Thursday, January 6, 2022

Tomorrow And Tomorrow And Tomorrow Creeps (Take IV): The January 6th Coup , A Year Later



Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

<From Macbeth, spoken by Macbeth:
William Shakespeare>




<i.>
The stuff of anniversaries is often the stuff of nightmares, as well as dreams, and this one is no different. One year ago today, Donald J. Trump, America's 45th President, once again defied the familiar script, in which the former Commander-in-Chief turns over the keys of power to his successor, who takes his oath of office, and prepares to make his own mark on the nation's long-standing democratic experiment.

It almost didn't work out that way. Raging like King Lear at the forces he felt had unfairly denied him a second term, Trump mustered the powers that remained to him, determined to hang on, against the others -- Antifa, Joe Biden, mobs of woke Millennials, the undocumented -- on which he'd focused so much public fury during his tenure.

As courts turned back his repeated claims of electoral fraud, Trump shifted his focus to its internal machinery. If he couldn't get federal judges to listen, maybe he could disrupt the certification of electoral votes. Or stall the process long enough to seize ballots and equipment, possibly by declaring martial law, under some national security pretext or other.

The true nature of these efforts are only becoming apparent now, as bits and pieces continue to surface, sometimes from co-conspirators like former trade envoy Peter Navarro -- whose new book, In Trump Time, proudly details those efforts -- other times, from tidbits of a special Congressional committee's investigation that have leaked through the news media.

Depending on which accounts you believe, the mob of supporters summoned for Trump's last ride were either egged on by a Chief Executive consumed by "Stop the steal" notions of personal betrayal, who planned to get even, all along. Or they broke into the Capitol in a mass fit of spontaneous rage, after hearing of Vice President Mike Pence's refusal to stop Joe Biden's certification as President-elect.

Five protesters died, including protester Ashli Babbit, shot dead by Capitol police as she tried to climb through the broken window of a barricaded door. Three others died from heart attacks, plus one from an accidental amphetamine overdose, and trampling by others as they swarmed the building.

Capitol police officer Brian Sicknick died the following day of a stroke from the stress of an ordeal that included being pepper sprayed. Four more officers killed themselves during the next seven months, and an additional 138 were injured, 15 of them severely enough to require hospitalization.

The U.,S. Capitol's looting and vandalization resulted in an estimated $1.5 million in damages that included rampant defecation on floors and walls, as well as damage to statues, paintings and furniture from fire extinguishers and pepper spray canisters. Taxpayers effectively subsidized the resulting repair and cleanup, because the building had no insurance for such contingencies. 

Those measures also included an additional $30 million spent on security fencing that remained in place through early July, with the building largely off limits to visitors. The images of Fortress Washington, as some commentators called it, bore an uncomfortable resemblance to the bombed-out likes of Belfast, or Beirut, two other locales scarred by sectarian violence spurred by one side or the other's refusal to share power. For editorial writers, such images allowed them to say, "Such things couldn't happen here." Until January 6, 2021, that is.



<ii.>
So what, exactly, has happened, one full year after the event? Not much, so far, though that may soon change. Republicans continue working hard to memory hole the events that almost capsized our democracy, a challenge eased by a COVID-19-dominated news cycle, and public weariness with headlines that bear nothing but endless calamity. That, too, may change, depending on what the special Congressional committee -- the 1/6 Committee, as it's known -- uncovers.

For most of the insurrectionists, the putschists, the seditionists, whatever you call them, the legal fallout has been relatively low. With federal guidelines that cap misdemeanor sentencing at six months to a year, most first-time offenders could cut plea deals that involve no prison time at all, a fact that's disturbed some federal judges during the sentencing hearings. 

The stiffest sentences have, naturally, gone out to those implicated in violent or particularly disruptive conduct, such as Jacob Chansley, who received 41 months for his role as the infamous self-styled QAnon "Shaman." While nobody's suggesting that someone should get 20 years for crapping on a desk, how all this prosecutorial leniency (see BuzzFeed link below) will deter future insurrectionists remains to be seen.

