THAT JOB HE CAN DO:

In 1969, Daniel Patrick Moynihan delivered a commencement address at the University of Notre Dame. The times paralleled our own: alienation that fed on itself and fueled chaos. Moynihan noted that he had spent a career trying to make government bigger, but that doing so effectively required recognizing what government could not do well. "What is it that government cannot provide?" he asked. "It cannot provide values to persons who have none, or who have lost those they had. It cannot provide a meaning to life. It cannot provide inner peace."

Trumpism was less a policy agenda than an attempt to supply those things to disaffected people, not by means of government, nor even through the White House, but rather through the personality of its occupant. He validated their lives and rhetorically vanquished their perceived foes. January 6 differs from Shay's Rebellion of 1786 and 1787 and the Whiskey Rebellion of the early 1790s. Those were indefensible and seditious. They also entailed people's livelihoods. The insurrection of January 6 pertained to its participants' apparently precarious self-respect.

If elections are meant to provide our sense of purpose and worth, their results are fated to be explosive. Moreover, if politics is the vehicle for all meaning, we should expect it to infiltrate every aspect of our lives and, in so doing, lose any sense of moderation or perspective. Moynihan's words on that topic at Notre Dame apply to the Trump right as much as they did, in 1969, to the radical left: "We are not especially well equipped in conceptual terms to ride out the storm ahead, but there are things we know without fully understanding, and one of these is the ultimate value of privacy, and the final ruin when all things have become political."

Of course, people do need outlets for values. Sources of meaning are important. But we should find them in concrete forms close to home, not abstractions like the personality of or opposition to the president. The insurrection exposed a profound civic pathology whose chief symptom is obsession with politics and whose etiology is the collapse of community. This form of politics replaces the tangible relationships and corresponding bonds of dependence and obligation that constitute authentic communities with shallow, anonymous attachments to politicians.

Cults of personality are seductive, partly because face-to-face relationships, which require us to confront each other in all our irritating imperfection, are difficult. They require real sacrifice and actual work. Hero worship exacts no costs in exchange for the moral exhilaration it provides.

For all the anti-government rhetoric of the Trump movement, it subsisted on the illusion of relationships of personal caretaking between individuals and the president. The conservative sociologist Robert Nisbet explained totalitarianism in terms of this ardent affection for politicians. The human need for community remains when traditional social bonds collapse, he wrote, so people seek it in the superficial realm of the state instead.

The service Biden can most do the nation is to decline heroic status.

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