Alfred Hitchcock, The Wrong Man (1956) 
Fade IN:
But for too many of our citizens, a different reality exists: Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system, flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge; and the crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential. This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.
Donald J. Trump, January 20, 2017
Dissolve TO:
Americans have called on us to marshal the forces of decency and the forces of fairness. To marshal the forces of science and the forces of hope in the great battles of our time. The battle to control the virus. The battle to build prosperity. The battle to secure your family’s health care. The battle to achieve racial justice and root out systemic racism in this country. The battle to save the climate. The battle to restore decency, defend democracy, and give everybody in this country a fair shot.
Joseph R. Biden, November 7, 2020
Think of it as a lap dissolve, a very long, choppy, truly inelegant one. Dissolves are standard movie code for transition-time. Which takes place every four or eight years in the United States of America. When one idea of government is in the midst of arrival, still in motion, and the other has yet to leave but at the same time readies itself for departure. For a period of ten weeks, every four years, as a nation, we live in the space and time of this lap dissolve, when, in our current condition, two worldviews collide and, in the wreck, occupy the same frame of fractured public discourse.
Each worldview plays its own soundtrack, sometimes audible, sometimes not, and writes its own voice-over narration. Each sets its own stage, gathers its own cast of character-advisors, and sets the tone for the time after the lap dissolve resolves and settles on the new scene, which can now properly commence. This democratic custom, which started to break down in 2016, presumes that the transition would be cooperative, managed less by regulation than by friendly handshakes and invocations of peaceful transfer, as the headspace of the country shifts gradually, acclimating from one zeitgeist to another. If it’s too abrupt or sudden or antagonistic, as it is now, growing more acrimonious, more authoritarian by the hour, it is easy to give into the feeling of vertigo, not knowing exactly how things will end, longing for terra firma and a-once-upon-a-time-when change did not require a major reckoning.
Coming into focus, clearer in every passing frame: a few bedrock truths about America. For example: in spite of the challenges posed by the coronavirus pandemic, including many novel voting systems, more Americans voted than ever before in any election in US history. Another one: this year, the votes of the electoral college aligned with the popular vote. Another two: they did not align in 2016. Or in 2000.
But the truth is that they did align this time, and in this alignment it may be tempting to give into the indulgence of hope for a clear repudiation of Trump, a rejection of his sadism and his incompetence; his misogyny and cruelty; his open embrace of white supremacy and brazen attempts at voter suppression; his subversion of democratic processes, including his own attempt at reelection; his hostility to facts and his degradation of public discourse; his false and fascistic naming of internal public enemies; his pathological narcissism, ignorance, disrespect, and contempt for anyone who knows more than he does about anything, which is just about everyone. But the truth is this: more than 72 million Americans voted for Donald Trump’s second term and therefore a startling number among us explicitly endorses all that he embodies and now, in the political aftermath, all that he represents. And so we must accept this, too, as a truth the election told about America.
To wrestle with this, and as a nation wrestle we must, an unfamiliar, yet not unknown, American wilderness awaits our brave journey, where our national ambivalence remains unsettled and volatile. It is difficult to imagine a reckoning in this American landscape, so scarred by division, fundamental difference, and worldview. Vast and unimaginable gulfs separate those who do and those who do not consent to authoritarianism in America, those who embrace a restrictive, punitive Christian Nationalism and those who abide by secular democratic discourse. Some of our most expansive thinkers articulate the political-cultural problem as a spiritual one. Here is how Ibram Kendi describes the reckoning of our political divisions as a problem of the soul:
“We the people of the United States do not have a single national soul, but rather two souls, warring with each other. The battle for the soul of America is actually the battle between the souls of America.”
Here is how Masha Gessen, a Russian expatriate who knows something about authoritarianism, describes the necessity of our reckoning:
“Our current transition is no ordinary transfer of power: in reversing Trump’s autocratic attempt, voters have chosen between two fundamentally different political futures. The broad lessons that apply to other societies that have undergone major transitions apply to us. In general, these societies have had to choose between two paths: the path of reckoning and the path of forgetting.”
What are we to make of this spiritual gaze upon the practice of reckoning, upon the horizon of our collective future? Left-leaning intellectuals typically shy away from such invocation of spirit, ceding this overwrought ground to the religious right, who guards it with ferocity. Is it possible to ask such questions outside as well as inside the formative frames of Judeo-Christian narratives and thereby expand the American capacity for answering? In the fall of Trump and the rise of Trumpism, the journalist Katherine Stewart describes the majority of “the base” as “people who identify at least loosely with Christian nationalism: the idea that the United States is and ought to be a Christian nation governed under a reactionary understanding of Christian values.” If these are times for reckoning as reflection, is it possible to invoke the American soul without giving in to the gravitational pull of this religious authoritarianism, which seeks to define it in advance? Instead, is it possible to expand the terms and conditions of our inquiry and thereby create a fuller, more inclusive discourse? Is now the time to take back some sense of an American soul from those who have flooded that plain with Christian Nationalist aims and assumptions?
Trump lost the election, but Trumpism more than survives him. It is difficult to say how all of this will look, post-transition, once the toxic molds of enabling and collusion and fear, among staff, senate and house have been remediated. It will be difficult to settle legal accounts with this administration’s wide wake of criminality and anti-democratic ambition. Perhaps the most difficult thing will be to reckon with the more ineffable losses–of norms and of national unity, of the prepandemic public sphere, and of language as a generative bond–these will be difficult to repair.
Nevertheless, we must begin to imagine our collective aftermath, once the narrative settles into the next sequence. In the meantime, the transition continues at a grudging, painful pace, a stylistic predictor of what could come next, a story shaping up as a titan struggle between a 21st century reconstruction and a smoldering new lost cause. We have the makings of deep and lasting civil unrest, a war some say. On January 20, 2021 at noon sharp, this fundamentally American battle hymn will play in a different key and be narrated differently through changing channels of political representation. But it will play nonetheless, stoked by the fires of Parler, perhaps not Twitter, or on Trump TV, perhaps not Fox. Different historical contingencies will inflect the tune, but we will sing a familiar refrain, because it is but a structural variation on a much longer American hymn.