By Kent R. Kroeger (Source: NuQum.com; January 16, 2021)
Could Donald Trump’s presidency have ended any other way?
What happened at — and, more importantly, in — the U.S. Capitol on January 6th was tragic. People died because an uncontrollable mob formed outside the U.S. Capitol to support a president who, at best, was recklessly naive about what a mass rally like that could turn into; and, at worst, deliberately ignited those flames.
If only Trump instead of me had gotten this fortune cookie and taken it to heart:
“If you win, act like you are used to it. If you lose, act like you love it.” — A fortune cookie
To my Biden-supporting readers, concerned that I am going to defend Trump’s actions leading up to the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, rest easy. I am not.
Now is not the time to discover the mental gymnastics necessary to excuse a political act — Trump’s rally to “Stop the Steal” — that a child would have realized had the potential to provoke significant violence.
To my Trump-supporting readers, already practicing levels of emotional isolation and self-censorship that can’t possibly be good for your long-term health, you will be spared any self-important, virtue-signaling lecture about the moral righteousness of Republicans “brave” enough to disown Trump or how the GOP’s many latent malignancies were exposed (and exploited) by the Trump presidency.
No, instead, I will use the January 6th debacle to share what I am telling myself so I can help make sure something like that sh*t-carnival never happens again.
For starters…
Now is NOT the time to say, ‘They started it.”
For partisan purposes, I will not compare or equate last year’s George Floyd/Black Lives Matter protests in which at least 19 people died and caused approximately $1.5 billion in property damage to the Capitol riot.
Protests turning deadly are not that uncommon in U.S. history, and they’ve been instigated from both the left and right. We’ve before even seen gun violence directed at U.S. House members within the Capitol building itself (1954 Capitol shooting).
But to use the 2021 Capitol riot tragedy to propel the narrative that violence is primarily the domain of the political right is to willfully ignore instances such as the 12 people who died of lead poisoning in Flint, Michigan when a Democrat mayor, a Republican governor, and an oddly passive Environmental Protection Agency under Barack Obama carelessly switched Flint’s water supply in order to save money.
One might say that Flint is a different kind of violence and they’d be right. I think its worse. Its silent. Hard to identify its perpetrator. And even harder to secure justice and restitution.
Or how about the hundreds of mostly brown people U.S. drones and airstrikes kill every year? These military and intelligence actions, uniformly funded by bipartisan votes since the 9/11 attacks, have arguably accomplished little except make the U.S. the world’s most prolific killer of pine nut farmers in Afghanistan.
Whether we acknowledge it, deadly violence is central part of our culture and no political party, ideology, race or ethnicity is immune from being complicit in it.
Now is NOT the time to call other people conspiracy theorists — especially since we are all inclined to be one now and then.
While I emphatically oppose the overuse of mail-in voting (particularly when third parties are allowed to collect and deliver large numbers of completed ballots) on the grounds that it compromises two core principles of sound election system design — timeliness and integrity — it is regrettable that Trump and his subordinates have encouraged his voters to believe the three-headed chimera that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. The evidence simply isn’t there, as hard as they try to find it.
That said, for Democrats or anyone else to call Trump voters “conspiracy theorists” is to turn a blind eye to a four-year Democratic Party and news media project called Russiagate that, in the brutal end, found no evidence of a conspiracy between the 2016 Trump campaign and the Russians to influence the 2016 election. At this point my Democrat friends usually lean in and say something like, “The Mueller investigation found insufficient evidence to indict Trump and his associates on conspiracy charges — read the Mueller report!” At which time I lean in and say, “Read the Mueller report!” There was no evidence of a conspiracy, a term with a distinct legal definition: An agreement between two or more people to commit an illegal act, along with an intent to achieve the agreement’s goal.
What the Mueller report did do was document: (1) the Trump campaign’s clumsy quest to find Hillary Clinton’s 30,000 deleted emails (George Papadopoulos and Roger Stone), (2) the incoming Trump administration’s opening of a dialogue with a Russian diplomat (Sergey Kislyak) using an Trump administration representative (General Michael Flynn) and (3) the Trump organization’s effort to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. All of those actions were legal — as they should be.
And, yes, I am skeptical that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone — even as I believe he was the lone gunman. If that makes me a conspiracy theorist, so be it.
