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.
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!”
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.
