The US presidential election is over, but deep fissures remain in the nation’s collective psyche

A late-morning stillness had settled over a November Saturday in a comfortable blanket of suburban serenity. All of a sudden, at stadium-level blast, there got here the shattering rock ’n’ roll roar of victory:

We are going to, we are going to rock you.

We are going to, we are going to rock you

The sounds of one thing unleashed — banging pots, honking horns, primal shouts — burst from all instructions in Maplewood, New Jersey. And as one other Queen tune boomed from the muscular loudspeakers in his storage, Zack Kurland stood on the fringe of his driveway, arms raised like Rocky.

We’re the champions

We’re the champions

His spouse, Neena Kumar, got here working and leapt into his arms.

Information had simply arrived that Joe Biden had been declared the winner of the presidential election of 2020, and now the 2 have been twirling in an impromptu public dance of triumph.

The second evoked an iconic American picture: a World Struggle II sailor spontaneously kissing a girl in a nurse’s uniform in Occasions Sq. after the information of victory in Europe. Solely as an alternative of V-E Day, this was V-B Day: Victory for Biden.

However not everybody was dancing. Triumph in a international struggle unifies a rustic; triumph in an election has the lurking potential to additional divide. And by Sunday morning, among the celebration and grieving had melted away to reveal a tough query for divided households and a divided nation: Now what?

True, a report variety of greater than 75 million People had voted for Biden, the Democratic challenger, and his working mate, Kamala Harris, the primary lady elected as vice-president. Additionally true was that greater than 71 million others now needed to grapple with the idea that their candidate — Donald Trump, the Republican incumbent — would most definitely be branded by his personal worst epithet: loser.

If Trump loyalists have been honking their horns in any respect Saturday, it was in all probability to clear rejoicing Biden supporters from the streets. And the one hope being provided by their chief was a vow to problem within the courts what he asserted, with out proof, was a fraudulent election.

By refusing, for now, to publicly settle for the election outcomes, Trump was all however inviting dance-interrupting discord.

And a few accepted his invitation.

Trump supporters held “Cease the Steal” rallies outdoors state capitols throughout the nation, although their cries of electoral corruption generally got here as information of Biden’s declared victory was lighting up smartphones in all places.

In Sacramento, California, movies captured confrontations that devolved into bodily assaults; some within the scrum wore the black-and-yellow polo shirts usually related to the Proud Boys, a far-right, pro-Trump group not unfamiliar with violence.

One other video, from Salem, Oregon, confirmed a person in Proud Boys attire discharging what seemed to be pepper spray, after which a crowd battered a automobile with fists and a baseball bat.

These small moments mirror the sizable fissure within the collective American psyche that Biden sought to start closing in his speech Saturday evening. With a stand of American flags behind him, he stated the time had come to revive the nation’s soul, to embrace the primary three phrases of the Structure: “We the folks.”

Biden is aware of from expertise how tough such easy sentiments are to achieve.

One other historic second not way back — the 2008 election of the nation’s first Black president, Barack Obama, with Biden as his vice-president — additionally prompted dancing within the streets. And it, too, was framed as a second of therapeutic unification. The sensation didn’t final.

However Biden nonetheless recognised a have to sound the decision, as soon as once more, for the nation to come back collectively. “It’s time to place away the tough rhetoric,” he stated. “To decrease the temperature. To see one another once more. To pay attention to one another once more.”

His phrases appeared directed as a lot to the person American as to the nation at giant, as if to recognise the gaping rifts created over the 4 tumultuous years since Trump was elected.

Friendships have fractured. Office relationships have cooled. Household gatherings have been altered by fears {that a} request to go the salt may in some way result in a political brawl.

In Trump-solid Mercer County, Pennsylvania, a retired particular training instructor named Beverly Graham, a Democrat, celebrated the massive information Saturday by pouring a glass of honey whiskey. She drank it in quiet toast, then tackled the chore of cleansing the loos.

It has been a tough 4 years for Graham, with numerous political disagreements, together with with sons who went from supporting Obama to supporting Trump. Particularly tough was the brutal mocking of Democrats — in different phrases, folks like her — on social media by members of her church. Their disdain was so vitriolic that she had hassle attending Sunday providers.

That’s, when folks used to go to church. Earlier than the coronavirus .

“I simply don’t suppose it’s ever going to be the identical,” Graham, 65, stated. “As a result of I felt prefer it was past political. It was private.”

On the opposite facet of Pennsylvania, 300 miles to the east in Monroe County, a cellphone salesman named Austin Garone stated he was exhausted by the considered telling an ex-girlfriend which means he had voted.

They’d damaged up in 2016 over politics, principally, after he voted for Trump, a alternative, he stated, she discovered incomprehensible. This time round, she had been calling, texting and sending lengthy Fb missives, all to influence him to not vote for Trump once more.

“Individuals simply hate Trump a lot,” Garone, 26, stated. “It’s an emotional response, and so they lose their sense of motive.”

He stated he had informed his ex-girlfriend, nonetheless an in depth good friend, that he wouldn’t vote for Trump if she might show that he had infringed upon her rights as a bisexual lady.

Garone finally determined that the president had not executed so. However he’s not volunteering that he voted for Trump in 2020.

“If she asks, I’ll inform her,” he stated. “But when not, I gained’t point out it.”

And in Louisville, Kentucky, a lawyer named Dustin Meek stated that she had spent appreciable time making an attempt to navigate the political schism between herself, a self-described progressive Democrat, and her household in her Trump-supporting hometown of Ashland, 190 miles to the east.

“We’ll begin out the night saying, OK, no dialogue of politics,” Meek, 54, stated. “However inevitably, a joke will likely be thrown, or one thing will come up, and folks will poke, and truthfully, I’ve to say, it has strained the relationships. It’s arduous.”

She and her relations can’t appear to even agree on what constitutes “truth,” she stated. They observe right-wing information web sites, whereas she favors muore conventional information sources that Trump has inspired his followers to mistrust.

Meek expressed hope that the much less inflammatory rhetoric of a brand new president would ease issues. And he or she stated that she wouldn’t permit politics to get in the best way of attending future household gatherings.

“Whether or not sure of my relations will elect to not attend sure occasions as a result of my husband and I are there, that’s potential,” she stated.

By Sunday morning, a semblance of serenity had returned to Maplewood. Kurland, a digital designer and a musician whose storage loudspeakers had rocked his neighborhood, mowed the garden. His spouse, Kumar, a psychologist, walked the household’s two black Labradors.

That the president of the USA was tweeting once more a couple of stolen election didn’t perturb them. They’d already danced for pleasure of their driveway.

Dan Barry c.2020 The New York Occasions Firm