Will President Joe Biden succeed? Like many others, at home and abroad, I desperately hope so. But first we need to agree on what “success” means. It means, above all, restoring order to his country’s politics. That requires making the present direction of the Republican party politically untenable. Without that, hope of restoring democratic stability at home and a leading role for the US in the world may be in vain.
In his heart-lifting inaugural address last week, so different from the rantings over “American carnage” of his predecessor, Mr Biden declared: “We have learnt again that democracy is precious. Democracy is fragile. And at this hour, my friends, democracy has prevailed.” He was right, on all points.
Yet “this hour” is not forever. The forces that brought Donald Trump to power have not vanished. As Princeton University’s Jan-Werner Müller, an expert on populism, remarks, “Populists cleverer than Trump smother democracy slowly through legal and constitutional machinations.” Mr Trump may be gone. Trumpism is not. As the Indian writer Kapil Komireddi has noted, the fusion of big business with bigotry is potent. The US wealthy have certainly prospered. (See charts.)