Now is NOT the time to shame people for believing that most of our political elites work more for the political donor class than the average American (whoever that is).
I do not believe the data supports the thesis that economic grievances are the primary factor behind Trump’s popularity within the Republican Party. Instead, the evidence says something deeper drives Trump support, more rooted in race, social status, and culture than economics.
Still, the stark realization that our political system is broken binds many Democrat progressives and Trump supporters and has been continually buried over the past four-plus years of anti-Trump media coverage: This country has a political-economic system primarily designed to fulfill the interests of a relatively small number of Americans.
In Democracy in America?: What Has Gone Wrong and What We Can Do About It (University of Chicago Press, 2017), perhaps themost important political science book in the past thirty years, political scientists Benjamin Page and Martin Gilens offer compelling evidence that public policy in the U.S. is best explained by understanding the interests of elites and not those of the average American. In fact, this disconnect is so bad in their view, it is fair to ask if Americans even live in a democracy.
“Our analysis of some 2,000 federal government policy decisions indicates that when you take account of what affluent Americans, corporations and organized interest groups want, ordinary citizens have little or no independent influence at all,” Page and Gilens said in a Washington Post interview while promoting their book. “The wealthy, corporations and organized interest groups have substantial influence. But the estimated influence of the public is statistically indistinguishable from zero.”
“This has real consequences. Millions of Americans are denied government help with jobs, incomes, health care or retirement pensions. They do not get action against climate change or stricter regulation of the financial sector or a tax system that asks the wealthy to pay a fair share. On all these issues, wealthy Americans tend to want very different things than average Americans do. And the wealthy usually win.”
And while Page and Gilen’s research rightfully has methodological detractors, the most direct statistical indicator of its validity — wealth inequality —has been growing steadily in the U.S. since 1990, with a few temporary pauses during the Clinton administration, the 2008 worldwide financial crisis, and the Trump administration (yes, you read that right).
Only the disproportionate amount of the coronavirus pandemic relief money going to corporate bank accounts has put the wealthiest 1-percent back near their Obama administration highs.
So while Trump supporters don’t always marshal the best evidence-based critiques of the American political system, with a little more effort and the help of better leaders it wouldn’t be hard for them to do so.
Now is NOT the time to reduce three-fifths of our population down to words like ‘fascist’ and ‘racist.’
Are there racist Republicans? Of course there are — around 45 percent among white Republican voters, according to my analysis of the 2018 American National Election Study (Pilot). That same analysis, which used a measure of racial bias common in social science literature, found 20 percent of white Democrat voters have a more favorable view of their race relative to African-Americans and/or Hispanics. Any assumption that racism is unique or in a more toxic form among Trump supporters is challenged by the evidence.
Now IS the time for cooler heads to prevail, which eliminates almost anyone appearing on the major cable news networks in the past two weeks.
The national news media profits from the use of exaggeration and hyperbole. That can never be discounted when talking about events such as what happened January 6th.
Here is how Google searches on the term ‘coup d’état’ was affected by the Capitol riot:
I confess I was not horrified watching live on social media as Trump supporters forced their way into the Capitol. I was shocked, but not horrified. A small semantic difference, but an important one. At no point did I think I was watching an ongoing coup d’état.
But for my family and friends that watched the mob unfold on the major cable news networks, they thought an actual coup d’état was in motion — that this mob was viably attempting to stop the electoral college vote, overturn the 2020 election, and keep Trump in the presidency.
Where the news media has an obligation to discern fact from fantasy, they did the exact opposite on January 16th. They, in fact, helped fan the spread of disinformation coming out of news reports from inside the Capitol.
As disconcerting as the scene was on January 6th, there is a chasm-sized difference between Facebook chuckle heads causing a deadly riot and a credible attempt to take over the U.S. government.
This is how journalist Michael Tracey described the Capitol riot and the media’s predilection for hyperbole while reporting on it:
“Is it unusual for a mob to breach the Capitol Building — ransacking offices, taking goofy selfies, and disrupting the proceedings of Congress for a few hours? Yes, that’s unusual. But the idea that this was a real attempt at a “coup” — meaning an attempt to seize by force the reins of the most powerful state in world history — is so preposterous that you really have to be a special kind of deluded in order to believe it. Or if not deluded, you have to believe that using such terminology serves some other political purpose. Such as, perhaps, imposing even more stringent censorship on social media, where the “coup” is reported to have been organized. Or inflicting punishment on the man who is accused of “inciting” the coup, which you’ve spent four years desperately craving to do anyway.
