Reflections on the First Anniversary of January 6, 2021

 

Reflections on the First Anniversary of January 6, 2021.

January 8, 2022

 

Two days ago we observed the first anniversary of the events of January 6, 2021. On that date Donald Trump, while he was still President of the United States, stirred up a mob of his supporters and sent them down Pennsylvania Avenue to attack the United States Capitol building. January 6 was the day Congress met to receive and certify the presidential electoral votes of the states after the November, 2020, election, a task assigned to them by the United States Constitution. Even before the 2020 election Donald Trump, as president, had asserted many times that the upcoming election was “rigged,” and that it being rigged was the only way he could lose. He lost both the popular vote and electoral vote. Not only did he refuse to concede to president-elect Biden (something losing politicians usually do though doing so has no legal significance). He continued loudly and continually to claim that he had actually won the election by a large margin but that his victory had been “stolen.” He began to come up with whatever cockamamie scheme he could think of to reverse the outcome of the election. Some of his followers came up with the slogan, “Stop the Steal!” There was and never has been any evidence to support Trump’s claim of massive irregularities in the 2020 election. There was no wide-spread voter fraud, Trump’s claims to the contrary notwithstanding. The appropriate state officials in every state certified the result of the election in their states. Some of those state officials were Democrats, though many of them were either Republicans or held a nonpartisan office. There simply is no evidence at all to support Trump’s claim that he had actually won the election.

Trump tried various desperate things to reverse the outcome of a free and fair presidential election. He sent hack lawyers, including Rudy Giuliani, once touted as “America’s Mayor,” into courts in swing states seeking to have the courts find enough voter fraud to declare the election results in their state invalid. Those lawyers presented not one shred of evidence to support their spurious claims of fraud. Courts across the country easily dismissed Trump’s cases. Judges often chastised Trump’s lawyers for having filed an unfounded suit. I don’t know if any of those lawyers got hit with Civil Rule 11 sanctions, but if they weren’t they should have been.[1]

Trump tried other desperate measures in his vain attempt to hold onto power though the American people had voted him out of office. He tried to get Republican-controlled state legislatures in Michigan and elsewhere to invalidate the election result in their state that showed Biden the winner and name Trump electors instead. None of them did. He tried to pressure the Republican Secretary of State of Georgia to “find” enough votes for him to reverse Biden’s narrow win in that state. That committed public servant refused to invent votes that didn’t exist. Trump’s shenanigans didn’t change one single electoral vote.

Trump saw his last chance to save his hold on power in the final act of the presidential election drama, Congress receiving and certifying the electoral votes of the various states. Congress would meet on January 6, 2021, to carry out that constitutional but largely ceremonial function. Trump knew, however, that Vice President Mike Pence, in his capacity of president of the Senate, would preside at that session of Congress. Trump asserted that Pence had the legal authority to declare the presidential election invalid and either to send the election back to the states for a re-vote or to the US Supreme Court for resolution. News reports say Pence wavered a bit when Trump demanded that he invalidate the election. In the end however he recognized that he did not have the legal authority to do what Trump wanted. He did not try to invalidate the election result.

Trump was getting desperate, for he could not face losing but clearly he had lost. (One of Trump’s favorite putdown of people he doesn’t like is to call that person a loser.) Pence wouldn’t do what Trump wanted. So sometime before January 6 he set up a public rally in Washington, D.C., and urged his supporters from around the country to come to the nation’s capital on that date. He or his people told them it was going to be “wild.” As Congress gathered to certify the electoral college results Trump and some of his minions, including the now thoroughly discredited Giuliani, addressed the crowd that had gathered not far down Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol. Trump gave them one of his rabblerousing speeches and got them changing “Stop the Steal! Stop the Steal!” He told them to march down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol. Many of them did, and when they did all hell broke loose.

When the mob got to the Capitol someone erected a makeshift gallows in front of the Capitol, and mob began to chant “Hang Pence! Hang Pence!” Mike Pence was their guy’s vice president, but he wasn’t going to attempt to overturn the election results. So he became the mob’s bête noire. I’m no fan of Mike Pence; but he was the serving Vice President of the United States, and Trump’s mob wanted to kill him. The rioters carried many different flags and banners. There were many Make America Great Again banners there of course. Some rioters carried American flags. Most offensively, at least one of them carried the southern battle flag from the Civil War. It was clear this mob was attacking the federal government of the United States in something like the way South Carolina did when it fired on Fort Sumter. The seditious rioters overwhelmed the grossly outmatched Capitol police and broke into the building. They smashed windows and bashed down doors. Many members of Congress were locked down in the Senate chamber. The police got Pence out of there to safety, but the representatives and senators in the Senate chamber were still at great risk. The rioters broke into many offices in the building, including that of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, where someone stole a laptop computer. Inside the Senate chamber Capitol police told the people to put on the gas masks that were stored under senators’ seats. Who knew there were gas masks stored under the senators’ seats? I sure didn’t. Eventually the Capitol police got all of the members of Congress to safe locations, but in the process they shot and killed one of the rioters who was trying to break into the Senate chamber.

