Irish Examiner view: America votes for renewal

America’s president-elect, Democrat Joe Biden, and vice-president-elect, Kamala Harris, have won a victory of international significance

The US should celebrate that Kamala Harris has become the first woman to be elected as American vice president. Picture: Andrew Harnik/PA

All great wartime leaders knew that winning a battle, especially a major one, was an achievement but the most successful ones — ultimately the winners — also knew winning a battle was an opportunity that brought great responsibilities. 

America’s president-elect, Democrat Joe Biden, and vice-president-elect, Kamala Harris, have won a battle but the outcome of the war remains an open, troubling question, especially as it’s much, much more than a nation’s culture war, and it’s not just an American conflict. 

Nevertheless, there are a great many reasons to celebrate their victory.

The first must be that it removed an appallingly boorish and dishonest fraud, one with horizons defined by his deep, unsettling ignorance, insularity, and pathetic insecurity, from the White House. 

America has rid itself of the worst president in its history, provoking heartfelt relief among its allies all around the world.

The second is even more important. At the very moment of their victory, Biden and Harris reached over that fraud and spoke to the 70m people who did not vote for them, the constituency misled to believe the incumbent was the solution to their very real and deepening difficulties. 

Biden, presidential when his opponent was petulant, immediately acknowledged how divided America has become. He emphasised how unsustainable that self-perpetuating and mutual contempt is.

"This is the time to heal in America ... let’s give each other a chance,” he said in his speech late on Saturday evening. “We must make the promise of the country real for everybody, no matter their race, their ethnicity, their faith, their identity, or their disability.”

A third, and there are many more, is that Kamala Harris, an impressive figure who may become more and more significant in the run to 2024, is the first woman to be elected American vice president. 

Her moderation may assuage those who have bizarrely come to believe Republican suggestions that elements of the Democratic party are communists.

At moment’s like this, there is always a danger of over-imbibing the feelgood cocktail that winners scatter all around but Biden’s olive branch to those millions of blue-collar Americans reduced and abandoned by the Bill Clinton-led realignment of their party have an opportunity, one better than any their MAGA prophet delivered, to work towards the common purpose of rejuvenating their country. 

This puts traditional Republicans in a tight corner. If they stymie Biden’s promised and necessary bridge-building, they will waste the opportunities of consensus and invite hardening extremism. It is hard to see how American unity might survive the inevitable conclusion of such polarity.

US resident-elect Joe Biden points has acknowledged how divided America has become. Picture: Andrew Harnik/PA

Biden, at 77 the oldest person elected US president, has said that Covid-19 is his priority. This is as it should be, as theresponse to the pandemic — almost 240,000 people dead — has not reflected the great resources a superpower can bring into play. 

Ironically, it is harder than it should be to dismiss the argument that Biden might not have won but for the Barnum and Bailey mishandling of the pandemic.

The result may have made Sunday lunch less palatable for many of the world’s second-division despots who enjoyed at least the tacit support of the outgoing regime. 

Viktor Orbán, Jair Bolsanaro, Narendra Modi, Mateusz Morawiecki, and Benjamin Netanyahu, others with tin-pot ambitions too, have lost an all-powerful, encouraging patron. 

However, Britain’s Boris Johnson, as Brexit talks intensify, has had the legs pulled from under him. The trenchant, hard-line position he held as late as last week when another result was a possibility is all of a sudden as plausible an ashtray on a Triumph Bonneville motorbike — if you can remember those spluttering icons of British engineering. 

Though Johnson’s government has, in theory, four years to run, a Biden presidency determined to renew old alliances across Europe may sideline it in a way inconceivable to those who not so long ago promised sunny uplands once Brexit was imposed. 

Once again, England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity, though in this instance it is a relief rather than an occasion to gloat.

The Biden victory should be celebrated for many reasons, especially for what it prevented, for now at least. However, as all great generals knew, winning the peace is sometimes harder than winning the war.

Biden has made all the right promises around American and global unity and reconciliation, rebalancing the concentration of wealth and improving the lives of those millions trampled by globalisation and reckless, conscience-free banking. 

Let us hope and pray that the Biden-Harris presidency, and those who might work with it, are equal to the task as, for once, the usual cliche is hardly adequate: The stakes were never higher and this is a war the world’s moderates must win.