Journalists and pundits, glorying in their natural state — which is to peddle as much free-flowing hysteria as possible — eagerly invoke all the same rhetoric that they’d abhor in other circumstances on civil libertarian grounds. “Domestic terrorism,” “insurrection,” and other such terms now being promoted by the corporate media will nicely advance the upcoming project of “making sure something like this never happens again.” Use your imagination as to what kind of remedial measures that will entail.
Trump’s promotion of election fraud fantasies has been a disaster not just for him, but for his “movement” — such as it exists — and it’s obvious that a large segment of the population actively wants to be deceived about such matters. But the notion that Trump has “incited” a violent insurrection is laughable. His speech Monday afternoon that preceded the march to the Capitol was another standard-fare Trump grievance fest, except without the humor that used to make them kind of entertaining.”
This is not a semantic debate. What happened on January 6th was not a credible coup attempt, despite verbal goading from a large number of the mob suggesting as much and notwithstanding Senator Ted Cruz’ poorly-timed fundraising tweet that some construed (falsely) as his attempt to lead the nascent rebellion.
Still, do not confuse my words with an exoneration of Trump’s role in the Capitol riot. To the contrary, time and contemplation has led to me to conclude Trump is wholly responsible for the deadly acts conducted (literally) under banner’s displaying his name, regardless of the fact his speech on that morning did not directly call for a violent insurrection. In truth, he explicitly said the opposite: “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
Nonetheless, he had to know the potential was there and it was his job to lead at that moment. He didn’t.
Now IS the time to encourage more dialogue, not less — and that means fewer “Hitler” and “Communist” references (my subsequent references notwithstanding).
Along with Page and Gilen’s book on our democracy’s policy dysfunction, another influential book for me has been Yale historian Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (Tim Duggan Books, 2017). In it he uses historical examples to explain how governments use tragedies and crises to increase their control over society (and not usually for the common good).
For example, weeks after Adolf Hitler was made Chancellor of Germany, he used the Reichstag fire on February 27, 1933, to issue The Reichstag Fire Decree which suspended most civil liberties in Germany, including freedom of the press and the right of public assembly.
“A week later, the Nazi party, having claimed that the fire was the beginning of a major terror campaign by the Left, won a decisive victory in parliamentary elections,” says Snyder. “The Reichstag fire shows how quickly a modern republic can be transformed into an authoritarian regime. There is nothing new, to be sure, in the politics of exception.”
It would be reductio ad absurdum to use Hitler’s shutting down of Communist newspapers as the forewarning to a future U.S. dictatorship caused by Twitter banning Trump. Our democracy can survive Trump’s Twitter ban. At the same time, our democracy isn’t stronger for it.
Conservative voices are now systematically targeted for censorship, as described in journalist Glenn Greenwald’s (not a conservative) recent Twitter salvo:
Final Thoughts
Today, because of what happened on January 6th, the U.S. is not as free as it was even a month ago, and it is fruitless to blame one person, a group of people, the news media or a political party for this outcome. We have all contributed in a tiny way by isolating ourselves in self-selected information bubbles that keep us as far away as humanly possible from challenging and unpleasant thoughts. [For example, I spend 99 percent of my social media time watching Nerdrotic and Doomcock torch Disney, CBS and the BBC for destroying my favorite science fiction franchises: Star Wars, Star Trek and Doctor Who.]
A few days ago I chatted with a neighbor who continues to keep his badly dog-eared, F-150-sized Trump sign in his front yard. He talked weather, sports, and movies. Not a word on politics. I wanted to, but knew not to push it. If he had mentioned the current political situation, I would have offered this observation:
Political parties on the rise always overplay their hand. How else can you explain how the Democrats, facing an historically unpopular incumbent president — during a deep, pandemic-caused recession— could still lose seats in U.S. House elections? Republicans are one midterm election away from regaining the House of Representatives and the two years until the next congressional election is a political eternity.
The Republicans will learn from the 2021 Capitol riot.
As for the Democrats, I would just suggest this fortune cookie wisdom:
Actually, that is wisdom for all of us.
- K.R.K.
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