Trump’s mob ultimately failed in their attempt to stop Congress’ certification of Biden’s electoral victory, but they caused extensive damage to the Capitol building. They had members of Congress using their cell phones to make what they thought might their last call to their loved ones. The Capitol police showed enormous courage and managed to keep the effect of the seditious invasion of the Capitol from being worse than it actually was. Still, in the days after the riot two Capitol police officers took their own lives. The US Capitol had not been invaded and occupied since the British did it in the War of 1812. January 6, 2021, was a shameful day in American history. May it never be repeated.

In the news coverage of the first anniversary of the January 6 insurrection we heard reports about what was happing in the White House as the events of that day unfolded. Though Trump had told the mob he had assembled that he would be at the Capitol with them, he went back to the safety of the White House. It seems Trump was watching the riot on television and was thoroughly enjoying the show. We hear that members of Trump’s staff, his daughter, and even the despicable “news” hosts of Fox News pleaded with him to do something to stop the madness. He sat there doing nothing for something like three hours. He finally sent out a tepid text message telling the rioters to stop, but it seems clear that he could have prevented much property damage and personal physical and psychological injury had he acted sooner and more firmly.

The political analysists other than the rightwing hacks at Fox News and other ultra-conservative news outlets generally agree that the January 6 invasion of the Capitol was the most serious attack on American democracy since the Civil War. Of course there have always been anti-governmental forces in this country. To a significant extent democracies that respect individual rights must tolerate such forces. There have been American white supremacist terror groups in this country for most of the country’s history. Hate-filled racists created the Ku Klux Klan shortly after the Civil War for example. These groups have been able on occasion to carry off significant attacks against the US government, the horrific bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995 being the most egregious example.

But the January 6 assault on the Capitol was different from anything we had seen before. What made it different was mostly the involvement in it of Donald Trump, at the time still the sitting President of the United States. We don’t yet know the full extent of his involvement in the planning of the January 6 attack. We do however know a good deal about how he at the very least created the atmosphere from which the assault arose and in which it took place. From before the 2020 election, and more vociferously after it, Trump spread the big lie that his election victory would be or had been stolen from him. Using the big lie is of course a well-known tactic of dictators and would-be dictators. Hitler’s big lie was that the Jews were responsible for Germany’s problems after World War I. Stalin’s big lie was that he was acting for the benefit of the working people of the USSR. Trump’s big lie about the 2020 election hasn’t produced disaster on anything remotely like the scale of the ones those two big lies created. It was nonetheless a big lie and one supported by no evidence. In the time just before January 6, 2021, Trump said over and over and over again that his election victory had been stolen from him and that Joe Biden was not the legitimate president.

It appears that he was involved in the planning in the rally in Washington, D.C., on January 6. We know that he spoke to the big crowd that gathered in response to his call for his supporters to come. In his speech he of course repeated the big lie that his election victory has been stolen from him. He got the crowd chanting “Stop the Steal! Stop the Steal!” He told them to go to the Capitol to stop what he called the steal, that is, to stop Congress from carrying out its constitutional duty. Trump even said that he would be there with them, though of course he wasn’t and probably had no intention of being. Once the assault started he sat for something like three hours watching it on TV, doing nothing to stop it though the rioters understood that they were doing what Trump wanted them to do. The extent of Trump’s culpability for the events of January 6, 2021, remains to be fully established. Yet even based on what we already know his culpability is substantial.

Yet that Donald Trump is potentially criminally liable for his involvement in the January 6 insurrection is not the only nor necessarily the most important conclusion from the stunning events of that day. Donald Trump was a cause of those events. There’s no doubt about that. Perhaps more importantly, he is also a symptom of a deeper disorder in American society and culture. To understand how he is such a symptom we must go back into American history. Much of what follows is well known, but I’ll go over it briefly anyway.

