Biden Wants to Unite the Country. How Can He Do It?

When Joe Biden assumes control of the White House on Wednesday, his message of “unity” will crash into the hard reality of a nation dented by a deadly pandemic and being pulled apart by historic forces: a violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, widespread distrust of the election results and deep division over racial injustice. For the first time in recent memory, the outgoing president won’t attend the inauguration, and he appears ready to wage political war from the sidelines.

In that fraught environment, is there anything Biden can do to make America even remotely whole?

POLITICO Magazine reached out to dozens of thinkers for one big idea that Biden should—and could—pursue as a step toward making good on his promise. We asked for suggestions that are bold, focusing on the biggest fault lines that divide the country right now, but which also pass the reality test: They should be technically feasible and within the president’s purview.

A few suggestions had a New Deal-style quality: a “Civic Communications Corps,” a massive investment in housing, a financing scheme to build new factories in regions Washington has ignored. Some experts urged Biden to root out racist extremism from the military and at the grassroots; others called for a clear pushback on finger-pointing rhetoric from the left. And several said the new president’s first priority should be the pandemic killing thousands of Americans a day.

Here are the proposals in full.

Heidi Beirich is co-founder and chief strategy officer of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism.

The horrors of America’s emboldened extremists were broadcast to the world in the January 6 insurrection, when white supremacists, militiamen, QAnon believers and other extremists stormed the Capitol. Veterans and serving troops participated, and there are indications that military-style tactics were employed to organize the assault. Shockingly, the Army is now employing extra screening to ensure troops providing security for the inauguration do not pose a threat.

This is an outrage, the result of the Pentagon’s ongoing failure to root out extremism in the ranks.

This problem is long-standing. Hearings into this matter were held by Rep. Jackie Spier last February (full disclosure: I testified). There have been dozens of white supremacist terrorist and attempted terrorist acts committed by active-duty military and veterans, many targeting marginalized communities. Let’s not forget that Timothy McVeigh, a veteran whose bombing in Oklahoma City was the largest domestic terrorist attack before 9/11, had both white supremacist and militia sympathies.

The threat is crystal clear. We can’t be training those who may engage in domestic terrorism and hate crimes how to kill. And extremists are a threat to their fellow troops, particularly those of color.

Changing the military’s methods for rooting out extremists is squarely within Biden’s powers as commander in chief. He should immediately order an independent audit into the Pentagon’s current procedures. Longer term, Biden should improve diversity in the military command, tighten screening of recruits, enforce and strengthen current regulations against extremism, ban troop involvement in private militias, order the Pentagon to report hate crimes, demand annual reports on extremists found in the ranks and share information on extremists with other federal agencies. Finally, veterans convicted of incitement and extremist violence should have their government benefits denied.

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Naunihal Singh is an associate professor in the National Security Affairs Department at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, and author of Seizing Power: The Strategic Logic of Military Coups. The opinions expressed are his own, and not those of his employer.

One of the most serious fault lines in this country right now concerns how people understand America. To many, America is a country of ideals—of democracy, equality and rule of law. But to others, America is a country where rules and laws should be bent to protect the interests of a single racial group, one they believe is entitled to be in charge. The events of January 6 are clear evidence that either ignoring or coddling the second group simply won’t work if we want the country to stay intact.

The tension between these two visions of America is an old one, and Biden alone can’t be expected to resolve it. However, he can take a concrete step in the right direction by expelling both white supremacists and white supremacy from those parts of the government that we trust to protect us, namely the military and Department of Homeland Security.

The military has a significant problem with white supremacy and racism. According to the only available (although methodologically flawed) poll, 1 in 3 service members have observed signs of white supremacist or racist ideology within the military. Current and former members of the military and law enforcement are among the suspects in the attack on the Capitol. And the Pentagon is running a second background check on all 25,000 members of the National Guard who are working to protect the inauguration to make sure that none have any ties to extremism. While there is no comparable poll of DHS personnel, there is a documented problem with white supremacists in law enforcement, and DHS has at times minimized the threat of white supremacist groups in America.

Biden should proceed along three paths. First, there should be zero tolerance for extremists in the ranks, and a functioning system to identify and credibly address racist behavior. At present, membership in a white supremacist group shockingly is not necessarily considered grounds to kick somebody out of the military. Meanwhile, those who report racism in the military are, at best, ignored and, at worst, may be pushed into leaving. Similarly, racism remains a serious problem within the FBI. Second, Biden should ensure that all symbols of white supremacy in the military—including unit insignia, ship names and building names—be removed. NASCAR should not have banned the Confederate flag sooner than the U.S. military. The removal of anti-American symbols should be coupled with a systematic effort to recognize the contributions of previously unsung heroes. Third, Biden should make clear that addressing white supremacy is a priority for both the military, in terms of good order and discipline, and DHS, in terms of protecting the homeland.

