The toxic polarisation of our politics can be reversed, but it will take humility | Martin Kettle

Joe Biden’s approach is likely to include listening and cooperation. Politicians – and citizens – should emulate it

After Dwight Eisenhower had been sworn in as United States president on Capitol Hill in January 1953, he recited a prayer to the watching crowd that he had written himself that same morning. The words embodied how Eisenhower hoped to govern. “Especially we pray,” he told them, “that our concern shall be for all the people regardless of station, race or calling. May cooperation be permitted and be the mutual aim of those who … hold to differing political beliefs.”

To a 2020s audience those words may now seem anodyne and pious, the usual politician’s guff that we barely listen to. Race, in particular, would remain an unhealed wound through Eisenhower’s eight years in the White House. Nevertheless, the prayer truthfully embodies an approach to politics that actually worked for much of 1950s America.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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