By Noah Rothman
Thursday, January 07, 2021
On January 6, 2021, the president of the United States
fomented a violent insurrection against the federal government.
On this point, the semantics matter. This was not a
coup d’etat, the definition of which is an organized effort to remove the
existing government, in which all the levers of governmental power are seized
by force. Nor was this a mere protest. No sane observer could equate what
happened yesterday with a public demonstration of dissent which, though not
necessarily law-abiding, is nevertheless a peaceful display. This was an
organized, terroristic assault on the seat of elected government.
The president organized yesterday’s mob. On its eve,
he appealed to the crowd directly—as grave a civic offense as the Founders
dared to imagine—for the redress of his political grievances. He threatened
Congress with street action if they did not reject the voters’ verdict. At the
rally, he egged the crowd on, legitimizing the delusions spoon-fed to them by
some members of Congress, that the 2020 election could somehow still be
overturned. And he guided the mob toward the Capitol and set them loose,
resulting in terror and vandalism this country has not seen in that hall for
more than 200 years.
This was not an organic and spontaneous expression of
rage. It was a planned, organized, and orchestrated attack on the U.S.
government. The rioters were in constant communication with one another. They
targeted specific members of government with
violence. And as police later learned, the plotters were armed with improvised
explosive devices and Molotov cocktails, which were strategically stationed
around Washington D.C.—including at both the Republican and Democratic National
Committee offices.
The collection of violent nihilists who descended on
the Capitol building had no coherent political program beyond violence and
mayhem. They are no one’s constituency, and they deserve to be treated like the
contemptible political orphans they are. But we have not done that. Cretins and
fools who fear nothing as much as they do a comprehensive theory of events that
indicts anyone other than their political adversaries will reject this notion,
but prominent actors from both parties—yes, both sides—have for years found the
mob a useful tool. And because of that recklessness, what happened yesterday
could be just a sign of what is to come.
Donald Trump lionized violence in service to his
political claims from the moment he first ran for office, but the first
expressions of violence in his name occurred in March of 2016. Then, following
several months in which he fantasized aloud about the prospect that his
supporters might lash out violently, someone did just that. But rather than
condemn this criminal act, he promised to pay the legal fees of those who
followed this example. And while Republican lawmakers condemned Trump’s
accommodating instincts at the time, particularly those who were competing with
Trump for primacy over the GOP, their sense of urgency faded after he took the
White House.
In the months and years that followed, Trump would
reprise this act, praising the violent mobs who lashed out in his defense. This
is what led to his indefensibly confused and ambiguous response to the racists
and rioters who descended on Charlottesville, and it’s what led him to call for
counter-demonstrators—”GREAT PATRIOTS!”—to confront the violent protests that
erupted over the summer of 2020 following the killing of George Floyd.
It would be a mistake to attribute this convergence of
interests between Trump and the mob to a shared ideology. There is no ideology
on display here other than the idea that meting out pain to the right people is
a virtue. The mob is nothing more than a tool for Trump. They, among other
instruments, strike fear in his enemies and allies alike. The mob, too, sees
Trump as a vehicle for power and influence, as do the Republicans who have
abetted Trump to this point. All are complicit—passively
or otherwise—in the violence we’ve
witnessed for the past four years.
But Democrats, too, countenanced their share of
violence. Just as Trump declined to condemn those who committed violence in his
name in 2016, Democrats looked the other way as vicious counter-demonstrators
descended on Trump-campaign events, assaulting peaceable rally-goers and
vandalizing the surrounding property. Democratic lawmakers and their allies in media heaped praise on the conglomeration of
malcontents calling itself Antifa merely because it nominally claimed to be “fighting fascism.” And as city after city was engulfed by riots last summer, Democrats
declined to condemn the excesses to which demonstrators appealed in the name of
racial justice. Indeed, when the chaos in American streets was addressed at
all, it was framed as a wholly righteous and unblemished demand for historical
rectitude.
And while Democrats looked the other way, left-leaning
media embraced the utility of street violence. “Riots are destructive,
dangerous, and scary,” Vox.com observed, “but can lead to serious social
reforms.” In an unusually soft interview with NPR, author Vicky Osterweil insisted
that “looting is a powerful tool to bring about real, lasting change in
society.” As Commentary‘s Christine
Rosen observed at the time, excusing the violence as though it was an anomaly
and not a consistent feature of these demonstrations became a media fixation.
“Group Breaks Off of Mostly Peaceful Protest, Vandalizes Police Station, Sets
Courthouse on Fire,” read one NBC News headline. “Third night of looting
follows third night of mostly peaceful protest,” asserted another from the Wisconsin State Journal. To even call
what municipal police routinely deemed riots “riots” was, in the estimation of
CNN’s Chris Cillizza, an act of “desperation” by embattled Republicans.
If anyone wants to know how we arrived at this
lamentable time in American history, the place to look for answers is in the
mirror. Violence does not happen in a vacuum. One side’s menace feeds off the
other’s and justifies its own actions based on those of its opponents. You
cannot excise one but not the other—both must be anathematized.
This shameful past does not have to be a portent of a
violent and unstable future, but that will be our fate if responsible
politicians continue to see disturbed and impressionable people as a weapon to
be harnessed and directed at their domestic political opponents. If cynical
politicians continue to lie to their constituents, feeding them comforting
fictions about how the country’s institutions are tainted and arrayed against
their interests, we will endure more insurrections, more violence, and more
instability. And that will have profound consequences.
As I wrote in my book, published two years ago this
month, condemning political violence in whatever form it takes isn’t evasive.
It’s consistent. Anything less is a corruption of the sort that “eats away at
the foundations of a healthy society. And one day, when the rot has been
ignored for so long that no one believes it can be expunged, another mob will
come along. And that time, the republic’s weakened edifice may not withstand
the pressure.” Let January 6 be a wake-up call. Orphan your violent.
No comments:
Post a Comment