Jimmy Carter’s funeral is giving the nation an uncanny week of routine on the eve of political upheaval.
Americans know what to do when a president dies.
We find the instructions they have often personally laid out. We polish the horse-drawn caisson, and we put on a show of pomp and circumstance that gathers political foes in a display of collective mourning, reflection and unity.
That’s what’s happening this week in Washington, where former President Jimmy Carter is lying in state in the Capitol Rotunda before a funeral tomorrow that will convene all five living current, former and future presidents: three Democrats and two Republicans. The pageantry is unfolding just days after the uneventful certification of the election, giving the nation an uncanny week of routine — of bipartisan political ritual — on the eve of political upheaval.
“It just made me happy,” the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin told me today, “to see these moments can still exist.”
None of it is enough to cover up the nation’s stark political divisions. As Carter’s coffin approached the Capitol yesterday, it passed tall security fencing erected because the ritual of peacefully transferring power is no longer a given. President-elect Donald Trump stopped in at the Rotunda a few moments ago to pay his respects to Carter, but he earlier this week attacked one of Carter’s signature achievements, the permanent neutrality of the Panama Canal, and recently complained that Carter’s death means flags will be at half-staff when he is inaugurated in a week and a half.
And while nobody knows what awaits the country when the rituals of January are over, many insist they matter all the same.
“They are a demonstration to the citizens of this country and to the world that our country is not just the hot mess of what we see on social media every day,” Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat whose top role on the Senate Rules Committee means she is instrumental in coordinating inaugurations and memorial events at the Capitol, told me.