On this Inauguration Day, there are three good articles I recommend, each dealing with a slightly different aspect of our nation:
Andrew Busch has an article in The Clairmont Review of Books entitled Why Trump Lost….but almost won. It is an unusually even-handed analysis of the election in this age of extreme partisanship, and worth reading, because this election is not the end of the story. The nation’s growing inequality, among other things, has created a large class of voters who are in revolt against the ruling political establishment, and who may well bring us other unsettling presidents in the future if the Biden administration can’t give them some hope in the next four years.
Ben Domenech, writing in The Federalist, has a piece worth reading: The Old Order Returns. Biden’s administration is “the old order” not only in the sense of the return of Obama-era players, but more significantly in the sense that all the major political leaders in both parties, starting with Biden, are OLD, very old. And he asks whether this is a strength, or instead a measure of the weakness in the nation’s political system. A good question, worth thinking about.
Finally, Edwin Hagenstein, writing in RealClearBooks, makes the case that America Urgently Needs Civic Renewal. It’s not just the growing inequality that is driving our national unrest, it is also a change in the culture, in which the concept of civic responsibility has been lost, indeed has become something rather quaint and outmoded. President Kennedy’s admonition, “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country” comes to mind here, along with the fact that civics is no longer taught in most schools, and we are paying the price for that oversight.
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