The day democracy wept
Cry, the beloved country. There have been multiple American moments of great drama since World
War II. Movements to extend rights to minorities, women, the disabled and gays. Assassinations, terrorist attacks and antiwar protests. Scandals, impeachments and an election that went into 36 days of overtime.
But not once — not even when Soviet missiles were being installed 90 miles from American shores more than a half-century ago — have the democratic values that the Book of Matthew described as “the light of the world” been in jeopardy.
Not once, until this month. The violence against Black protesters during the civil rights movement made continued legal segregation unacceptable. The murder of John F. Kennedy was followed only hours later by a president who was determined to work to achieve the goals of the martyred leader. The Watergate scandal was followed by the ascendancy of an unelected president, Gerald Ford, who asked the public to confirm him not by their votes but by their prayers.
Not for a moment — not even during the Richard Nixon-era controversies — was there a physical assault on the institutions of democracy. Not once was a vice president prompted to say from the rostrum of a Senate chamber that hours earlier had been a crime scene, as Mike Pence put it, “The people’s work continues.”
The siege of the Capitol was a stain on the country, undermining its moral authority abroad, raising questions at home about the “domestic tranquility” cited in the preamble of the Constitution.
It provided an angry bookend to the beginning of the Donald J. Trump presidency, when the 45th president spoke of “American carnage.” It left the country breathless, prompting even some of Trump’s most ardent Capitol supporters to separate themselves from the president, though his term has less than two weeks to go.
Of all the ironies of a date of infamy, this may be the greatest:
Lawmakers who for years could not bring themselves to work together, have lunch together, play Capitol gymnasium basketball together, instead huddled together in disbelief and in fear. Then they gathered together to confirm the election of Joseph R. Biden Jr. as the next president.
It was the sort of moment that, in Great Britain during the World War II blitz, forged a sense of national unity as Londoners huddled together in Tube stations as the bombs exploded above ground.
That may affect lawmakers, but it may not have the same effect on the Trump loyalists, who very likely will take a different message from Wednesday’s events. The dispersal of the rioters and the death of a woman in the confrontation have the perilous potential of becoming a rallying cry for rioters.
Immediately a debate broke out about the causes of the divisions that prompted the transformation of the pro-Trump demonstration into a riot. The very targets of the Capitol violence have themselves been unable to breach those divisions.
Today the name Fisher Ames (1758-1808) is largely forgotten.
He was a Massachusetts congressman and a leading voice of the Federalist Party. Two weeks after the Democratic-Republican Thomas Jefferson was inaugurated following his defeat of the Federalist John Adams, Ames wrote this to Theodore Dwight, a leading Federalist who was the brother of a Yale president, the grandson of Jonathan Edwards and a cousin of Aaron Burr, the newly installed vice president:
“Party is an association of honest men, for honest purposes, and, when the State falls into bad hands, is the only efficient defence; a champion who never flinches, a watchman who never sleeps ... It would be wrong to assail the new administration with invective. Even when bad measures occur, much temperance will be requisite. To encourage Mr. Jefferson to act right, and to aid him against his violent jacobin adherents, we must make it manifest that we act on principle.”
The day before I was born, a group of Puerto Rican nationalists entered the House visitors’ gallery, chanted “Viva Puerto Rico libre!” and opened fire, wounding five House members. Like so many of my generation — and especially those of us in the news media — I have a collection of newspaper front pages, especially the one from my birthdate. For two thirds of a century I have kept a replica of the cover of that New York Herald-Tribune newspaper, and when I became a congressional correspondent many years ago, I never forgot what happened in the chamber I covered.
Cry, the beloved country.