These efforts will face many obstacles, and alone they might not be enough. But we simply cannot afford to ignore this vital area of national security any longer. By pushing the government to root out white supremacy, Biden can take a clear stand in favor of an inclusive vision of America, and reaffirm the core ideals that should unite us all.

Mark Bauerlein is a contributing editor at First Things and an emeritus professor of English at Emory University.

Biden needs a Sista Souljah moment. The greatest threat to his administration won’t be Republicans in Congress or Donald Trump loyalists outside Washington. It will be the hard left pushing him into one illiberal policy after another. They are loud and influential, yes, but a whole lot of centrist liberals who abhorred Trump are queasy as they watch BLM and other militants bullying corporations, universities, banks, and stores to go all-out anti-racist and purge the right.

Biden must reaffirm the First Amendment, which the left sees as a roadblock to progress. One possibility is this: Back Trump’s 2019 executive order titled “Improving Free Inquiry, Transparency, and Accountability at Colleges and Universities.” This would signal to the left that their activism has a limit and won’t mean any sacrifice of democratic norms. The document squarely aligns with liberal principles of free speech and open discussion. It addresses a problem, too, on which most everybody, including President Obama, agrees—namely, the chill that afflicts higher education and dismays everyone but the grievance parties, including my liberal colleagues (many of whom are nervous these days). Also, as I wrote at the New York Times when the order was proposed, it gives college leaders who are weary of the brittle sensitivities of the vocal few a good excuse to restore the climate of robust debate and academic freedom.

The left will howl, but that’s the price of the harmony and unity that Biden has espoused. It will assure conservative students and their parents, too, that he is not the puppet of the left that he appears so far. Do it, Mr. President, and your approval rating will jump.

Cynthia Miller-Idriss is director of the Polarization and Extremism Research & Innovation Lab (PERIL) at American University, where she is also a professor in the school of public affairs and in the school of education.

The January 6 attack at the U.S. Capitol came just three months after the Department of Homeland Security declared white supremacist extremists the “most persistent and lethal threat” facing the nation. As Biden assumes office amid ongoing domestic extremist threats in all 50 U.S. states and the U.S. capital, it is patently clear that the new administration must place combating white supremacist and anti-government extremism among its highest priorities.

It is hard to overestimate the scope of the problem. Millions of people now believe in an alternative universe of disinformation and conspiracies about an illegitimate election. A toxic mix of groups from across a normally fragmented far-right spectrum—white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups, anti-government militias, QAnon conspiracy theorists, Proud Boys and violent Trump supporters—staged an insurrection inspired by that disinformation. And, by all accounts, it could have been much worse.

As a first step to address this threat, the White House should establish a task force dedicated to combating white supremacy and violent extremism. It is vital that the Biden administration couple traditional law enforcement, surveillance and monitoring approaches to violent extremism with educational and prevention approaches that can address radicalization. We need strategies that draw not only from the world of counterterrorism but also from social work, education and public health. We need large-scale, systemic investments in research and interventions to interrupt radicalization and build offramps from extremist groups and ideologies, including public media literacy education to help people recognize disinformation and understand their own susceptibility to persuasive extremist rhetoric and tactics.

America will be addressing this threat for years to come. Our best hope to bring the country together and eradicate domestic forces of division lies in building the most holistic and preventative response to extremism possible.

Nicholas Eberstadt holds the Wendt Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute and is author of Men Without Work: America’s Invisible Crisis.

At this fraught juncture in our national existence there is no technocratic prescription for healing our body politic. The incoming president cannot reunite our divided country by pushing some policy button. Instead, he must do something infinitely more difficult, and exhausting. He must convince a mistrustful public that he recognizes the unfamiliar new threats to freedom loose in our country today—and is committed, vigilantly and unconditionally, to defending all Americans against them.

America will not be able to do much healing in the next four years if the 47 percent of America who voted against the president-elect are treated as a subjugated population. Yet knowingly or not, this is how the election’s victors are behaving. A large minority of our nation can scarcely air its opinions in the academy or, increasingly, in the establishment media. Their speech is ever more policed in the workplace and online by rules tantamount to “victor’s justice.”

A double standard is emerging in our nation: one for the current political victors and their allies, the other for their opponents. Whether it concerns the reaction to organized violence in our cities or systemic racial discrimination against qualified university applicants, such partiality is now widely manifest, and it undermines the rule of law at the foundation of our genuinely exceptional American experiment.

