The Strange Theater of Watching the Inauguration on Social Media

Few people could witness Joe Biden and Kamala Harris get sworn in in person. Instead, we watched (and tried to make sense of it all) online.

Amanda Gorman, the US’s first-ever youth poet laureate, recited a poem during Wednesday's inauguration ceremony.

Photograph: Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Author: Angela Watercutter

In the end, it all came down to optics. Inauguration Day usually includes at least a few hundred thousand people watching from the National Mall in Washington, DC, all crammed shoulder-to-shoulder, trying to glimpse history IRL. But in 2021, as the United States swore in its 46th president, Joe Biden, and his vice president, Kamala Harris, attendance was sparse. In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic and just two weeks after insurrectionists overwhelmed the very Capitol steps where the ceremony took place, only as many people as could be kept safe could be there in person. Most Americans had to stay at home, tuned in on TV or watching online.

What they got was an eyeful. At a time when everyday objects—surgical masks, red baseball hats, even the American flag—have been grafted with new, at times outsized meanings, people know how to read the cues. Trained eyes, with the microscope of social media, know how to spot significance, how to see what’s there—and what isn’t. Donald Trump, of course, did not attend the inauguration. He boarded his final Air Force 1 ride to Florida in the morning, telling people he practically begged to come to “have a good life” as he walked off to the sounds of the Village People’s “YMCA.” He was the first president in over 150 years to not attend his successor's swearing-in.

(Also absent from DC on Wednesday were the throngs of protesters and rioters who stormed the Capitol on January 6. There had been concern that the Trump supporters, QAnon conspiracy theorists, white supremacists, and other insurrectionists who showed up two weeks ago might appear again for the inauguration. As of this writing, they hadn’t.)

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America’s first ‘virtual’ inauguration ushers in a transformed era

At a swearing-in with a small socially-distanced audience, Biden says "the cause of democracy" has triumphed and calls for unity.

Joseph R. Biden takes the oath to become the 46th president of the United States.

Photograph by Andrew Harnik, AP
Author: Robert Draper

Joseph R. Biden takes the oath to become the 46th president of the United States. “The American story depends not on any one of us, not on some of us," he said in his address, "but on all of us, on we the people, who seek a more perfect union.”

“Today we celebrate the triumph not of a candidate but of a cause, the cause of democracy,” said Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. moments after being sworn in as the 46th president of the United States.

On this day, Americans are reminded that we are different. On any other day, we can go a little overboard in rhapsodizing our singularity. America did not invent democracy, after all. We are far from the world’s sole repository of free speech, peaceful assembly, and fair trials. With apologies to the country music duo Brooks & Dunn, whose song “Only in America” is a staple on the campaign trail, in many other nations “everybody gets to dance” and “dream as big as we want to.” For that matter, the nonpartisan election advocacy group FairVote lists what it calls 35 “well-established democracies”—and in each of these countries, a national election routinely produces a winner to whom power is transferred in an orderly, nonviolent manner.

What sets America apart is the spectacle of that transfer, broadcast around the world: relinquisher of power and receiver on the same stage on the Capitol’s West Front, surrounded by their families and others entrusted to power, including the elite fraternity of presidents past, while hundreds of thousands gather before them, a sea of eyewitnesses at times spilling all the way down the National Mall to the obelisk dedicated to America’s first president, George Washington. Being an act of openness and renewal, it is a quintessentially outdoor event, replete with heavy coats and frosty breath. Above all else, this passing of power from one president to another conveys the sacred idea that such power is always derivative—that it resides finally, immutably with the people. For all the burlesque that befouls our politics, the quadrennial ritual on January 20 is when we are humbled by the reminder of our own solemn charge. It is self-rule made manifest. (Here's a brief history of the inaugural ceremonies that set our traditions—and later broke them.)

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At Biden’s Inaugural Events, the Music Was Earnestly Reassuring

Artists including Bruce Springsteen, Demi Lovato and John Legend tried to bring together an America that couldn’t gather in person, and irony and bombast were banished.

At the swearing-in, Lady Gaga sang a “Star-Spangled Banner” that hinted at Kate Smith but made its way into gospel-R&B

Photograph: Erin Schaff/The New York Times
Author: Jon Pareles

Throughout President Biden’s inauguration, music sent every possible signal of unabashed earnestness. Irony was banished; so were arrogance, bombast, triumphalism and confrontation. Echoing the Biden campaign, and tightly coordinated with the speeches and imagery of his first day in office, the music insisted on unity after division, hope after pain. On Wednesday morning, President Trump had jetted away, in a final burst of self-glorification, to the Village People’s booming “Y.M.C.A.” and to Frank Sinatra’s boastful “My Way.” By contrast, Mr. Biden’s prime-time “Celebrating America” broadcast on Wednesday night promised humility and a determined inclusiveness, interspersing tributes to everyday Americans — nurses, teachers, cooks, delivery drivers — with songs. It opened with Bruce Springsteen, alone with a guitar at the Lincoln Memorial, singing about migration, mutual aid and welcome in “Land of Hope and Dreams.” It was a reprise of a song by Mr. Springsteen, a career-long voice of workers’ dignity and a steady supporter of Democratic candidates, that played at President Obama’s farewell address.

Mr. Biden’s events presented music as balm and consolation, as a peace offering and a promise of community, even as the pandemic — along with security concerns after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot — made a public gathering impossible. At “Celebrating America,” he and his vice president, Kamala Harris, spoke briefly from inside the Lincoln Memorial, where Mr. Biden said their inauguration was “not about us, but about you.”

Earlier that day at the swearing-in ceremony, Lady Gaga wore a voluminous red dress, a navy jacket and large brooch with a dove holding an olive branch as she sang “The Star-Spangled Banner,” starting it with a foursquare declamation and grand vibrato hinting at Kate Smith but making her way toward gospel-R&B melismas before she was done. Jennifer Lopez, wearing suffragist white, crescendoed from a soft-rock “This Land Is Your Land” to a fervent “America the Beautiful,” shouting part of the Pledge of Allegiance in Spanish and slipping in a phrase from her own “Let’s Get Loud.”

The afternoon’s “virtual inaugural parade” strove to recapture the endearing roll call at the Democratic convention. It offered quick glimpses of musical, military and athletic groups from all of the states, along with rhythmic delights from Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Andra Day sang “Rise Up” on a rooftop overlooking a Black Lives Matter mural in Hollywood, accompanying a skating routine by the young viral-video star Kaitlyn Saunders on Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington, D.C., and the New Radicals played their one hit from 1998, “You Get What You Give” — a favorite of the president’s son Beau Biden, who died of brain cancer in 2015. The show’s giddy finale was a deftly edited, crowdsourced, TikTok-style montage of hundreds of people flaunting their moves to Martha and the Vandellas’ Motown classic “Dancing in the Street.”

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