This country was founded by and primarily for white men. When Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that he and his cronies held it to be self-evident that all men are created equal he wasn’t telling the whole truth. I’ve always been told that the word “men” in that statement means all people. It might mean that to some people today (though not to me), but that’s now what it meant when Jefferson used it. When he used the word it excluded fully one half of the colonies’ population, for Jefferson and the others never intended it to apply to women. They probably intended to exclude even white men who did not own landed property. Most definitely they did not intend it to include Black men much less Black women. The economy of much of the country at that time and for decades to come was founded on the enslavement of Black men, women, and children. Thomas Jefferson and George Washington both owned slaves. The men who established this country never intended it to exist for the benefit of all people. They intended it to exist primarily for white, land-owning men. At the beginning that’s who the country was created to benefit. The land owning part eventually got dropped, but white men have held a position of privilege and power in this country ever since.

I have neither the time nor the resources to survey the entire history of the white male dominance of the United States across its many decades of existence. The general outlines of that history are well known. It took a Civil War that killed far more Americans than any other war we’ve ever fought and an amendment to the US Constitution to end the enslavement of Black Americans mostly if not quite entirely by white Americans. (There were a few Black slaveowners who owned other Black people, a fact I learned only recently from the great Henry Louis Gates, Jr.) The Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution ended slavery. It did not end penal servitude, and it most certainly did not end American racism.

That racism continued full steam ahead. It created de jure racial segregation and white on Black terror in the Jim Crow south. It created de facto residential and educational racial segregation in the north and the west. In 1896 the US Supreme Court issued its decision in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson, in which the court said that racially separate public facilities were constitutional as long as they were equal, which for the most part they never were. White Americans assaulted and even killed Black veterans returning from World War I. On May 31 and June 1, 1921, a white mob attacked and leveled the relatively prosperous, Black area called the Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma, an atrocity that has been covered up in this country until quite recently. A civil rights movement among northern Blacks and a flowering of Black culture called the Harlem Renaissance grew stronger in the 1920s. Yet even relatively progressive Americans like Franklin Delano Roosevelt did little or nothing to address racial segregation or American racism. Black Americans were treated as second class citizens all through these decades of American history.

Things began to change a bit after World War II. President Truman desegregated the US military in 1948, exercising his power as Commander in Chief of the armed forces. In 1954 the US Supreme Court issued its decision in Brown v. Board of Education that overturned the Plessy decision and declared racial  segregation in schools and other public facilities to be unconstitutional. On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of a public bus, an action that became one of the turning points in the civil rights movement. Demands that governments in the south respect the voting rights of Black citizens became more visible. Racist southerners used the police and private terror in an attempt to stop the movement. They failed. In 1964 the federal government enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits racial and other types of segregation or discrimination in facilities open to the public. In 1965, the federal government enacted the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in an attempt to protect the voting rights of minority populations that many states were still effectively restricting. Despite these bits of progress, all through the 60s and beyond white people maintained their position of dominance in American society. If you look at photographs from those years of the people serving on governing bodies or in major financial institutions across the nation you will see next to no Black faces.

In the decades since the 1960s, while the dominance of whites continued, the demographics and the public face of this country have been changing. The percentage of the population of both Blacks and Latinx people are increasing. Experts predict that by the mid-2040s whites, while they will still be the largest demographic group, they will no longer be a majority in this country. We hear about and see more minority leaders in business, education, politics, medicine, and other fields than we ever have before. We’ve even had a Black president. Television commercials are often a good place to discern changing demographics. Advertising executives must understand their audience and the potential consumers of whatever their clients are selling. More and more TV ads these days feature Black characters rather than white ones. We see mixed race couples in television advertising. The advertising business seems to be reacting to the country’s changing demographics more than is any other sector of American life.

Large numbers of white Americans across the country not just in the south have resisted every advance toward true freedom that people of color have made from the beginnings of the country to today. For quite some time now that resistance has led to the creation of white supremacist terror groups. In 1995 one of them managed to set off a large car bomb in front of the federal building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. We see images of these groups dressed in para-military gear and carrying military-style automatic (or at least semi-automatic) rifles. Early in Donald Trump’s presidency a large number of armed white supremacists descended on Richmond, Virginia. They shouted, “You will not replace us! You will not replace us!” For some time now a white supremacist underclass has been developing in this country. White supremacists in that underclass speak of starting a new civil war. They have committed acts of violence against innocent people, and they are prepared to commit many more.