The situation holds uncomfortable echoes of the soft punishment dished out to Adolf Hitler, who served eight months o fthe five-year sentence he received for instigating the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, in Munich. The future German dictator's experience, as most historians agree, convinced him to seek a legal path to legitimacy, and the power he craved, even as his supporters eagerly committed bolder acts of street violence in his name. That, too, sounds sadly familiar.

Trump supporters, by and large, remain subject to the alternate universe they've inhabited since he won the Presidency in 2016. For example, only a fifth describe the attempted coup as an insurrection, while four in 10 believe those who attacked the Capitol were leftists disguised as Trump supporters. (For other poll findings, see Down With Tyranny's link below.)

Congressional enablers like Congressman Mo Brooks, of Alabama, and Senators Ted Cruz, and Josh Hawley, continue to show up for work, despite reports that implicate them in the plan to delay certifying Biden's victory. Calls for their expulsion have largely subsided, leaving the wish we stated in Part I of this series ("their desertion of democratic norms should not go unnoticed, nor unchallenged") to hang in the air, unanswered, the language of the Fourteenth Amendment (see above) notwithstanding.

Those enabling the enablers don't seem unduly alarmed about their prospects of losing the next coup, judging by the barrage of laws they've unleashed (425 measures, in 49 states) that range from outright, old school voter suppression (Georgia, Texas), to language that shifts control of elections to partisan bodies (see ABC News link below).

Republicans are making no attempt to hide what they're doing, amid the stale talking points of "election integrity," or "making it easier to vote, and harder to cheat" they're invoking to justify it. They can do it, because Democratic efforts to protect voting rights have stalled miserably in the Senate, thanks to fifth columnists in their midst (Senators Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema), and the party's inability to shake its addiction to unilateral disarmament.



<iii.>
And what of the man riding the center of the storm? Many quarters of the mainstream media cling to dismissals of a 2024 Trump Presidential run as a grift to make bank off his base, or bid to stall the legal reckoning that he's avoided so far. It's a reading that seems slightly at odds with Trump's vigorous attempts to purge the party ranks of his critics, and continue casting an outsized shadow over its future. 

So far, he's made 40 Congressional and nine gubernatorial picks, with much of his ire focused on those he sees as crossing him personally, like Georgia's infamous vote suppressing governor, Brian Kemp. Does that sound like someone who only seems content to count the cash, and call it a day? We doubt it.

The fallout of Biden's presidency isn't exactly discouraging Trump dreams of a dramatic comeback in 2024. On one level, Biden has scored some impressive wins, such as his confirmation of 40 federal judges -- the most of any new President since Ronald Reagan's election, in 1980. By and large, they're a more diverse and better-qualified lot than the zealous foot soldiers that typify Republican presidencies, and should balance out the latter group's excesses. 

The American Rescue Act's passage provided $1.9 trillion in much-needed relief to Americans struggling to stay afloat during a never-ending pandemic, while the approval of $1 trillion in infrastructure aid should certainly feel like welcome news for communities hoping to get a piece of that action.

On other levels, Biden's presidency is slipping into a familiar disconnect of, "Do as we say, not as we do." One example are his actions on environmental issues, which are rapidly emerging as his administration's biggest, blackest hole, as evidenced by its issuance of oil and gas drilling permits (3,091 on public lands and water, or 332 per month) compared to 300 per month for Trump, according to CBNC.

Other goals are falling by the wayside after Big Money gets to clearing its throat. Last month, for example, Congress largely shrugged off calls for badly-needed structural reforms, like paid family leave, to pass a $777.7 billion defense budget that wound up $25 billion higher than the White House wanted, and nearly $38 billion more than Trump himself spent.

Defending democracy is a tricky business that requires the ability to look behind, as well as ahead. How we got here is as important as where we're headed. Protecting voting rights is critical and necessary, but so is trying to ensure that social conditions don't slide to the point of giving someone like Trump the foothold they need, to gain the power they crave.

Yet, unable (or unwilling) to deliver on their domestic priorities, Democrats are once again reduced to hoping that enough people show up to rescue them, in spite of themselves, and that Republicans lack the smarts to get out of their own way, as they continue measuring the drapes. If you're hoping to defend democracy, there are simpler and smarter ways of doing it. This passive, reactive approach isn't it.
 




