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Survived the storm, but not unscathed: US flag in Florida
Photo: Wilfredo Lee / AP
From January 2021, normality should finally return to the most powerful country in the world.
Joe Biden, who is likely to become the 46th head of state, holds out his arms and calls on the citizens of the United States for reconciliation.
It is time to overcome the split.
To return to decency in dealing with one another and to orientate oneself again to facts and truth in thinking and acting.
The only question is: is it just possible?
After a tough battle between two camps, in which almost half of all Americans voted Donald Trump, can one appeal to the common sense of his voters or even the more sensible ones in the Republican Party and offer them to come back to the side of the truth?
By pretending to listen carefully to their fears that made them act so irrationally seriously?
So that they will never need such an evil demagogue again?
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It is doubtful that the political division among Americans - as in many other western democracies - can be overcome in this way.
It is unlikely that Trumpists want to seek therapy with democratic politicians and more liberal citizens in order to find truth and decency there.
But what can then be done about the deep trenches that threaten the existence of social coexistence?
The intuitive attitude is there first, then the arguments follow
First of all, you have to understand that people are usually naturally not very good at taking a distance from their own attitude.
Mostly one has an intuitive attitude based on impressions and previous experiences and only afterwards settles the arguments in such a way that it feels as if one has objectively justified and derived them.
The American psychologist Jonathan Haidt has given some clever lectures and written texts on this.
How well it succeeds in convincing others of the correctness of one's own attitude depends on rhetorical skills, social background and academic education.
That doesn't mean that discussions at a high academic level are about pure truth.
Especially in the university ivory towers, the feature pages, the talk show program for the educated middle class, it is usually more about assertiveness and power.
It is quite possible that many of Trump's supporters followed him so fanatically for precisely that reason: because he was not intimidated by the smarter, better argument of his opponents.
And as absurd as his assertions may have been, as erratic as his behavior may have been: for four years he has shown it to those who usually always had the good arguments on their side and in the end the last word.
They danced to the high-pitched tune on his Twitter timeline.
Being right does not save democracy
There is even scientific evidence for this: Stephan Lewandowsky and colleagues from the University of Perth were able to show in a study that journalists from newspapers such as the "New York Times" or television stations such as ABC News neglected topics that could have politically harmed him because they doggedly into his tweets.
This also makes a deeper truth clear: Trump had his opponents in hand because they couldn't stop working on the fact that the most powerful man in the world simply disregarded their factual knowledge and the better arguments.
Generously offering Trump and his supporters reconciliation opens a door, but one in which the other person has to make himself small in order to get to the other side.
If you are really interested in reconciliation and not in power, in an equal togetherness and not the victory of your own conviction, you take the step the other way around.
And instead of the humiliation of the defeated opponent, chooses one's own humility in order to approach one another.
In the realization, for example, that it was perhaps not just about the insulted doggedness of the political opponent, but also a little bit about one's own.
Against this background, one should also question the euphoria after Biden's election victory.
No matter how justified the relief about Trump's departure may be: Democracy cannot be saved by being right with one's own opinion.
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