These groups were long a fringe element of American society. Most Americans probably didn’t know they existed. But then Donald Trump, a sleazy New York real estate developer and publicity seeking egomaniac, entered American politics. He pandered to white supremacists. He called immigrants from Mexico rapists and murderers. He said there were fine people among the bigots who invaded Richmond. He is almost certainly himself a racist; but even if he isn’t, he talks and behaves like one in public. Trump’s bigotry and pandering have made many Americans believe that racism is now more socially acceptable than it had been for a very long time. Trump staged large political rallies where he whipped up the crowd with demagogic rhetoric. He said he would “make America great again.” White supremacists across the country heard him saying that he would put white people back on top, pandering to white supremacists’ belief that whites are being displaced by people of color all across our nation. “MAGA” has entered our vocabulary. It designates and is used by Trump’s bigoted, violent, white supremacist followers. Trump lies to them like he lies to everyone, that is, he lies all the time. His white supremacist supporters buy his lies as though they were gospel truth.

Trump has completely changed the nature of the Republican Party. It was a liberal party when founded, the party of Abraham Lincoln with his Emancipation Proclamation and Teddy Roosevelt with his campaign against the business trusts that dominated the country’s economy. By the 1920s it had become a typical conservative political party. It came to represent the business class. It advocated small government. It didn’t want government intervening much at all in the economy or in people’s lives. It did however do some good things. For example, Richard Nixon, probably the worst president we ever had before Trump, signed into law the statute creating the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Compared to today’s Republicans, Nixon’s domestic agenda looks downright progressive.

Now Trump has taken over that Republican Party. He has turned it into his own cult of personality. The party that used to call itself the Grand Old Party no longer stands for anything but Donald Trump. Rabid, bigoted Trump supporters are not a majority among the people who identify themselves as Republicans, yet Trump uses those supporters successfully to control the party. How does he do it? He uses fear to manipulate our political system. It has long been true that a tightly organized but small group of extremists can have an inordinate impact in politics. In order to win elections in this country politicians must most commonly win primary elections. That is, they must run against and defeat other politicians of their own party. Primary elections are usually decided by relatively few voters. Fanatical Trump supporters will turn out for primary elections in higher numbers than will more traditional Republican voters. Republican politicians are terrified that they will lose primary elections if the vote of Trump’s rabble goes to someone else. They call having a Trump-endorsed candidate run against them being “primaried.” Republicans from Mitch McConnell on down, even most of those who in the past have criticized Trump, kneel at Trump’s feet hoping he won’t have somebody primary them the next time they’re up for reelection. That’s how Trump has turned the Republican Party in to the Donald Trump Cult of Personality.

We need to understand that the attack on the Capitol on January 6 by rabid Trump supporters did not spring fully developed from the head of Zeus. It arose out of the corrosion of the American body politic. It arose because Donald Trump so successfully took over the Republican Party and used it to whip up his supporters with lie after lie. It arose because enough white American men feel threatened by the country’s changing demographics. That change plays right into these people’s racial bigotry, a bigotry they get because of America’s original sin of racism. They imbibed racism with their mother’s milk, just as we all did. Some of us have recognized our internal racism and worked to overcome it. To Trump’s rabid base racism is just God’s honest truth.

Most of Trump’s supporters probably couldn’t articulate it very well, but at some level these mostly poorly educated white men sense that they and all white men like them are losing their privileged status as the controllers of the status quo. At some level of their psyches these men have known that white men will eventually lose their hold on politics in this country. They will have to share power with women and with people of color. At some level many of them have thought, “I may be poor, poorly educated, and lacking many of the things I need in life, but at least I’m better than that nigger over there!”[2] Historically there has always been someone below them in the social pecking order, but that fact of American life is eroding away. It’s not all gone by any means, but it will be gone within the foreseeable future.

So these bigoted men dig in their heels. They chant “You will not replace us!” They buy into Trump’s deceitful slogan of Make America Great Again. They hear in that slogan a promise the their still present but weakening privileged status as the dominant power in this country will be shored up and preserved. They may even think that Trump could roll back some of the progress American people of color have made toward full equality. Their status cannot be shored up and preserved. This country is not going to go back to the 1940s when privileged white Americans didn’t even sense that their status was in the least bit threatened.

But fearful people are rarely assuaged by the truth. Trump convinces them that he is their hero though in fact he cares about nothing and no one but himself. These people attack democracy because the country’s changing demographics mean that their preferred candidates will win fair elections less and less often. If democracy doesn’t serve our purposes, they say, then to hell with democracy. We’ll let Trump whip us up into a frenzy, then we’ll attack and invade the Capitol to prevent Congress from certifying the evil Joe Biden’s win over our man Trump. On January 6, 2021, Trump did indeed whip them up into a frenzy. Then he sent them off to the Capitol. As they broke into that symbol of American democracy (not that much of what happens there is particularly democratic), destroying property and terrorizing everyone legitimately in the building, Trump sat in front of a television, almost certainly watching the rightwing propaganda machine called Fox News, enjoying the show.