Enemies of the open society are found on both the right and the left in America today. But their ranks are shockingly strong in the president-elect’s own party. If he is to bring our country back together, he will need to summon the courage and the strength to face down some of his own supporters, even while enduring predictably unfair attacks. Tolerance, forgiveness and constitutionalism are the path back to a strong and united America—and the president must lead the way.

Deb Roy is professor of media arts & sciences at MIT, director of the MIT Center for Constructive Communication, and co-founder and chair of Cortico.

We live in an age of social media and polarized broadcast media in which the loudest voices and most extreme opinions dominate. Americans have self-sorted into politically and culturally isolated enclaves, susceptible to false narratives trafficked by political and media opportunists. The collapse of shared truths that inform us of the nuance and complex lived experience of our fellow citizens, and of empirically grounded knowledge, has put our country in grave danger. For those of us committed to the idea that all people have equal rights to live together as part of one democracy (a majority of Americans, I believe), we need to build new civic communication infrastructure that enables communities to be heard by one another, for improved mutual understanding, and by leaders, so that government becomes more responsive to citizens.

To do this, Biden should work with Congress to create a national Civic Communication Corps. Members of the corps would work together with communities across the country to facilitate thousands—and one day even millions—of conversations (virtual, and in-person as the pandemic recedes), open to all, with an emphasis on surfacing hopes, concerns and stories of the underheard. The corps would collaborate with communities to identify areas of commonality and difference, make sense of those patterns, share insights with local media and make recommendations for action to improve people’s lives. Municipal, state and national public institutions could in turn commit to listening and responding to the needs and interests of those who have shared their time and perspectives. To support the corps and maximize its impact, I envision a state-of-the-art AI-powered digital technology platform designed to capture, make sense of and share community conversations at scale. The principles of transparency and accountability must be baked into the design to balance privacy with visibility. A pilot project along these lines, the Local Voices Network, suggests the approach can work.

The ultimate goal would be a nationwide network of communities, fueled by strong local organizing, that would reverse the erosion of a shared understanding, build trust and strengthen our democracy for generations to come.

Joseph E. Uscinski is associate professor of political science at the University of Miami.

Joe Biden will take office following a violent insurrection in which four people were killed protesting what they thought was a rigged election. While the actions of those storming the Capitol are not representative of most Americans, some of the views that drove them are widespread. Many people—sometimes majorities—believe the “deep state,” powerful elites, the opposing party or some other group control events, leaving the rest of us as pawns in their game. These beliefs, as corrosive as they are, are not new, nor are they even more prevalent than in the past. What has changed is that for the past four years we have had a president, supported by other leaders in Congress, who has been willing to activate and heighten those feelings of alienation for his own ends. With Trump leaving office, Biden inherits the responsibility for mending the divisions exacerbated by his predecessor’s rhetoric.

Politicians and interest groups, from both sides of the aisle, have argued for government to play a bigger role in getting social media to combat the extremism that drove the insurrection. Biden should resist calls for such heavy-handed actions. The discord driven by Trump and his acolytes was driven by Trump and his acolytes—not by a communication technology or online platform. Government actors—including the president, senators and House members—encouraged their supporters—some of whom worked in government, including several police officers—to stage this riot. With Trump leaving office, America will no longer have a president encouraging hatred, distrust and violence; Trump’s supporters in government will no longer have a like-minded president to rally behind.

Biden should pin the blame for the recent events exactly where it belongs—on the government officials behind those events—and push members of Congress to act immediately against those in their chambers who encouraged or abetted this insurrection with expulsions. The government played a key role in creating the problems we are currently trying to fix, so Biden must fix the government rather than turning his attention elsewhere. For the country to move past the ugly events that preceded his term, the president, as the leader of the federal government, must push for accountability, setting the clear precedent that using misinformation and conspiracy theories to encourage violence will no longer be tolerated at the highest levels of government.

Amy Cooter is a sociologist at Vanderbilt University who studies U.S. militia groups.

I have studied U.S. domestic militias for more than a decade, and I have long argued that militia members, who are often described as extremists or at least political outliers, are actually more of a barometer of middle America politics than many people are comfortable admitting. We most recently saw that ideological overlap come to fruition on January 6, when insurrectionists who wanted to “stop the steal” were comprised of militia groups, neo-Nazi groups and unaffiliated individuals who see themselves as Trump supporters or perhaps just “concerned citizens.”

