What comes next for America now Trump is out of the White House?

One question hung over the presidency of Donald Trump, from his arrival at the White House four years ago to his reluctant departure this week: did his unexpected election represent a last cry of pain from largely white, blue-collar American voters who had found themselves on the wrong side of history? Or was he, and all he stood for – the protectionism, the isolationism, the transactionalism and the rest – pointing towards the future of the United States?

Many will see the inauguration of Joe Biden as the 46th president as the answer to that question. Everything about him and his vice president, Kamala Harris – their first speeches, their tone, their comportment – says that this team is the essence of non-Trump. Biden spoke about ending what he called the country’s “uncivil war”; the recurrent theme was “together”.

Abroad, he promised to restore “broken alliances”. From now on there is to be a new sense of unity, common purpose, at home and beyond US shores. Among his first acts were the return of the US to the Paris Agreement on the climate crisis and an end to the Trump-era restrictions on immigration from a number of Muslim-majority countries.

But I wonder. First, whether the togetherness Biden professes to be aiming for is actually feasible in the United States today, and, second, whether – even if he and Harris are able to heal many of the divisions over the next four years – unity rather than division can actually define the country’s future beyond that.  

One reason for asking this is something Barack Obama has said in interviews linked to the publication of the first volume of his memoirs. Speaking to the British historian David Olusoga, in an interview for the BBC, he suggested that his election in 2008 as the first black US president, and his re-election four years later, might at least have contributed to the election of Trump. His inference was that a large section of US voters had found it hard to accept a black president and the social change this denoted. The 2016 vote for Trump was a form of resistance. As, it might also be said – though the interview predated this – was the overrunning of the Capitol earlier this month.  

Nor has the election of Joe Biden decided this question one way or the other. In many ways, it has left the United States – awkwardly or elegantly, remains to be seen – suspended between the past and the future.

At 78, Biden is not only the oldest person ever to have become US president, he is also in a very traditional mould: a past vice president, a long-serving senator, a man with patrician and paternalistic manners, who tends to weigh his words; an east coaster of Irish descent. All that disqualifies him from being the quintessential White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (Wasp) is his Catholicism, which went almost unremarked during the campaign. That was in contrast to the difficulties John F Kennedy’s Catholicism posed for him when he was running for president six decades before.

If Biden can be seen as a president from the past, Harris, who has become vice president at the age of 56, can be seen as a face for the future. The first woman – as was noted when she was sworn in –   to take the role, and also the first person of Asian or black heritage in that position. She is a Californian, a one-term senator from that state and a lawyer. Her husband, it has been noted, is Jewish. With the United States set to become what is termed “majority-minority” somewhere between 2040 and 2050, perhaps sooner, Harris represents where the United States is going.

It is quite a change. The US population was 80 per cent white from its formation until 1920, when it reached 90 per cent and remained there until 1950. In 2018, according to the US Census Bureau, that had fallen to 60 per cent, and the trajectory is downwards. Already, it is estimated that, across the US, there are more non-white children than white children in schools.

It is worth including several caveats. First, the US Census Bureau defines “white” very narrowly. Second, the picture across the US is uneven; some states, such as California and Texas, are already “majority-minority”; others, in the northwest and the northeast, will be majority white for many years to come.

And third, the transition so far, including in Harris’s home state of California, has been relatively smooth, without major unrest or trauma. Optimists could thus argue that the United States is evolving peacefully into the multi-ethnic state it is.

They might add that the strength of US identity – the way allegiance to the state is cultivated at US schools, with the daily swearing of the oath of allegiance, the place of the flag and the anthem in US life, and the fact that most migrants still see the US as the land of opportunity and their dreams – will ensure that the country and the way of life endure. I would add the resilience of state institutions, and the constitution itself, in the face of the successive challenges from Donald Trump.

But that is the optimistic scenario. What has been striking since the violence at the Capitol on 6 January is the depth of pessimism, less from outsiders than from Americans themselves, about the future of their country, even its stability. The events of that day surely explain why the idea of the US in peril, in particular its democracy as “fragile” and “precious”, was an undercurrent of Biden’s inaugural address, and his pledge to end an “uncivil war” showed what was on his mind.  

For pessimists, the Trump presidency and the violence at the Capitol are not vestiges of the past, but harbingers of what may come. Regardless of Trump’s own views, he drew his support from many white Americans who fear they are “losing their country”. They could not win the election this time around, and as the years go by, their chances of dictating the outcome at national, presidential, level become ever slimmer. Still, many Americans were shocked at the sight of a Confederate flag being waved inside the Capitol.

They should not have been. Some of the same forces that fuelled the US Civil War more than 150 years ago persist to this day. (I commend Tony Horwitz’s 1998 book, Confederates in the Attic.)

Hence, whether people march under the banner of civil rights or affirmative action or Black Lives Matter, there is a risk of a backlash. There was a reason why a statue of the Confederate leader Robert E Lee stood in the US Capitol, and a reason why some might have seen its removal in December as a sign not of better, but of worse, things to come.

So far, I am generally optimistic about the propensity of the United States to avoid civil strife. At best, Biden and Harris will turn out to exemplify their country’s capacity for largely peaceful evolution. As in the UK, as in Europe, however, the past matters, and those in power must be wary of opening old wounds; the pessimists’ case should always be kept in mind.