The afternoon of January 6, 2021 is quite easy for me to remember, because I spent it largely in the company of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark somewhere between St. Louis and the Oregon Coast.
In my first stab at fulfilling a New Year’s resolution to read actual books again (rather than just magazines and newspapers), I had picked out Stephen Ambrose’s “Undaunted Courage,” a rip-roaring chronicle of the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804-1806, a subject about which I knew practically nothing beyond the fact that it followed—and was enabled by—President Thomas Jefferson’s purchase of the Louisiana Territory in 1803, arguably the most fruitful real estate transaction in history.
Taken together—and notwithstanding the tragedies and injustices of subsequent generations—this early expansion and exploration of the nascent American republic still stands as the fullest flourishing of Enlightenment idealism put into action—a moment in which the nation doubled in size overnight and the possibilities for the future seemed limitless.
So it was that on the sixth day of 2021—with the maximal amount of unintended irony—I was luxuriating in this hopeful tale of American greatness and ingenuity when—as yet unbeknownst to me—the then-current president of the United States fired up a mob of his supporters to march upon the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., in order to prevent the formal certification of the 2020 election—which is exactly what they proceeded to do.
I couldn’t tell you precisely what time I took a break from my reading to hop on my stationary bike while checking the news on my phone. All I can say is that when I last tuned into the outside world—listening to NPR no more than an hour earlier—Congress was about to officially declare Joe Biden the 46th president and nothing in particular was amiss. Now here I was scrolling Twitter—in reverse chronological order—to find that the Capitol was being invaded by hundreds of angry (and possibly armed) marauders and our entire system of government was at risk of collapsing before our very eyes.
Naturally, we learned a great many details in the days, weeks and months that followed about what specifically occurred during—as one comedian termed it—“the three-hour American Revolution,” many of which the House January 6 Committee is enumerating this very week. While it was happening, however, all we could see was chaos and all I could feel was my heart beating so furiously that it might well have been attempting to escape my chest.
It was the visceral, surreal experience of seeing a worst-case nightmare scenario playing out in real time. It was a feeling of hopelessness, helplessness and stone-cold terror all wrapped into one. It was the fear that the Bastille was being stormed and the king’s—in this case, Mike Pence’s—head could be chopped off at any moment.
The fear was real because the threat was real. Until the building was cleared and secured and its invaders safely at a distance and/or in police custody, there was little (if any) cause to think otherwise.
But then a funny thing happened: The building was cleared and secured, Biden’s electoral victory was certified, the man who incited the riot was impeached (but not convicted), Biden was inaugurated at noon on January 20 and the American experiment in representative democracy continued on its merry way.
That, in so many words, is how I have processed the events of January 6 over the subsequent 18-odd months: That the riot at the Capitol was an act of bottomless mendacity and barbarism, was explicitly and brazenly set into motion by one Donald John Trump—the man at whose feet all moral responsibility should be laid—but was finally a colossal and pointless waste of time for its planners and participants, since it made not one shred of difference in the constitutional transfer of power from one administration to the next.
The system held, everyone in positions of actual authority—from state legislators to secretaries of state to the president of the Senate himself—did exactly what they were supposed to do, and the person who won the most electoral votes on November 3, 2020, has indeed resided at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue ever since.
The argument to be had, of course—which I have been privately struggling with from the beginning—is whether the system might have buckled if only a few details had been different. Whether, say, the barbarians at the gate would have actually murdered congresspeople and/or Pence had the opportunity presented itself. (Friendly reminder that theatrically waving around a noose is not the same thing as using it.) Whether there was any serious chance that officials like Brad Raffensperger were prepared to violate both the law and the Constitution—thereby destroying their own careers and livelihoods—for the sake of overturning the result of a free and fair election. (A reminder here that not a single one of them did so, even in the teeth of direct threats and intimidation by senior officials in the administration.)
Call me crazy and naïve, but I believe the reason the plot to steal the 2020 election ultimately failed is because there was no way it could possibly have succeeded. I believe—and have believed all along—that the system of checks and balances devised and codified in the summer of 1787 is far more solid and resilient than its critics give it credit for—not least because the framers of our Constitution were so clear-eyed and prudent in anticipating future leaders who might attempt to undermine or destroy that very system for their own selfish, frightful interests. So far, so good.
I have not followed the January 6 Committee’s hearings terribly closely—thanks in large part to a perfectly-timed two-week vacation—but my sense of its overall finding thus far is that Donald Trump is a bad person who enlisted bad people to do bad things for bad reasons, and that they did those things badly.
At the risk of unwarranted flippancy, I did not require a congressional committee to tell me these sorts of things as if they were breaking news. I dare say they have been more or less common knowledge for the better part of a half-century. While the particulars of the election plot are important and should continue to be investigated until all relevant facts are known, the basic truth about the nature of Donald Trump is neither a mystery nor a conspiracy. He is exactly as he appears—always has been, apparently always will be—and as I wrote at the time, the siege of the Capitol can be seen above all (if only in retrospect) as the natural, inevitable consequence of entrusting a man like him with more power than any other person on planet Earth. Elect a clown, expect a circus.
All of which begs the central political question of our time: If Trump, the Capitol riot and arguably the entire GOP constitute the existential threat to democracy that the January 6 Committee asserts, why is the Democratic Party about to be decimated in the midterm elections this November and Biden seemingly destined for early retirement in 2024?
While there are many possible answers to that question, I have lately become partial to the analysis of David Sirota—a former Bernie Sanders advisor and Oscar-nominated co-writer of “Don’t Look Up”—who has observed on multiple occasions that the democratic process has allowed Democrats to control the presidency and both houses of Congress since January 2021, and that the party has squandered that political capital by failing to deliver on virtually every promise it made to its constituents in 2018 and 2020. As Sirota put it, “[When] you get into power and shield your corporate donors who don’t want that change […] what you’re saying to voters is that democracy doesn’t matter.”
In other words, if Democrats truly believe in voting as the purest expression of self-rule and a bulwark against tyranny, perhaps they should expend slightly less effort in prosecuting their political enemies and slightly more effort in justifying their own existence by providing material benefits to those who put them in power in the first place. After all, what’s the point of voting at all if you don’t believe either party truly gives a damn about making your life better?
My main concern, you see, is not that Donald Trump will steal the election in 2024, but that he will win it fair and square, and that his Democratic antagonists will have no one to blame but themselves.
The Party Crasher 