One difficult—yet necessary—step toward reeling these Americans back to the mainstream would be to reshape national education policy to ensure that, over the long term, all students have a basic and more accurate understanding of our nation’s history. Many states’ curricula continue to gloss over all but the most basic information about Native American genocide, slavery and Jim Crow, and they often leave out altogether how America’s past continues to shape the different life outcomes of different people. The president’s power to mandate educational standards is limited, but many school districts comply voluntarily with national standards, which could be made more robust. Federal funding incentives could also be directed toward districts that adopt updated standards.

Without a shared, fact-based understanding of our history, it becomes very easy for some white Americans who genuinely believe the United States is the land of equality and opportunity to feel that their entire worldview is threatened when confronted with evidence of things like systematic racism that call the American dream into question. It becomes easier for them to believe groups like Black Lives Matter are “anarchist” and not truly fighting for a just cause. For some, it is then easy to drift into conspiracy theories suggesting that conversations and legislation around justice issues might even be motivated by a desire to deprive other people of their rights. In that framework, figures like Donald Trump become a last bastion of hope against a “liberal elite” who want to change the country’s character, fostering further division. Stronger national standards for teaching American history won’t solve the problem entirely, but they can help to counter divisive narratives.

Eli Pariser is co-director of Civic Signals and New_ Public.

As Biden undertakes the task of rebuilding the country and bringing the American public back together, his administration should consider how we can reinvent and repair our digital public spaces.

It’s no secret that private social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, where Americans increasingly get their information and political engagement, are deeply broken. Rather than enhance a civic conversation, they reward misinformation, incivility and outright hate. Recent research conducted by my organization New_ Public found that around the world, even superusers of these platforms often believe social media is falling flat when it comes to key indicators of healthy public spaces, such as accurate information, keeping users safe and bringing people together.

Voices on both the left and the right have called for deeper regulation, or even government takeover, of platforms like Twitter and Facebook. But we also need to support the emergence of alternative online spaces that are intentionally designed to help bring people together and promote civic life. Spaces like Vermont’s Front Porch Forum, a local email list, have shown that better conversations can be had at a large scale when the focus is on expert moderation and quality and not quantity. We can look to the physical world for inspiration. Public parks, libraries and community centers are all essential, often (but not always) owned and governed by the communities they serve and designed not just to serve individual users but to strengthen community ties.

Naturally, for new digital social institutions to succeed, they need help. But as Congress begins to debate trillions of dollars in stimulus aid and infrastructure needs, there might be no better investment in repairing our country than in improving the infrastructure for our digital public lives. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ bipartisan Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship recently called for a “tax on digital advertising that could be deployed in a public media fund that would support experimental approaches to public social media platforms as well as local and regional investigative journalism.” Biden should call on Congress to support this proposal.

It’s become clear in the Trump era how truth has fractured. But solving this problem isn’t one of content alone: What we believe depends on whom we trust. Trust requires building spaces where we’re able to see and meet those who are different from us, and ultimately form relationships.

Adam M. Enders is assistant professor of political science at the University of Louisville where he studies conspiracy beliefs, misinformation and polarization.

President-elect Biden’s central goal should be unity by shared reality. Most importantly, he should stay committed to empirically verifiable facts, even when conspiracy theories and misinformation are hurled in his direction. If Biden simply refrains from baselessly questioning the integrity of journalists, scientists and other experts—even those who are his political opponents—the public will slowly begin to rebuild faith in our institutions and in reliable information. If Biden refuses to wield misinformation or conspiracy theories when the truth is inconvenient for him or his party, such baseless ideas will fade, along with the voices of their proponents.

This goal of shared reality cannot be accomplished by Biden alone. He must also repopulate our government—especially the departments of State and Justice—with public servants who are committed to making the government work for its people, rather than systematically dismantling government from within. Those disinterested in, even hostile toward, the missions of their own bureaucratic organizations that ensure clean air, quality education and diplomatic relations with other nations are also agnostic to a shared reality and the civility it breeds. Biden must also hold accountable members of his own administration when they stray from the truth or pander to our worst fears and insecurities.

Even though conspiracy theories, misinformation and other dubious ideas always have, and always will, exist, societal leaders set the parameters for political discourse. Any chance at restoring a working baseline of the civility required for effective democratic governance requires shared reality—and, as decades of political science research can attest, this effort must begin at the top.

Cliff Albright is co-founder and executive director of the Black Voters Matter Fund.

Although the calendar reads 2021, the current moment has much in common with the inauguration of 1877, following the infamous Tilden-Hayes Compromise. In that historical moment, Black progress and, quite frankly, Black lives were the compromise, as the North ended its commitment to the goals of emancipation by removing federal troops from the South. One might say that January 6 was an echo of the country’s previous failure to protect democracy.

