I am beginning this essay on Inauguration Day, which by co-incidence happens this year to fall on the day when the nation honors the great civil rights leader Martin Luther King. King’s parents named their son after one of the world’s most famous protesters, who is often credited indeed with being the wellspring of the tremendous and consequential movement we call the Protestant Revolt or Reformation. This history is perhaps particularly relevant for us Americans, whose national origins are intimately connected with the activities of principled Christian protesters. In any event, one senses contradictory hopes and fears gripping the nation.
In many parts of our nation, including this one, a serious winter chill has descended. The current outdoor temperature is 18 F (about minus 8 Centigrade, or as the translations of Russian novels I read used to say, “fourteen degrees of frost”. The temperature will probably fall lower over the next two nights. The New York Times has given up on even trying to deliver our copy; they kindly sent me an email with the news. I had an odd experience, possibly relevant to the moment, in the middle of the night, around 3:00 a.m. When I went to bed snow was falling. When I arose briefly about 1 a.m. out of necessity, the snow had ceased, but I could see from my window that there were two or three inches. About an hour later, having returned to the arms of Morpheus, I became aware of faint scraping sounds from the patio region behind the house. My first reaction was that it must be an animal. If so, it was a very persistent one. In fact, it was a young Hispanic man, M. S., who does regular yard-work for us. He was removing snow from parts of the blue-stone patio. I later discovered that he had already also cleared the driveway, the street fronting, and the path from the street to the front door. The snow was not deep, and it was easily enough removed I suppose; but even that much shoveling would have tested me to the limit—if I could have done it at all. I deduce that his absurdly early appearance could be explained because he had several others on his list. He’s an entrepreneur, a go-getter.
From time to time I have friendly but superficial conversations with this young man, whose work ethic I admire. I think he may be an American citizen, though I don’t actually know. If a non-citizen, he is probably a “documented” one, but again I do not know. I do know that the idea that anyone would not want such a person in this country seems to me mad. I have been sufficiently unfortunate over the past several years to have several hospital visits, some with short hospitalizations. On the other hand, I have been fortunate enough to be near an excellent hospital offering excellent care. My experiences suggest to me that our much-vaunted medical services would probably come to a grinding halt without the often inglorious work done by dozens of people who look more or less like M. S. working in our heath facilities.
I was writing these desultory paragraphs while sort of watching the preliminaries to the presidential inauguration ceremony. It is now another day, and I move on to the Inauguration ceremony itself. I was rather moved by the semi-operatic rendition of the “Battle Hymn.” As a child I heard it frequently, sung by my three aunts and their mother, my paternal grandmother, the daughter of a Union veteran and an old-fashioned kind of American patriotic woman. It is not called a hymn for no reason. But it certainly is a sombre hymn. The coincidence that this year brought together the inauguration of a new president and the memorialization of Martin Luther King was striking and worthy of a second thought. The “beauty of the lilies” hardly describes what we for so many months have seen on our screens. Furthermore the poetic ideal of the efficacy of sacrificial death is of course paradoxical, puzzling. But as a call to something higher, nobler, better—it seems to me magnificent. I had allowed myself to at least entertain hopes for a more irenic presidential speech, but the hope was too tentative to be dashed when it failed realization. That made me a little sad, but what I thought was sadder was Mr. Biden’s plausible belief that he had to shower his kinfolk with preemptive pardons to protect them from a distempered revenge.
In the recent election, in which Donald Trump prevailed over Kamala Harris—an election in which we were repeatedly admonished that “democracy is on the ballot”—only about two thirds of eligible voters actually cast ballots. This was a higher proportion than in some earlier years, but hardly a demonstration that more voters than usual thought that democracy was on the ballot. Another way of saying this is that a third of eligible voters did not vote. The total popular vote, though unambiguously in Mr. Trump’s favor, was not a landslide. It was pretty close. In the terms of election criteria established by the Constitution—electors distributed among the individual states—Trump’s victory was more resounding. But the President is the president of all the states, and all the people in them—a fact that he has from time to time acknowledged. He may need frequent reminders. He apparently spent the afternoon issuing directives, at least one of which (concerning birthright citizenship) appears to my unlawyerly eye illegal.
Much of the world, including parts of our own land, is under duress. But amidst all the troubles there are reasonable hopes and real opportunities. The American president—and I mean whoever holds the office of the presidency—faces truly awesome challenges and responsibilities. Our democracy operates through professional politicians not philosopher-kings. Once in a while, almost accidentally, we get something close. Abraham Lincoln could say and mean “with malice toward none, with charity for all.” That “all” conspicuously included those who had shattered the republic and made war against it. You might say they had weaponized the weapons system.
We cannot hope for another Lincoln just now, but we can hope that what needs to be checked will be checked and what needs to be balanced, balanced. Presidents have not infrequently been told they cannot do things they want to do. American presidents have over the years tried to claim and exercise more and more power. Schlesinger’s The Imperial Presidency dates from 1973, from the time of Nixon. Well before that, Franklin Roosevelt spent a good deal of time in his first term being told by the Supreme Court that this, that, or the other of his desires was unconstitutional. That is why he proposed, unsuccessfully as it turned out, expanding (or as others called it packing) the court’s membership in order to achieve an accommodating majority. The idea was much more recently floated by various Democrats, and is likely to reappear again. In the meantime, the law on how we make laws is this: Congress proposes legislation, requiring the agreement of both houses; the proposed legislation is then either agreed to by the president, who must sign it, or rejected (vetoed) by him/her. A presidential veto can be overcome by a super majority of two thirds in both houses of Congress. My real fear is that Mr. Trump’s cavalier executive order doing away with birthright citizenship is based less in tyrannical appetite than in ignorance. I fear he may not have known such citizenship is established by the Constitution, but perhaps he does by now.
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