<iv.>
Improbably, though, embers of hope continue to flicker amid the barrage of apocalyptic imagery. By all accounts, the 1/6 Committee has moved at a faster than anticipated clip, in pulling together the various strands of the conspiracy. They've interviewed some 300 witnesses, though only 50 have been identified publicly, as Politico reports: 

"They’ve blanketed Donald Trump’s allies with subpoenas, referred three key witnesses for contempt of Congress prosecution and exerted pressure like few committees ever have. By all accounts, they’re making inroads into the depths of the Trump White House and unearthing evidence that will make that dark day look even darker."

Transparency, of course, is the best hope for bringing light to that particular darkness. From our standpoint, what's most striking about the January 6th coup, and its immediate aftermath, is how so many observers missed the signposts that led up to it. 

In hindsight, the dots have been there to connect all along, starting with the fury that Barack Obama's victory unleashed among the more extremist and racist quarters of a population determined to inhabit the world of the 1950s, when women and minorities were expected to "know their place," or risk legal and extralegal retribution.

The "birther" movement that emerged to cast doubt on the legitimacy of Obama's birth certificate -- the same one that Trump embraced, eagerly and publicly -- soon gave away to more dangerous movements. The rise of shootings by racist and rightist militants, such as the New Zealand mass shooter who livestreamed his massacre of 51 Muslims, would surely feel familiar to any Weimar-era German who witnessed similar incidents during the 1920s and 1930s, as their democracy slowly, then rapidly, came apart at the seams.

Media narratives dismissing the shooters as social misfits living in their mom's basement, or "lone wolves" with mental problems, as Professor Erroll Southers, quoted in "Trafficked"'s episode on white supremacy (see clip below, on Military.com) makes clear: "What Southers is diagnosing is a national blind spot, an inability for a country founded by, and still largely run, by white people, to recognize the very real threat of white extremism."

We urge readers to watch that episode, which lays bare the global connections and increasingly sophisticated outreach recruiting techniques being utilized by groups like the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, who had members among the January 6th rioters. If nothing else, the events of January 6th should serve as a wakeup call, particularly for agencies like the FBI, who have largely spent two decades focusing on yesterday's fight against the (largely) nonexistent threat of Islamic terrorism. 

Tomorrow's fight, as the "Trafficked" episode demonstrates, will prove a dirtier, different beast. Critics who cheer the deplatforming of Trump, or loudmouthed Congressional cheerleaders like Marjorie Taylor Greene, also need to take a closer look at the role of platforms like Facebook, whose algorithms, by all accounts, continue to promote militant extremism for the sake of multibillion corporate profits. It is hard to imagine how democracy can function, when such instincts are allowed to run unchecked.

For democracy to survive in its present form, it requires understanding how drastically the perils to its existence have changed. The mere absence of misfortune, as some mainstream outlets have suggested, is not a cause for celebration.
 
The January 6th coup attempt did not succeed, because our institutions held so strongly. It mainly failed because Trump and his allies didn't have the right people in the right places to do their bidding, or relevant control of electoral machinery nationwide, to achieve the outcome they so fervently desired.

Whatever happens from here on out, let us redouble our efforts to defend democracy, renew scrutiny of those who seek to undermine it, and resolve to learn from the errors that have dogged the American democratic experiment from making good on its promise of social and political equality for all who seek it. 

It has been fashionable, as of late, to repeat the oft-quoted truism, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." A related expression might well suggest, "If you want to meet the moment, don't rely on the luxury of getting a second mistake." As the backsliding of democratic norms in Hungary and Poland demonstrates -- or, for that matter, Germany's Weimar-era experience -- the price of failure is too high. So are the penalties for falling short. --The Reckoner


LInks To Go
ABC News: 10 New Laws

Brennan Center For Justice:
Voting Laws Roundup: October 2021:
BuzzFeed News: Most Capitol Rioters
Probably Aren't Looking At Maximum Prison Sentences:

Down With Tyranny:
Trump Won't Be In Prison
When We Wake Up Tomorrow...But Should He Be?:
https://www.downwithtyranny.com/post/trump-won-t-be-in-prison-tomorrow-when-we-wake-up-but-should-he-be

Military.com: NatGeo Series Asks

The Huffington Post:
Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn
On Jan. 6: "It Can Happen Again":

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