It’s also ironic that as we recently celebrated another Martin Luther King Jr. holiday this week, Biden and the rest of the country are essentially asking the same question that Dr. King asked in 1967: Where do we go from here? Chaos or community?

One action Biden can take to help answer that question is to call for Congress to fast-track the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, especially considering that some states, including my home state of Georgia, are already considering legislation to further restrict voting rights. Although the legislation, which must be reintroduced in the new 117th Congress, may not be ready for Biden to sign on Day One, his administration can immediately begin to join voting rights organizations in current litigation against states that have restricted voting rights and access in recent years. And though such legal support is not a replacement for restoring the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance provisions, it’s an immediate step he can take to demonstrate his commitment to voting rights.

However, as important as voting rights are, the current cancer that plagues America goes beyond voting rights and requires a much more comprehensive, indeed soul-searching, response. Towards this end, Biden should immediately support H.R. 40, also commonly known as the reparations bill, which would create a commission to study slavery, the legacy of structural racism and potential remedies. That will not be ready to sign on Day One, but as it works its way through the legislative process, Biden should begin the process by using his executive powers to create such a commission, which can then be strengthened and further institutionalized through congressional action. In doing so, Biden can demonstrate support that goes beyond the bully pulpit and which fully commits to transformative healing.

Some opponents might argue that, given current tensions, any suggestion of pursuing or even studying reparations will sow more division than unity. Such arguments are framed in a way as to center the concerns of white America to the detriment of everyone else. Truly healing the country requires centering those who have had actual injuries for centuries, rather than those who have had scabs manufactured by a white supremacist demagogue in the White House. More importantly, our history demonstrates that when Black life is respected and civil rights are advanced, the entire country benefits, including those who mean us harm.

Ruth S. Shim is a physician, director of cultural psychiatry and professor of clinical psychiatry at the University of California, Davis.

Biden can begin to set us on a path toward healing and unite the country by creating a truth and reconciliation commission in the United States, allowing us to examine the pernicious historical origins of structural racism in society. This is not a new idea. In June, Rep. Barbara Lee introduced a resolution in the House of Representatives to establish a United States Commission on Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation, before it stalled in the House Judiciary Committee.

The bold and innovative part of this idea would be for a president of the United States to take the lead in making this commission a reality. Other countries, including South Africa, Canada and Argentina, have successfully enacted truth and reconciliation commissions.

The emphasis on the truth is what is needed now. Narratives about historic atrocities that were fueled by racism have been consistently erased or reframed through the lens of white supremacy that has dominated American society since its founding. A fact-finding commission, focused on the truth of slavery, repeated acts of genocide against Indigenous people, the Civil War, the Mexican-American War, and other historical instances of oppression and marginalization are needed in a country where these stories are retold under false pretenses, and heroes and villains are recast.

Truth, followed by reparative and restorative justice, is the first step to heal the deep, festering wound of structural racism in America and its impact on all aspects of society, including inequities in wealth, health and power. Biden has the power to create this commission, legitimize it and work for its success.

Thomas J. Sugrue is director of the Cities Collaborative at New York University, where he is a professor of history and social and cultural analysis.

It’s time for Biden to fulfill an unmet promise dating to the New Deal: to provide Americans the right to a decent home. For decades, the federal government has underwritten homeownership for select Americans: mostly white, middle-class suburbanites. Everyone else has been left to fend for themselves in a real estate market full of sharks: predatory lenders, rapacious investors and exploitative landlords. The federal government has largely withdrawn from the provision of public housing, and Trump gutted fair housing. Stepping into the gap are for-profit investors and developers that scoop up distressed properties, do little to upgrade them and rent them at substantial profits.

Housing insecurity is one of America’s most serious preexisting economic conditions, worsened by the pandemic. Biden plans to address some of the symptoms. He is expected to issue an executive order to extend the nationwide moratorium on evictions through September 2021, and his proposed stimulus package will provide $35 billion in additional subsidies to defray housing costs and prevent homelessness.

This spending is necessary but far from sufficient for those working-class and poor Americans who can’t afford decent housing even when they work full time. America’s stock of homes for sale—especially in the major metropolitan areas that are the core of the nation’s economy—are overpriced. Affordable rentals are in short supply. Nearly half of America's renters are cost-burdened, spending over 30 percent of their income on housing.

Biden can do more. One promising proposal is to create a new Social Housing Development Authority, a federally backed agency that can purchase and rehabilitate apartments and homes. Another is repealing the Faircloth Amendment, a two-decade-old moratorium on the construction of new public housing. Nearly every city has massive waiting lists for government-subsidized housing, but the supply has dwindled.