What are we to learn from the events of January 6, 2021? There are I think two important lessons to learn. The first is a learning about Donald Trump. We must never allow him to come to power again. He is an American fascist. He panders to the most corrosive and destructive elements of American society. He doesn’t want to be the fairly elected leader of a free republic. He wants to be a dictator. He wants to have what his buddy Vladimir Putin has, control of a state that can be made to look democratic but that isn’t democratic. He doesn’t support democracy, he supports only himself and his own hold on power. He creates for himself a world we can call “a-truthful.” For Trump the categories true and false do not exist. The only categories he applies to anything are beneficial for Donald Trump and not beneficial for Donald Trump. He has no empathy for ordinary people whatsoever. The only people who matter to him at all are his rich supporters who give him money, supposedly for his campaign expenses but that he spends however he wants, to hell with the election finance laws. Given another chance he will destroy American democracy and undo as much as he can of the advances, such as they are, that minority American populations have made toward full civil rights and free involvement in the American political process. We simply cannot let that happen.

The other lesson we must learn is that there are significant parts of the American people that are frightened and willing to use any means, including violence, to hold onto the privileges they know they are losing. We hear much talk these days about a new civil war. I pray that we won’t have one, but if we do it won’t the north verses south like the first civil war. It will be between those frightened, bigoted parts of our society that support Donald Trump against Americans who support republican democracy and want to preserve our over two hundred old experiment in democracy, as it is fashionable to call this country. How the military would act in such a civil war there is no way to know. Although I will always deplore and oppose the use of violence, if violence there is to be I certainly hope that the US military will support the proper side.

The events of January 6, 2021, must teach us that we cannot be complacent about the future of our political way of life. Those events showed us how fragile our democracy really is. The seditious rioters almost got their way. We cannot be complacent about the threat the fearful, ignorant, and bigoted elements of the population pose with their fanatical desire to return Donald Trump to the White House. Yes, they are still a minority of our population. Trump lost the popular vote for president in both 2016 and 2020. (It was our republican but not democratic federal system that got him into the White House in 2016.) Trump’s supporters are angry, fanatic, and more than willing to use violence to protect their eroding position of privilege and power. These elements, though they respond to Trump’s intimations of violence with violence, are not yet tightly organized. If Trump or anyone else were to get them tightly organized around the common goal of overthrowing American democracy they would present a formidable threat indeed. Even as fragmented as their movement is today they present a significant risk of sporadic violence.

Complacency by Americans who support democracy is the biggest threat to that democracy today. We must take sides in the struggle to save American democracy. He wasn’t speaking about the struggle I am describing here, but the great Elie Wiesel said it brilliantly: “We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormenter, never the tormented.” In our context neutrality and silence help Donald Trump and his white supremacist supporters. We must not stay neutral. We must not be silent.

So here we are, one year after the worst assault on American democracy since the Civil War. Trump continues to insist that he won the 2020 election, which he did not. He continues to say someone stole his victory from him, but no one can steal what never existed. The Department of Justice is busy prosecuting the January 6 rioters. It may or may not be investigating events before January 6 that led up to the insurrection. Attorney General Garland says the DOJ will pursue the evidence wherever it leads and will hold people at any level responsible for any criminal behavior. I hope he means it. A House select committee is investigating the events of January 6. It seems the committee has already amassed a huge amount of testimony and documentary evidence despite the refusal of some of Trump’s closest associates to cooperate with the committee or even to comply with the committee’s subpoenas. We don’t yet know much about what the committee’s evidence establishes. We must wait for the committee’s report, which reports suggest may come out this summer. The committee will have to complete its work before the next Congress is sworn in after this year’s midterm elections because there is a real chance the Republicans will regain control of the House in those elections. If they do they certainly will disband the committee and stop as much of the committee’s findings and evidence from becoming public as they can. We live in a dangerous time. We see our American democracy threatened by Trump and his backers in a way none of us ever thought we would live to see. The future is of course not ours to see, but it certainly looks threatening from here. Stay tuned. There’s more to come.

 

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[1] Civil Rule 11 is a rule of procedure in civil cases in federal court that says a lawyer who signs a pleading essentially attests that the pleading is grounded in fact and existing law or a legitimate attempt to change the law. The court may impose sanctions on a lawyer who signs a pleading with no factual or legal basis.

[2] Please understand that I use “the n word” here only because that’s how Trump’s racists would phrase it. I know full well that it is a hateful, despicable word that I would never use in my personal speech.