What Went Down During Joe Biden’s Inauguration

In addition to the inauguration of a new president, today is also the day Georgia’s newest senators, Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, get sworn in. So today is also the day Democrats officially take control of the Senate.

Biden is extolling “tolerance and humility” and “standing in the other person’s shoes” as a way of ending the county’s “uncivil war.” As political scientists like Lilliana Mason and Nathan Kalmoe have documented, this is not going to be easy for some people to do. A significant chunk of Americans (around 15 – 20 percent) think violence against the other party is at least sometimes justified. Dehumanization, too, is an increasingly prevalent feature of American partisanship, as FiveThirtyEight contributor Erin Cassese has found. Grappling with those dark realities is going to be one of the biggest challenges of Biden’s presidency.

Biden said, “We must end this uncivil war.” This speech has made clear that Biden’s administration knows what it is up against, in terms of the growing political polarization in the U.S., or what academics have recently referred to as political sectarianism.