters, encouraging them verbally to walk on the sanctuary of legislative power, again and again denouncing the results of a “stolen” election, belching against elected Republican officials who were about to validate them, the elected president embodied the legitimacy of the office and the continuity of democratic institutions. Moved and firm, in a few words, this septuagenarian politician, whose insipid verb and faded appearance were readily denounced, appropriated the presidential stature that his predecessor, under the opprobrium, had just shattered.
Five dead, two homemade bombs fortunately defused, violence and looting, paramilitary equipment abandoned in the precincts of Congress, around twenty arrests and an investigation which confirms the worst-case scenario: without anticipation on the part of the intelligence and security services. security, among the overheated militants, the ultras of all stripes, the white supremacists and the conspirators of various obediences, there were in number these organized militias which one had seen, weapons in hand, demonstrating against the sanitary measures, against the “Black Lives Matter” and who, this time, wanted to save America by seizing elected officials from both sides and Mike Pence, the vice-president. He had to be hanged since he had finally decided to do his duty by ratifying the results of the presidential election. Frightened, the Americans and all those in our countries who have always admired the vitality of their democracy, discover the state of decomposition of a populism with old ferments of which Donald Trump, until the sinking, embodies the drifts.
“Save America’s Soul”
Incitement to violence, insurrection, sedition or even attempted coup? How to qualify the behavior of a president in office who calls for the destruction of the institutions that he has sworn to protect? How to prevent him from harming during the few days which remain to him at the White House, transformed for four years in setting of reality TV, epicenter of this parallel world, riddled with lies, of “alternative facts” diffused on Twitter, weapon of massive penetration the use of which is now prohibited? The leaders of the Democratic Party want to use all the institutional resources to accelerate the departure of Trump and prevent him from running again. It is putting up against the wall elected Republican divided, anxious to spare the millions of voters who still believe in their idol, it is also running the risk of turning him into a martyr and complicating the task of a Joe Biden and a Kamala Harris who advocate reconciliation to “save America’s soul.” The challenge that awaits them is vertiginous. The pandemic, managed in a chaotic manner, politicized at the mercy of presidential swerves and swerves by regional elected officials, leaves a country panting, without a real social protection system, jobs that disappear behind stock market records and an exponential death curve. In such a context, how to repair the fractures of an overarmed society which no longer agrees on essential values, which no longer recognizes the legitimacy of elections, where facts are denied as soon as they do not correspond to prejudices, where the obsession with identity turns into a cultural war?
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Of course, the institutions have held firm, the separation of powers has been respected, the army has remained on the sidelines, and the strengths of the world’s leading power remain spectacular. But in depth, it is the representative system that has been shaken. From Beijing to Moscow and Tehran, dictators and autocrats are not mistaken, who laugh at will about this democracy which for so long wanted to be exceptional to the point of lecturing the world and imposing its values . Like ours. Yellow vests with illiberal impulses that cross European opinion, it is these common weaknesses that Emmanuel Macron obviously thought when he chose, in the middle of the night, an American flag flanking the French and European banners, to affirm at the television its determination “not to give in to the violence of a few” and its intact confidence in democracy, “this universal idea”.
Also read.Colin Powell no longer identifies as a Republican after the Capitol invasion
On January 20, in Washington, the outgoing president will not participate in the ritual of ceremonies which, with the support of the Bible, will mark the handover of powers to the newly elected. So much the better! cried Joe Biden. The day after the Capitol sack, Donald Trump maintained an important ceremony in his eyes: he awarded the medal of freedom, the highest American civilian honor, to three golfers.
“The war of stories”, by Christine Ockrent, ed. of The Observatory.
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