They walk among us
Joe Biden and his media auxiliaries want to change the subject; more precisely, they want us to forget the inflation, the border, the crime, and the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan and think instead about “insurrection.”
As The New York Times, perhaps the most reliable transmitter of Democratic Party talking points recently put it, “Every Day is Jan. 6.”
One is left with a number of questions regarding such claims, including how any serious person could look at what happened on Jan. 6 and see in it a serious conspiracy to overthrow the duly elected government of the United States.
As Matt Taibbi notes, “No one from a country where these things actually happen could mistake 1/6 for ‘a coup.’ In the real version, the mob doesn’t take selfies and blaze doobies after seizing the palace, and the would-be dictator doesn’t spend 187 minutes snacking and watching Fox before tweeting ‘go home.’ Instead, he works the phones nonstop to rally precinct chiefs, generals, and airport officials to the cause, because a coup is a real attempt to seize power. Britannica says the ‘chief prerequisite for a coup is control of all or part of the armed forces, the police, and other military elements.’ We saw none of that on January 6th, but it’s become journalistic requirement to use either ‘coup’ or ‘insurrection’ in describing it.”
Put somewhat differently, if the buffoons who rioted at the Capitol are the most serious threat we face, it’s safe to go ahead and take a long nap. With such wing nuts as enemies, democracy needs no friends.
Most people were appalled by what they saw on Jan. 6, but no one thought that a real coup was taking place, and anyone who now claims they did is fibbing for effect and partisan advantage. Comparisons to Pearl Harbor and 9/11 only add to the sheer preposterousness.
But then the hand-wringing over the fate of democracy doesn’t really have anything to do with insurrection or coups or what happened (and didn’t happen) at the Capitol; rather it represents a cynical effort to use Jan. 6 as a means of delegitimizing and even criminalizing political opposition (insurrection being a crime for which none of the Capitol miscreants have yet, revealingly, been charged).
More specifically, it constitutes a ploy on the part of Democrats to smear their opponents as enemies of democracy and present themselves as its noble saviors.
We have thus gone, in the blink of a historic eye (a one-year old transition of presidential administrations), from dissent is the highest form of patriotism (the “resistance!”) to dissent is insurrection, at least when Democrats hold power.
Thereby is constructed a neat little paint-by-number narrative in which you redefine a drunken protest turned riot as a conspiracy to overthrow the Republic and then tar all Republicans as complicit in order to make the word “Republican” synonymous with the words “insurrectionist” and “domestic terrorist.”
In a logical sense, it is roughly equivalent to claiming that Democrats are arsonists because most of those committing arson in the Black Lives Matter riots vote Democrat.
The ultimate purpose of the narrative is to shield Biden from the consequences of his myriad unforced calamities — which present a far greater threat to the general welfare than some dingbat shaman wearing buffalo horns — by making those who oppose him “enemies of the people.”
It’s a neat trick — if you can’t go into the midterms running on your record or the issues, depict the loyal opposition as a disloyal fifth column.
A republic in such dire jeopardy consequently requires urgent measures that just happen to bear an uncanny resemblance to the Democratic Party’s long-standing wish list.
Dismissing critics of your agenda as “racists” was growing a bit stale, so now we have “insurrectionists” instead.
When Nancy Pelosi warns that Republicans are engaged in a “legislative continuation of what they did on January 6th” what she means is that Republicans voting for what they believe in (and their constituents sent them to Washington to support and oppose) is insurrection, but Democrats voting for what they believe in (and their constituents sent them to Washington to oppose or support) is democracy in action (raising the obvious question of where this puts Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, who torpedoed “Build Back Better” and is more popular among his deplorable West Virginia constituents for having done so).
In the Pelosi formulation, the rioters at the Capitol and Republicans resisting her agenda in Congress are the same people motivated by the same impulses. Opposing legislation that would make fraud easier to commit is therefore equivalent to coup-plotting.
So we have an insurrection that wasn’t really an insurrection, Republican complicity that wasn’t really Republican complicity and a threat to democracy that comes more from Democratic efforts to equate dissent with subversion than from any real subversion.
For Democrats, democracy works whenever they get what they want and is threatened whenever they don’t. It is a purely expedient concept defined in partisan terms and measured by partisan outcomes.
For my part, the only time I worry about the state of our democracy is when people like Pelosi and Chuck Schumer talk about saving it.