Biden Inauguration amid Trump COVID Failure could End Republican Era of Bashing Government

It was Inauguration Day and a young woman in Washington, D.C., looked up at snipers stationed on rooftops. “The whisper went round that they had received orders to shoot at any one crowding toward” the president-elect, wrote Julia Taft Bayne. Carl Schurz, a supporter of the new president, said he hoped the departing president, a “man who had done more than any other to degrade and demoralize the National Government and to encourage the rebellion,” would now “retire to an unhonored obscurity.”

The year was 1861. The person to be inaugurated was Abraham Lincoln. The dishonored former president who had spent the past year looking idly on while the nation slid into crisis was James Buchanan, a defender of the centuries-old system of slavery and white supremacy that the new president and his vision of a more proactive federal government seemed to threaten. 

Eight score years later, the nation will witness an equally tense and unusual inauguration ceremony. It comes 14 days after a violent mob spurred on by President Donald Trump’s words stormed the U.S. Capitol to prevent the peaceful transition of power.

Lincoln’s inauguration reverberates today not only because it took place under heightened security and in the context of a domestic insurrection carried out by people waving Confederate flags, but also because it signaled an inflection point in U.S. history. It was a moment when citizens began looking to the federal government to use its power to bring the nation’s founding ideals into line with social realities that contradicted those ideals.

Since Lincoln’s first inauguration, there have been two other inaugurations that marked important shifts in how Americans thought about the role of the federal government. In 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office in the midst of an economic crisis of historic proportions, which the outgoing Republican administration had seemed unable and even unwilling to confront in any meaningful way. FDR’s ambitious New Deal drew on Americans’ faith in the federal government as a positive force in their lives.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan interpreted his landslide victory as proof that the nation had rejected FDR’s New Deal and the pro-government assumptions upon which it rested. Since the 1960s, Reagan had been arguing that the “liberal” vision of politics embraced by most Democrats and Republicans at the time was outmoded at best, and a slippery slope to totalitarianism at worst. One of Reagan's oft-used laugh lines was, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’ ” 

Reagan led many Americans to believe that the federal government had virtually no constructive role to play in domestic affairs, and that Washington was occupied by meddling bureaucrats who did little more than waste “our tax money.”