Has The United States Become Ungovernable?

[Ladybbird]

Joe Biden One Year On: Has The United States Become Ungovernable?

One of Joe Biden's central election campaign themes was restoring unity to an angry and divided nation caused by Trump.


Twelve months after assuming office, things aren't any better

BBC 20 JAN 2022.









Long before the sun had risen over the dome of the US Capitol on the day that Joe Biden was sworn in as president, technicians on the inaugural platform tested the teleprompter he would later read from by scrolling through America's most celebrated sermon:


"Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure."




When I first saw the lines of the Gettysburg Address on those screens in front of the presidential podium, I thought it must be some kind of sick joke.

However, the words of Abraham Lincoln could hardly be described as being out of place.

Washington, after all, looked that morning like a military encampment.


Troops had slept overnight in the corridors of Congress to protect it from seditionists, just as their forebears had done in Lincoln's day. The scaffolding of the inaugural platform had been used only two weeks before as a staging post for the January 6th insurrection. The Confederate flag had even been held aloft in the halls of US power, as American once again fought American.

So the question posed by the country's 16th president seemed especially pertinent as the 46th occupant of the office prepared to assume power - could this country long endure?


Rather than speaking that day of national renewal, a platitudinous staple of presidential inaugurals, Joe Biden focused on national reunification. And though it was three words from his address that instantly entered the history books, "democracy has prevailed," it was three short sentences that set out his presidential mission statement: "Bringing America together. Uniting our people. And uniting our nation."

A year on, however, that plea for national unity sounds more like magical thinking. Far from coming together, the United States is in an even more perilous state of disunion. Often it feels as if the only thing that unites the nation is mutual loathing. America seems to be engaged in a forever war with itself.

Over the past 12 months, tensions have escalated over longstanding points of divergence, such as abortion rights. The country has found new things to argue about, such as vaccine mandates. It has also discovered new ways of fighting old battles. The conflict over critical race theory, the latest front in the country's left-right culture wars, is a novel way of carrying on the centuries-old debate over the legacy of slavery and segregation.


During the past year, moments with the potential to help bridge divides, namely the conviction of Derek Chauvin, the former police officer who murdered George Floyd, have been supplanted by events that ended up hardening divisions.

The trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenager acquitted of murder after shooting dead two men during racial unrest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, was an obvious case in point.