Healing over Jan. 6 won’t happen
Too many Republicans are still downplaying one of lowest moments in the nation’s history.
On this, the first anniversary of one of the most traumatic shared moments in American history, we do not expect healing. We do not expect reconciliation. We do not expect a renewed, bipartisan commitment to protecting our system of self-government.
As much as it pains us to acknowledge, we do not expect rituals of commemoration this week to provide solace to a deeply divided nation.
What we do expect, because it is about all we can hope for, is an honest and thorough accounting of what happened on Jan. 6, 2021. We expect the bipartisan committee in the House of Representatives charged with conducting a Jan. 6 postmortem to do its work thoroughly but also with dispatch. We need its findings, not 10 years from now, not 10 months from now, but before this year’s mid-term elections. Whatever the results in November, the American people need to know the facts about a deadly riot that struck at the heart of our nation. And we need to pay attention.
To quote U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, “We need a 9/11 commission to find out what happened and make sure it never happens again. …”
We do, indeed. Of course, Graham voiced that opinion last February, before he suddenly awoke to the fact that he would be paying a steep political price for attempting to bell the Big Cat in the Republican political household. Arguably the most dangerous political figure in this nation’s history, not for his ideals but for his lack of conscience in executing them, Donald Trump was the central figure in the Jan. 6 insurrection. Without his bloviations about a stolen election, there would have been no mob storming the Capitol, assaulting Capitol Police, threatening both Republican and Democratic lawmakers and vandalizing the stately citadel of American democracy. Without Trump, five people would not have died; dozens of police officers would not have been injured.
Without Trump, we would today be a nation merely in deep disagreement over tax policy, health care and immigration — not a people conscripted into a moral civil war that pits kin against kin in a fictitious, made-for-PlayStation struggle over good and evil.
Trump provoked the attack as part of a plan to undermine an election he lost. He had help. We need to know how he, and they, attempted to pull it off. And how they nearly succeeded.
Graham, like most of his fellow Republicans, soon understood that perpetuating — or at least tolerating — Trump’s Big Lie about a stolen election would be a much safer course to take, politically and otherwise. The senator resumed his pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago, where he trotted after the former president on the golf course and no doubt indulged the man’s dangerous delusions between holes and in the clubhouse afterward.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy quickly came to see the political peril in choosing truth over Trump, and has debased his leadership ever since. In the Senate, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has attempted a balancing act but despite commendable moments of conscience, he played a key role in blocking creation of a bipartisan commission, leaving investigation of the riots to a bipartisan committee in the House.
They and Graham have lived through enough elections to know that the 2020 elections were normal, honest and fair; the majority of their fellow Republicans know that, too. Unfortunately, they are either cynically opportunistic, afraid of the Republican base or both. A year later, polling shows most Republicans still believe there was evidence of widespread voter fraud in the presidential contest.
The Republican leaders have witnessed the dour fates of Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger; indeed, have been complicit. Cheney and Kinzinger, the only Republican House members who agreed “to find out what happened,” are two of a lonely handful of party outcasts willing to label Trump for what he is: an existential danger to democracy.
“We can either be loyal to Donald Trump, or we can be loyal to the Constitution,” Cheney reminded us all a few days ago.
With no expectation that the Trump thralldom will break any time before 2024 (if then), we need to know as quickly as possible what the House committee has uncovered — for the historical record, if nothing else. We have relied on commissions before to help us correct our course, whether the 9/11 commission to which Graham alluded or a commission after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Those events were crises. We are confronting another, this time a crisis from within.
Who were those people who broke down majestic doors and smashed windows, who sprayed chemical bear spray into the eyes of police officers, who ripped off the officers’ helmets and jabbed at them with flagpoles?
The House committee needs to highlight recent findings, including the fact that only a relative few were members of Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and other right wing extremist groups. Most were in their 40s and 50s. They were 95 percent white and 85 percent male. Most were employed; their ranks included doctors, lawyers, businesspeople. “The last time America saw middle-class whites involved in violence was the expansion of the second KKK in the 1920s,” University of Chicago political science professor Robert Pape told Barton Gellman in The Atlantic.
Pape, who has conducted the most thorough study of the Jan. 6 insurrection, says more than half of the 700-plus people who were arrested came from counties that Joe Biden easily won. Many also came from diversifying counties. Pape found, for example, that all 36 of the Texas rioters who were arrested came from just 17 of our 254 counties, each of which lost white population in the past five years.
“To ignore this movement and its potential,” Pape wrote recently in the Washington Post, “would be akin to Trump’s response to COVID-19: We cannot presume it will blow over.”
How responsible elected officials, the business community, faith leaders and other concerned citizens respond to “this movement and its potential” is an urgent challenge, that won’t be resolved overnight. More immediately, we need the Jan. 6 committee, in concert with the Justice Department, to begin identifying, not just the foot soldiers, but the individuals who set the riot in motion. Who were the planners? Which members of Congress were in on the plot? Who are the lawmakers continuing to defend those choosing to use violence to overturn a legitimate election? How do the American people hold them accountable?
Even as the Jan. 6 committee continues its work before Republicans take over the House (as many predict), there’s work for the rest of us to do in the effort to get this government of, by and for the people back on course.
Voting is vital, but not enough. We need to be involved in a grassroots movement to restore democracy. That means volunteering, donating and participating, maybe even running for office. It means supporting candidates who believe in the usefulness of government to solve mundane problems (traffic, trash, health, education), not government as a winner-take-all apocalyptic movement or a crusade in blind support of Great Leader. Our democracy requires us to be citizens in the truest sense of the word.
On this baleful anniversary, we are reminded of Benjamin Franklin, who, in concert with his fellow Founding Fathers, bequeathed us a republic — “if you can keep it.”
Can we?