Improving access to affordable housing will help to bring the country together by narrowing the huge racial wealth gaps that bitterly divide America, as families who pay less for housing will have more money to spend and save. Stable housing has many other pluses: better health, less crime, greater political participation. Housing insecurity affects everyone. Biden has the opportunity to do something that will help uplift Democrats and Republicans alike.

Sergio Garcia-Rios is an assistant professor of government and Latino studies at Cornell University.

Trump’s visit to the U.S.-Mexico border in his final days as president signaled that he sees the “wall” as a landmark of his administration. However, it is his zero-tolerance policy, the resulting family separations and the abuse of immigrants—which even some Republicans criticized—that will leave a deeper scar in our collective memory, particularly for the tens of millions of foreign-born Americans for whom immigration is personal.

It is important for the Biden administration to take action to begin healing this scar. The damage done to the families and children directly affected by these policies is beyond repair. But a sensible and important first step Biden could take toward healing the nation as a whole would be to set up a commission on Day One to investigate the atrocities that took place in those detention centers, including the reported unnecessary hysterectomies performed on immigrant women. The commission should find those responsible for wrongdoing and hold them accountable.

This kind of a commission would demonstrate to immigrants, who have been demonized in this country for far too long, that they are truly welcome here. And it would signal to those who demonize them that their actions are un-American. The first step to find healing is to recognize there is sickness, and there is no other way to think of America’s treatment of immigrants in the past several years.

Sandro Galea, a physician and epidemiologist, is dean and Robert A. Knox professor at Boston University School of Public Health.

The central story of the Covid-19 pandemic is one of health inequity. Black Americans have experienced higher rates and more severe cases than white Americans, and overall Covid-19 has been more prevalent among people of color. The roots of these inequities are not new; they lie in a long history of marginalization and disenfranchisement dating back centuries. Black Americans in particular live shorter, sicker lives than do white Americans.

While there has been much discussion of Black-white health disparities over recent decades, the solutions that are regularly proposed involve efforts to improve the health care system on its own. But this is not enough. The Biden administration can work toward rectifying fundamental health inequities by moving us toward Black reparations. Reparations can take many forms, ranging from ideas like baby bonds to cash transfers to adults, either of which would at least help to improve the current state of affairs. The Biden administration can, early in its tenure, establish a high-level commission to assess the best approach to implement Black reparations, to conduct return-on-investment analyses and to make the case to the country that we will not, in any foreseeable future, narrow health inequities without some form of Black reparations.

Covid-19 has created a window of opportunity to discuss publicly what was once a politically untenable issue: restituting to Black families wealth they have not been able to accumulate over generations, and leveling the opportunity playing field for all to have better health. This would be a first step toward a less unequal country, one that is more united, better and healthier for all.

Caitlin Rivers is an epidemiologist and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

Four hundred thousand Americans (and counting) have lost their lives to Covid-19, and they have left behind hundreds of thousands of grieving families and communities. Unlike after September 11, Hurricane Katrina and other major tragedies, there has been very little public recognition of the shared trauma of this pandemic. If the country does not take time to recognize these losses, we will be much slower to heal. Coming together to support families facing empty chairs at the dinner table could be one step toward renewing a sense of national unity and purpose.

Biden could announce a week of national mourning for the victims of the Covid-19 pandemic. The week of mourning could be filled with public ceremonies, remembrances and shows of support for survivors. In addition to events led by the White House, state and local leaders and media outlets could be encouraged to organize similar efforts. There could also be events honoring health care workers to thank them for their heroism and service. The week could be followed by a series of announcements or initiatives aimed at defeating Covid-19. Americans will only slow transmission and regain control of the pandemic through collective action. Taking time to remember the victims would help to bring us together and restore focus on that goal.

Abraar Karan is an internal medicine doctor at the Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School and a research consultant on Covid-19 epidemiology to the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response.

Mask use still remains far too politically polarized in this country. But the reality is that a sizable majority of Americans have embraced wearing face coverings to prevent the spread of coronavirus. Rather than continuously telling Americans to “mask up,” thus reminding people that masks have become a sign of division, the Biden administration should reframe the meaning of masks in America as something that unites us and make better masks widely available.

