The unusual situation regarding the Jan. 6th insurrection is that the Trump supporters are either denying that there was an insurrection or mitigating it by saying that it was a righteous riot in defense of voting rights despite the fact that a violent assault on the Capital has never occured in American history, even during Shays Rebellion, early on in American history, because it was a local event rather than a challenge to the sanctity of the transfer of power. How could this be when violent political opposition to a government was regarded as a weighty matter that required people to declare their old or new allegiances? The Founding Fathers knew they were engaged in a revolution, had explained their reasons for doing so and pledged their sacred honor to that cause. The French and Russian revolutionaries were not queasy about saying thy were out to overthrow their regimes and the Confederates regarded themselves as doing the right thing to oppose the Union, explaining, as the other fomenters did, why they had done so, which was to protect a slave order that was required so that there could be a democracy for the white elite. But this time is different. Rioters showing up in court say they were misled or overcome by enthusiasm. Not much there really happened and legislators who had abetted the uprising now hide their enthusiasm at the time by hiding behind technicalities so as not to be indicted rather than facing up to what they did as the honorable course. Let us try to understand this not as cowardice but rather as a distinctive political phenomenon, sort of a rehearsal for revolution that might arise again if people are able to survive what they hope is the temporary quelling of insurrection or maybe even claiming that it need not arise again because usual electoral politics will allow the insurrectionists to become triumphant, whatever their claim that electoral politics have been deeply delegitimated in 2020. Maybe Wyoming politics are clean and so can get rid of Liz Chaney, which is certainly the right of the Wyoming electorate however unwise it may be.
Current Trump endorsed candidates declare that the 2020 election was rigged but they proclaim it but do not do the bother of trying to present this very momentous claim, which is no less than that the democratic system has been fatally flawed, whether through chicanery or biased election tactics. You would think that Kari Lake, the candidate for governor of Arizona, would have some elder statesmen within their own ranks present a white paper to sum up the evidence for electoral malfeasance. But that can;t be done, unless it is just that there is a vast conspiracy of the media keeping such reports as rising to the surface. But even Rudolph Guiliani, deeply involved in trying to rig the election onto the other side, admits that he has theories but no evidence. Wouldn’t you think the Trumpists were embarrassed at not being able to deliver any of the goods, so serious is the charge they make? But no, it is just talk without substance and we all wonder where all their anger came from, their resentment against the American system so deep that they prefer to believe that the election was rigged rather than that it was an election they prefer their own candidate to have won. It was a clear Biden victory, when Geoprge W.’s victory over Al Gore was not, even if Biden’s victory was not a landslide.
You would also have thought that the Republican Establishment had taken a stand just so as to go past the matter. Gerald Ford had nearly won election in 1976 just two and a half years after Nixon resigned. The Republican Party had not been disqualified by the stain, only looking past the Nixon ghost. The nation forgives its sins. It seems to me it would have been easy enough for the Republican Senate caucus to have signed a manifesto that found Trump’s activities on Jan. 6th despicable or only that Biden had indeed been legitimately elected, as most of them, apparently, really believed. They had no end of opportunities right after Jan 6th, when both McConnell and McCarthy said as much on the Congressional floors, but changed their minds perhaps because big donors said otherwise and pollsters showed the electorate preferred the Big Lie. And so the issue of whether the so-called loyal opposition is in fact aTrumpist party who questions the entire legitimacy of the electoral system, something unprecedented, though when the Senate Dixiecrats all signed the Southern Manifesto, proclaiming “Segregation Now And Forever, it was also an expression of the support of their voters, Senators not exactly profiles in courage, neither then or now, the issue however now even more fundamental than whether Blacks were to remain as second class citizens.
