A dark day for democracy
Can an event be both inevitable and shocking? It doesn’t seem possible, yet the scenes witnessed in Washington DC this week were both the all-too-predictable culmination of more than five years of racist rhetoric and conspiracy-peddling by the current president of the United States and disturbing, unprecedented images of democracy under threat.
Some call it an attempted coup. Others call it an insurrection. There was a sickening, farcical nature to it as protesters, egged on by Donald Trump and others, occupied a deserted debating chamber and political offices, as though they were installing themselves as an impromptu, interim government.
But it was farce with a serious purpose. The protesters succeeded in interrupting Congress’ official confirmation of Joe Biden’s presidency.
Five people are dead, including a police officer. Violence had been encouraged. Senator Josh Hawley waved his fist in solidarity. The president’s erratic lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, called for ‘‘trial by combat’’. Donald Trump Jr urged protesters to ‘‘fight’’. The president’s own rhetoric was so incendiary it led to bans from Twitter and Facebook.
This did not sound like political leaders and associates urging a peaceful protest. This was more akin to throwing a lit match into dry grass.
Even as the National Guard cleared protesters and secured the Capitol, the president maintained his dangerous fantasy that the election was stolen. He told protesters that he loved them, that they were special.
At that moment, Trump finally split from a political mainstream that was always an uneasy home for him. It also means Trump and his children are finished as future Republican candidates; a line was finally crossed.
It was really crossed years ago. The Republican Party became Trump’s enablers when its leaders discovered no-one else could beat Hillary Clinton in 2016. Despite the flaws and the warning signs, the many women who talked of abuse, the bankruptcies and general unfitness for office, they held their noses and backed him.
They put ambition before integrity. Vice-President Mike Pence and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell wrestled a small amount of integrity back when they refused to support Trump’s dream of overturning a legitimate election, with McConnell delivering a memorable line about democracy going into a death spiral. He and others are smart enough to know Trump is to blame for the Republicans’ loss of the White House and both branches of Congress.
The conspiratorial underground that has been fed by
Trump, his former chief strategist Steve Bannon, and others seems so transparently ludicrous to those outside it that we risked not taking it seriously. It is an alternative belief system or a parallel universe that sometimes intersects with the real world.
Some media companies are complicit. Some politicians, including some in New Zealand, have nodded and winked at those beliefs. And frankly, the conspiracists have not been taken as seriously as they should have been because they look like middle America. They are mostly male, white, middle-aged, working class or middle class and sometimes exmilitary.
‘‘We do not fear those whom we see as being like us; we fear the other,’’ as writer Masha Gessen put it this week. Gessen was trying to explain one of the most alarming images of them all, which is the stark contrast between a heavily guarded Lincoln Memorial during Black Lives Matter protests and a relatively undefended Capitol that was easily overwhelmed by an angry white mob. It spoke volumes.