Many of us are still left wearing cloth masks or folded T-shirts as face coverings. But with widespread use of masks that have higher filtration capabilities, we could both protect people from becoming infected by others and help prevent sick people, many of whom don’t have symptoms, from infecting others. A number of places, including Hong Kong and Singapore, have provided their citizens with free, reusable, washable masks with better filters, using vending machines and post offices to help with distribution. In the United States, there’s still a strong strain of resistance to mask wearing in the first place. But that makes it even more important to get better masks to those who do wear them—which is still a lot of people. The Biden administration should invoke the Defense Production Act to scale up America’s production of better masks quickly, working with private-sector companies to increase our national supply to support health care workers and the general public.

Better masks can function almost as a “temporary vaccine” for the purposes of stopping transmission, especially while many states are struggling with an inefficient vaccine rollout and in the face of new virus variants. They also can help us stay prepared for the next respiratory emerging pathogen; reduce the rate of other infections, such as the seasonal flu; and even deter bio-terror. These are basic health goals all Americans should be able to get behind, with Biden’s guidance.

Kay C. James is president of The Heritage Foundation.

To unify the country, Biden can start by confronting the coronavirus pandemic, which affects every American and has had a profound impact on our lives and livelihoods. Much discontent in America could be solved if Biden as president does three things: making rapid self-tests widely available, pushing to open our schools and ensuring efficient vaccine distribution.

Rapid self-testing would be a way to quickly identify those who are infected to prevent them from infecting others and limit the number of government-imposed lockdowns. Biden’s FDA should quickly approve more of these tests and make them available without a prescription.

Biden has recognized the importance of reopening our schools. Virtual schooling is leaving too many students behind. As president, he should use the bully pulpit to confront teachers unions—the biggest impediment to getting kids back in the classroom.

The federal government should also provide assistance to each state by facilitating and supporting vaccine distribution. We can overcome the initial challenges we’ve encountered, and it begins by delivering Americans much-needed clarity to make distribution a success.

All of these recommendations are not partisan in nature and should appeal to Biden and to the vast majority of the country. At the same time, the president should recognize the federal government’s limitations in fighting the virus. State and federal leaders must both take responsibility and not cast blame on others when their efforts come up short. Rather than confusion, division and finger-pointing, we desperately need to be working together, and the new president should lead us in doing so.

Robert B. Reich is an author and professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, including as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton.

Regardless of political affiliation, Americans need lower drug prices. Pharmaceuticals are taking an ever-larger portion of the typical workers' paychecks. In addition, Black Americans face a higher incidence of preexisting conditions than do white Americans, including diabetes and heart disease, that lead to greater risks from the coronavirus. These conditions often require prescription drugs with sky-high prices. The good news is Biden need not await congressional action. Federal law currently grants the president administrative authority to take targeted actions to ensure public access to drugs with out-of-reach high prices or inadequate stockpiles. Biden can lower drug prices through Section 1498 of the federal code, which gives the executive branch the power to revoke a company’s exclusive right to a drug and license the patent to a generic manufacturer instead. By doing so, Biden could unite the country behind a high-impact policy people on all ends of the spectrum are affected by.

Khalil Gibran Muhammad is professor of history, race and public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and author of The Condemnation of Blackness.

In keeping with its Build Back Better campaign platform, the Biden administration and the Democratically led 117th Congress should create a new Works Progress Administration, one of the most successful federal programs in U.S. history. Not only did the WPA employ more than 8.5 million people for nearly a decade during the Great Depression, but the agency helped to build a public infrastructure of roads, bridges and transportation, as well as libraries, schools and hospitals, across the nation.

The WPA also employed thousands of cultural workers who produced some of our most treasured public art works, which documented and celebrated the resilience of Americans coming together and overcoming economic calamity, a climate-related drought crisis and one of the most divisive times in American history.

The new WPA could be renamed the New America Administration. Its mission should be defined by a commitment to multiracial democracy and economic justice for all—a goal never attempted in the nation’s history. As Biden has articulated, America cannot go back to “the way things were before” and instead must recognize and redress the historical exclusions of Black and Latino Americans, Native Americans, immigrants and women.

To do this, the NAA could build clean-energy, climate-resilient infrastructure, beginning in the most impoverished and racially marginalized ZIP codes in the United States. Instead of a system in which communities are chosen based on lobbying and political favoritism, an independent, nonpartisan commission could first rank, then prioritize ZIP codes by need so they receive an equitable share of resources until federal funds run out. Each infrastructure project could be federally regulated to meet the requirements of local residents. Local and state agencies could manage the projects directly, as well as supervising subcontractors and their locally hired workers. This would minimize or eliminate the use of tax credits for private developers and firms, whose bottom-line profits tend to benefit them more than the public good. And to ensure the economic and racial justice imperatives of the NAA are constitutionally sound, the Biden administration could use the respective legal frameworks of two previous presidential initiatives: President Barack Obama’s Promise Zones and President Trump’s Opportunity Zones.

