National Post (National Edition)
`INSURRECTION'
Dark day for D.C.
As the sun set in Washington, D.C., the United States was not in control of its seat of government. Federal law enforcement agencies, state police forces, local police, the Capitol Police, police units from Baltimore and as far away as New Jersey, joined by least three separate military forces — the D.C., Virginia and Maryland National Guard — were converging on the Capitol complex to retake the buildings and expel a mob that seized it, with remarkable ease, on Wednesday afternoon.
It began with a rally by Trump supporters, timed to coincide with the formal acceptance (or otherwise!) of Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory, and thus his imminent ascendancy to the presidency. A group of Republican senators and congressmen had pledged to object to said acceptance, and that was expected to be the story of the day. What would normally be a routine but brief process would instead take hours.
That’s not what happened.
The president appeared at the rally, encouraged the crowd to march to the capitol, and they did. And they pushed their way inside.
It was incredibly strange to watch from afar as the crowd simply pushed aside the local police. First they went through perimeter barricades, then into the buildings themselves. And then, after a brief delay, into the Senate and House of Representative chambers. There was, at some point, a brief episode of gunfire that left one intruder reportedly dead; there is no additional clear information at this time. But in a matter of minutes, the representatives and senators were evacuated, Vice President Mike Pence, who was present when the incident began, was evacuated to an undisclosed location, and the mob of intruders ... had the capitol. They wandered the offices of senior officials, sat at the desks of legislators and posed for pictures at the seat of U.S. legislative power.
Terror groups and foreign adversaries the world over must be astonished. That ... that’s it? We could just march in and seize the capitol? As difficult as it is to accept that the U.S. lost control of the capitol, it’s harder still to believe that the local security forces just let it happen.
But they did. A mob shut down the U.S. legislative branch. At press time, the legally necessary procedures to confirm that Joe Biden will be the next president still haven’t been carried out. Saving the legal documents required to confirm the electoral college votes apparently fell to a Senate staffer who grabbed them and ran as the government abandoned the capitol.
As the police and military forces mobilized, Biden addressed the nation, saying “At this hour, our democracy is under unprecedented assault, unlike anything we’ve seen in modern times ... The scenes of chaos at the Capitol do not reflect the true America, do not represent who we are. I’m genuinely shocked and saddened that our nation, so long a beacon of hope and light for democracy, has come to such a dark moment.”
Saddened? Sure. But shocked? Yes, it’s shocking to see this. These images won’t be soon forgotten. It’s a cliché but sometimes the truth is — what happened Wednesday was historic. It will be remembered.
But it wasn’t surprising. It wasn’t inevitable — if it was, the capitol might have been competently defended — but it was certainly possible, even probable, that there would be some violence. A great many of us had let out a sigh of relief after the November elections when feared violence failed to materialize. We relaxed too soon, and there’s no excuse for that. A significant percentage of the U.S. population genuinely believes the madness that Trump had this election stolen from him and they are acting accordingly.
With the full blessing of Trump himself. In a video statement released on Wednesday evening, as the mob still occupied the capitol, Trump told the mob, “We had an election that was stolen from us. ... This was a fraudulent election ... We love you. You’re very special. ... I know how you feel.” The president did tell the mob to go home in peace, but that was simply tacked on to his repeated claims that the election was stolen from him. In other words, the president told the crowd they were right, but they should go home anyway.
The U.S. has probably been heading to some - thing like this for years. Of late, I’ve wondered if the post-9/11 unity delayed what would otherwise perhaps have occurred years ago. But this, or something like this, has been a looming, obvious danger. Every election in recent years has felt like a chance to delay an eruption, not avoid one: Maybe a competent, moderate leader could avoid striking a match in a gas-filled room. But that was it. Avoiding a disaster has been the goal. It has felt impossible to hope for more.
Wednesday wasn’t a disaster, at least as I write this. It could become that as police and troops move in, and easily could have been all along, if someone had pulled a trigger, and then another person, and another. That no one did seems like a miracle. How many more miracles can we count on?
Joe Biden and the Congress already had a once-ina-century challenge on their hands with the pandemic. But ignoring the rot in U.S. politics and society cannot be a second-order priority. Biden, the Democrats and the Republicans cannot put off lowering the temperature for even a single moment. Possibilities that once seemed very remote, on Wednesday, seemed not just conceivable, but at hand. That won’t change just because the capitol will be cleared and repaired. This is here to stay until the divisions in America are healed through hard work. If that’s even possible.