Hearings can be a salve for the Jan. 6 wound
The hearings of the United States House Select Committee on the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol get underway this evening after the announcement of the most serious criminal charges to date from the riot: seditious conspiracy. One of the five men so charged is Zachary Riehl, who led the Philadelphia chapter of the Proud Boys — a violent fraternity of kooks and wannabe revolutionaries who claim to defend “Western civilization.”
These charges remind us of just how dangerous those few hours of siege really were, and how much worse it could have been. The federal government alleges that Mr. Riehl and others planned to hijack the transfer of power from Donald Trump to Joe Biden. Stewart Rhodes, leader of the Oath Keepers militia, and ten of his members have already been indicted for the same crime.
Many people who entered the Capitol on that day were arguably caught up in the moment — remember the bizarre sight of rioters courteously filing between the velvet ropes in Statuary Hall, like a large tour group. But others planned to seize power from the country’s elected leaders.
But even that large tour group was not innocent. The parts of Jan. 6, 2021, that were more ridiculous than malicious still endangered democracy. Adolf Hitler’s “beer hall putsch” in Munich in 1923 was a complete failure that ended with him being sent to prison. But he would be named chancellor of Germany only a decade later.
The lesson: seditious violence doesn’t have to be well-organized or immediately successful to gravely threaten a country’s political system. It doesn’t have to be intended. It only has to transgress boundaries a people have accepted as democratic duties.
The Jan. 6 committee will focus, rightly, on the former president’s words and actions before and during that fateful day. The committee will be asking whether he intended to encourage a genuine insurrection as opposed to recklessly prodding an overzealous group who turned their rally into a riot.
In other words, did he intend to encourage the alleged sedition of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, or to excite just enough chaos to demonstrate his enduring popularity and to foul up Congress’s business? When it comes to the danger to democracy, though, this is a distinction without a difference. Every event like Jan. 6 ticks the clock closer to midnight for the American experiment. Honest and thorough hearings, though, might be able to turn it back just a little bit.