Members of these communities could document and tell the stories of the making of a New America. The writers and poets, painters and podcasters would give voice and vision to “the land that has never been yet,” inspired by what the poet Langston Hughes wrote aspirationally in 1935, at the dawn of the old WPA: “O, yes, I say it plain / America never was America to me / And yet I swear this oath — America will be!”

Christopher Buskirk is editor and publisher of the journal American Greatness, co-author of American Greatness: How Conservatism, Inc. Missed the 2016 Election and What the D.C. Establishment Needs to Learn and a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times.

At some point, the future started looking more like a threat than a promise for a lot of Americans. The economic prospects for every generation that’s come after the baby boomers have been worse than for the one that came before. One way this manifests is in a view of politics as zero-sum, which leads to destructive, unsustainable rivalries. Improving the economic prospects of ordinary Americans should be job one for Biden.

One place to start is with a presidential initiative to make America the world leader in life sciences, from commonplace drugs to cutting-edge cancer therapies to the science developing around life extension. This means not just developing new things in America but making them here too, which would produce good paying jobs directly in the field and also in the ecosystem around it.

For starters, Biden should create a “buy American” requirement for the top 20 drugs prescribed to Medicare patients. This would require that those drugs and their precursor chemicals be manufactured in the United States. He could accomplish this through the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees Medicare and Medicaid and, though it would probably be unnecessary, through use of the Defense Production Act. This mandate should then expand to the newly developed therapies that require advanced contract development and manufacturing facilities. Such a move would catalyze the development of a robust ecosystem in life sciences based in America. Not only would it create a lot of high-paying jobs, both directly and indirectly, but as a big project, in which America can and should be a world leader, it would create a unifying sense of national purpose and identity.

Nina Vasan is chief medical officer of Real and executive director of Brainstorm: The Stanford Lab for Mental Health Innovation at Stanford University School of Medicine. Victor Agbafe is a dean’s and medical innovation scholar at the University of Michigan Medical School.

Suicide is a daily threat to our entire nation, across the political spectrum. Before the Covid-19 pandemic began, it was the second leading cause of death among American youth. This has only worsened, with more than 25 percent of youth having reported suicidal thoughts since the pandemic’s onset. Senior citizens are at increased risk as loneliness and isolation escalate. And 20 veterans die by suicide every day. By working to address this challenge, the Biden-Harris administration not only can help bring hope to Americans, but can unite us in a common goal.

To do this, Biden should work with Congress to launch a national Mental Health Corps. Young adults and veterans between 18 and 40 years of age would get trained as mental health counselors for youth, veterans and senior citizens in both homes and virtual settings. This program would have the same spirit as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps, which employed millions of young people at the time to plant trees and build national parks in the West.

In the immediate term, the Mental Health Corps would offer new employment prospects for young adults. Over time, it would bridge generational and geographic gaps in our nation, just like the preceding CCC. And, by connecting people with vastly different backgrounds around a shared goal, the program would help to ease the polarization that threatens our democracy. America has always been at its best when we come together to take on a shared struggle. The empathy we must show in addressing our nation’s mental health crisis provides us the same opportunity for collective healing.

Joan C. Williams is a professor at the University of California Hastings College of the Law and author of White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America.

What’s threatened the many white, noncollege-educated men who support Trump is the end of the American dream: Virtually all Americans used to do better than their parents; only half born in the 1980s will. American non-college-educated men feel ripped off because slash-and-burn capitalism has ripped them off: Virtually none of the productivity gains in this century have gone to them. They are wrong to blame immigrants and people of color, but Trump speaks their truth: that they feel emasculated, belittled and ignored. Delicious to think of yourself, instead, as a patriot saving democracy.

To appeal to these voters and address the real problems underlying their grievances, Biden needs an industrial policy that abandons neo-liberal assumptions that good jobs aren’t possible for non-college-grads. First, he should push for the $15/hour minimum wage to be included in the next stimulus bill, as well as broadband for the rural and declining counties that voted for Trump. While Biden can’t pass a stimulus bill without Congress, he can make every Thursday “infrastructure day” until Republicans cave from the persistent public pressure. Then he should use the Federal Financing Bank, which is controlled by the secretary of the Treasury, to finance new factories and green jobs—not just in California, but in Detroit and West Virginia.

Biden’s message? He has the back of the white working class because he has the back of the whole working class. Let’s return to a world where hard work pays off in a stable, middle-class life—that’s a message that will unify Americans across race, class, gender and immigration status.