Trumpism is, however, not unprecedented. It is a larger and more unconstrained version of McCarthyism, which was the Anit-Communist movement of the Fifties which also centered on a politically malevolent figure whose vanity and boundless disregard for the facts as well as disregards of civil liberties left much of the population bewildered and seduced out of good sense.Joseph McCarthy claimed that there were eighty two communists in the State Department, brandishing papers at his press conference that might suggest that the information in them would document the claim. McCarthy lowered the number in subsequent press conferences but something had to be going on. Journalists came to find, in astonishment, that the papers were just a prop, pulled together from his office, and without reference to Communist plotters, and so eventually to be dismissed as without credibility, but how are you to counter truths that have nothing to do with the truth? It isn’t only Trump who seems to send logic topsy turvy, as if in violation of logical thinking. It was just that he was an old fashioned liar. Even Richard Nixon, the notorious hate monger of the Left and Liberals, who thought that citing twenty years of treason was a reference to the spirit of the Democratic Party rather than actual traitors, when the connotation was clear, just as in Trump’s address to the crowd before the Capital that they should be strong about what they should do without asking for a riot in so many words, but allowing what was to be inferred, had himself revealed a real agent of Communism at a high level, that Alger Hiss, while MccCarthy found no one. The best he could do was pester a Communist affiliate who was a dentist for having been promoted to Major in the U. S. Army
Eventually, McCarthy was undone as Eisenhower expected would be the case because McCarthy had bitten off more than he could chew,in attacking the Army. Regular Republicans had rallied around proper decorum so as to protect the institution they held dear. But the damage was done. People who taught high schools and colleges were deprived of their jobs and there was a much exaggerated issue posed as a central one, some unions indeed infiltrated by Communists, such as the dock workers in Hawaii, just as Fox News is now preoccupied with caravans of illegal immigrants coming up to the Rio Grande to do whatever kind of mischief they can imagine the immigrants might carry. A lot of fuss and bother that made supposedly serious people ponder what might be going on. William Buckley, Jr. on “The Firing Line” claimed in his epicene wayin his time that there was a point to McCarthyism even if it had been overdrawn. There were Communists in America’s midst and we should acknowledge that. But that was too easy in that Buckley was just saying that smoke might mean fire not that there was any just as rumors that the 2020 election was rigged was a thought many people thought might have happened and that therefore the certification of Jan 6th should be delayed, as Senator Ted Cruz suggested on that day, so as to clarify matters. Mind you, he didn’t claim there was any credence in the rumors, but rumor alone was reason to interrupt the constitutional order.
Now that the Republican leadership failed to do its duty to purgeTrump from their ranks and rebuild a party long recognized as becoming a majority party if it assimilated the Hispanic community by supporting some sort of immigration bill, instead we are likely to face the unpalatable prospect of needing the judicial system to put Trump in the dock rather than retire to his Mar a Lago dacha. It is unseemly for an ex-President to be prosecuted but he has certainly egged the judiciary on by taking classified documents, the only plausible reason for which was to trade secrets to the Russians for money. I don’t put it past him. And there are the other legal problems, like trying to alter the Georgia results and the real biggie, which is fomenting the attack on the Capital. All the evidence is clear, tape recorded for anyone to listen and see, and only dullards or deep subversives would think otherwise unless they are so deeply into the Trump mystique.
I don’t know why the Trumpists feel that way. The country, after all, is doing rather well. No American troops in foreign wars. Plenty of jobs and decreasing inflation. The real problems have to do with how to manage college debt and transition from an internal combustion automobile to an electric one. Hardly overwhelming. Why are people in such a snit that they see no qualms in overturning our nearly two and a half century constitutional system? I don’t know the answer to that. But the preferred courses of dealing with the Trump cancer on the Presidency have played their course. Since the Republican Congressional caucus in both Houses have refused to draw a line against insurrection and ostracized or condemned Trump, and because the Republican electorate has supported some Trump candidate endorses, the elections in November to decide whether J. D. Vance and the like get elected despite the fact that they disregard the insurrection or admire it, the only expedient left is the judicial system even though the grist of the judicial process grinds exceedingly slow. It has been two years since Trump, on tape, showed him trying to rig the Georgia election; it has been nearly that long since he fomented insurrection on the Capital, and the Georgia authorities and the Department of Justice have not acted on those while real time to discredit or shame Trump through legal action has passed by, he claiming, when running in 2024, that people would then be punishing him for his being politically active rather than having punished him for past illegalities. Just today, the affidavit justifying the recapture of documents Trump illegally took to Mar A Lago for reasons yet unclear have been at least partly spelled out, but that is a sideshow in that even purloined secrets are small change in comparison to fomenting insurrection not just by a speech but with forethought and preparation for the unprecedented disruption of the succession of power. Maybe Garland will get around to it but by then the elections in November will have made Trump's political influence moot or revived, and that is more important than mere judicial action. We haven’t been in this pickle since Aaron Burr was involved in an insurrection of the western territories of the United States. That worked out for the maintenance of the Republic, but don’t depend on that long past precedence.