Will Biden’s ‘whole soul’ be enough to heal America?

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There were many touching moments during the Inauguration Day festivities in Washington, from the unscripted giddiness of Vice-President Kamala Harris after being sworn in as the first woman and the first woman of colour to hold that office, to President Joe Biden’s first photo op from the Oval Office, performing a job he had long coveted and which, at 78, he could finally call his own.

Perhaps the most reassuring moment of the day came, however, when Mr. Biden and First Lady Jill Biden joined Republican Senator Roy Blunt in the Capitol Rotunda for the traditional offering of gifts from Congress. As during previous inaugurations, the event included the hanging of a painting in the rotunda to mark the new President’s arrival. With the help of Dr. Biden, Mr. Blunt had chosen Robert S. Duncanson’s 1859 Landscape with Rainbow – on loan from the Smithsonian American Art Museum – to symbolize the promise of Mr. Biden’s presidency.

On the eve of the U.S. Civil War, Duncanson, a free Black man, chose to represent the United States as a kind of utopia – the rainbow says it all – despite the divisions that then threatened to destroy the union. “While he faced lots of challenges, he was obviously optimistic, even in 1859, about America,” Mr. Blunt said, calling the rainbow “always a good sign” for a new president.

Mr. Blunt omitted the part about Duncanson fleeing to Montreal in 1863, where he was welcomed with open arms by a fledgling artistic community. According to art historian Adam Lauder, Duncanson’s two-year stint in the city changed “the course of Canadian art.” His “atmospheric perspective would come to dominate a long line of Canadian landscape paintings produced in his wake, culminating in the romantic vistas of the Group of Seven,” Mr. Lauder wrote in Canadian Art magazine last fall.

Several of Duncanson’s paintings of local landscapes hang in the National Gallery of Canada and in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, serving as a reminder that the histories of Canada and the United States were as inextricably linked then as they are now. Just as Canada had a stake in the outcome of the U.S. Civil War, it has a stake today in the outcome of a Biden presidency.

And so, like many Canadians, I watched Mr. Biden’s inauguration with a mix of relief and apprehension. Relief at seeing the back of Donald Trump, whose rancour-filled four years in the White House left us fearful for our neighbour’s sanity. Mr. Biden’s calming influence, unparalleled experience and fundamental decency are a balm on our frayed nerves.

Yet, listening to Mr. Biden’s inaugural address, I could not help but wonder whether his plea to turn down the volume and the vitriol of political debate in the social media age even registered with the members of The Squad and their millions of Twitter followers. “Politics does not have to be a raging fire destroying everything in its path,” Mr. Biden said. “Every disagreement doesn’t have to be a cause for total war.”

Tell that to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, The Squad’s spiritual leader. On Monday, after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement tweeted in honour of Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Dr. King’s “message of hope, justice and equality,” the Democratic congresswoman fired back: “Abolish ICE.”

In his speech, efficient as it was, Mr. Biden rightly identified the sinister forces – “racism, nativism, fear, demonization” – that have been a constant throughout American history and which, just two weeks ago, were embodied by the mob that stormed the Capitol to thwart the certification of his own election as President. But it is not clear that those forces constitute the biggest threat to Mr. Biden’s presidency. The fringe elements that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 have been properly discredited and discombobulated since that uprising. Without minimizing the terrorist menace they pose, the uprisings served to expose their amateurism.

Republican leaders in Congress desperately seeking to rehitch their party’s wagon to the mainstream of U.S. politics will not give Mr. Biden nearly as hard a time as AOC and her progressive allies in the Democratic Party, who share with Mr. Trump’s supporters a desire to break the furniture. For The Squad and the MAGA crowd alike, nothing forged in compromise has any redeeming value.

Mr. Biden is a temperamental moderate who believes in compromise. His America is the America of Duncanson’s painting, an idyllic land where rainbows come out after every storm. Like Abraham Lincoln, who sought to reunite a deeply divided country at the end of the Civil War, his “whole soul is in it.” I am not sure if that makes him exactly the right man for the moment or hopelessly out of his element. For now, I’m going with the former.

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