Inauguration

Had the Founders of the American Republic left the capital in New York, it is hard to see how they could ever have had inaugural parades. Sealing off much of the downtown core, two subway stations and one of the city's busiest bridges for three days before a new president takes his oath would spark revolution in crowded Manhattan.

But in Washington, a city laid out by a native of Versailles and still imbued with a courtier spirit, the residents accept the quadrennial inconvenience with the same good cheer with which Las Vegans tolerate the all-night neon. It is how they make their living.

This year, though, the inconveniences go way beyond usual. The assortment of police forces that protect Washington - the Secret Service, the Park Service, the FBI, the congressional police and the District of Columbia's metropolitan force - are laying down the thickest cordon of security at any inauguration since Richard Nixon's first.

The inauguration began last night, with public concerts, jamborees and hoedowns. Tonight is the night for the $2,500-a-plate fundraising dinners and (the surprisingly scanty) parties in people's homes. Tomorrow morning, George W Bush and his wife arrive at the White House from Blair House to meet the Clintons. All four then drive to the Capitol for the swearing-in at noon.

Then the Clintons drive off - not to return home, for they have no home - but to a north-west Washington mansion bought with Hillary's book money. After the oath, the new president and his wife are driven in a motorcade up Pennsylvania Avenue back to the White House. There are more public events that afternoon and evening. Tomorrow night, the state parties throw what are grandly called "balls": 2,000-person crushes where the incoming administration can mingle with the country's most successful Buick dealers.

The seven previous inaugural weekends all proceeded without any trouble more serious than the occasional downtown music-lover complaining about the over-amplified sound of Tony Orlando's voice drifting into his condo.

This time, though, the police are expecting real trouble. Parade spectators will have their bags searched. Protesters have been warned that the big papier-mache puppets that showed up at the World Bank protests last spring are prohibited: they could be used to conceal weapons. Thousands of officers, uniformed and plain-clothed, will pounce on any group that attempts to mount a demonstration anywhere other than the assigned demonstration sites.

Police took few such precautions in 1981 for the inauguration of Ronald Reagan, a much more polarising figure. But Mr Reagan's election had surprised and demoralised the American Left: up until the last week of the 1980 campaign, he was neck-and-neck with Jimmy Carter. To everybody's surprise, Mr Reagan blasted Mr Carter out of office in the most crushing defeat of an incumbent president since Roosevelt ejected Hoover. The sign-painters and cat-callers stayed home, dejected and terrified.

By rights, they should be dejected this year, too. For the first time since 1948, they had on the ballot a serious, nationally recognised candidate who articulated their views: Ralph Nader. He won less than three per cent of the vote. It is hard to imagine a more resounding endorsement of the bourgeois centrism that allegedly governs the two big parties.

But it won't be the ex-Naderites who will be leading the protests. Al Gore has, improbably enough, been the beneficiary of a post-election eruption of black militancy. Black Democrats organised the most effective get-out-the-vote drive in memory for him. In Florida, where only 13 per cent of the population is black, blacks cast 16 per cent of the ballots. Black Democrats counted on having a president who would owe them and could therefore be counted on to appoint judges to reverse the 1990s trend to declare pro-black racial preferences unconstitutional.

Instead, America elected a president committed to appointing judges who believe in race-blindness, in large part because many of the votes cast by black Floridians were spoilt by the voters' failure to mark their ballots properly. Black Democrats have hurled the foulest accusations against the incoming administration and are threatening to shut down the proceedings. It is they who will be responsible for whatever trouble erupts tomorrow.

Whether or not riots erupt on the Mall, the senatorial equivalent of a riot has already commenced inside the Capitol, where the quiet, decent man designated by Mr Bush as his choice for attorney-general, former Missouri senator John Ashcroft, is being treated by his Democratic questioners as if he had left his Klan robes in the senatorial cloakroom.

Jerry Hunter, the St Louis lawyer who assisted then-governor Ashcroft with minority recruitment in the 1980s, wrote in yesterday's Wall Street Journal: "It is sad, in fact pathetic, that I must take the time to respond to charges that John Ashcroft is a racist . . . [He] is not only not a racist, he appointed more blacks to positions in Missouri state government than any of his Democratic predecessors."

But, in this context, "racist" is a term of art with a meaning rather different from what it has in common speech. Here "racist" is used to mean "an individual whom until yesterday the vast majority of black Americans had never heard of but whose words and actions, when selectively reported and cunningly misrepresented, can be used to whip already agitated black Americans into a frenzy of paranoia".

Few observers think there is any real chance of the Ashcroft nomination being halted. There is zero possibility that the protesters on the Mall will impede Mr Bush's inauguration. But the organisers of these disruptions have longer-range objectives than that: they want to wreck and sully a government whose legitimacy they don't accept. Never mind that this government is the lawfully elected one: as the events of the past eight years have abundantly proved, when the post-Clinton Democratic party must decide between law and power, it chooses power every time.