What Happened on January 6

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, January 06, 2022

 

What happened on January 6 of last year?

 

In one sense, it is simple: Donald Trump refused to accept the results of the 2020 presidential election, told many fantastical lies about the election and repeated the fantastical lies of others, and instructed a mob of his supporters to march on the Capitol and “fight,” to make what he frankly described as a show of force — which they did.

 

What happened was not a peaceful protest with a few rowdy elements. For a very detailed look at the violence itself and its relation to what was happening in the political sphere at the same time, you may consult any number of documentary sources; I found HBO’s Four Hours at the Capitol very useful as a play-by-play in which the insurgents are given the courtesy of being permitted to tell their own stories in their own words, to damning effect, and also recommend the New York Times’s 40-minute “Day of Rage” report. Of course, these will be rejected by the cultists who have convinced themselves that anything disagreeable to their own sentiments is “fake news” and fabrication. It is precisely this kind of delusional cult thinking — encouraged by the likes of Sean Hannity, whose recently revealed texts show that he knew at the time exactly what was happening and why, even if today he pretends not to have — that led to the sacking of the Capitol in the first place.

 

In another sense, what happened on January 6 is not simple. The riot at the Capitol commands the attention of the public, the media, and the Democrats, because it is dramatic and therefore makes for good entertainment and good campaign fodder alike. And, as is so often the case, it is the less-important aspect of the story — the sideshow — that takes center stage in the public mind. This is a familiar pattern in political scandals: What mattered in the impeachment of Bill Clinton was the perjury and the suborning of perjury, but what everybody talked about was Monica Lewinsky. Richard Nixon complained that his administration was undone by a “third-rate burglary” — but it wasn’t: It was undone by the coverup and related corruption, even if it is the burglary that is most vividly remembered.

 

The homicidal clown show at the Capitol was one prong of a multi-pronged attack, part of a failed coup d’état that proceeded on several fronts and that — this part matters — proceeds still on several fronts, prominent among them the effort to purge responsible and patriotic Republican officials from state election-oversight positions in order to replace them with Trump sycophants and conspiracy cultists for the purpose of nullifying or sabotaging future elections that produce uncongenial results irrespective of whether Donald Trump ever again appears on a ballot. The most important part of the coup d’état wasn’t the guy with the bison horns shaking his spear at the rotunda — it was the effort to come up with some pretext for formally nullifying the elections and to recruit a sufficient number of coconspirators to act on the pretext. The coup d’état failed because that more insidious project failed, not because the sideshow at the Capitol faded out. There is no great reason to be confident that the democratic firewall will hold again next time.

 

Because American political discourse in our time is something like an opera written in pig-Latin — full of great pitch and moment but signifying a good deal less than it would seem to the casual listener — it is very difficult to discuss the deficiencies of the 2020 election, or any other election, in an intelligent and productive way. And there were problems with the 2020 election, one of the largest of them being the Pennsylvania state supreme court’s usurpation of the state legislature’s power to oversee and manage elections, a power that is the legislature’s particularly and not the court’s to seize or revise when the judges believe the legislators to have acted unwisely or even unfairly. The U.S. Supreme Court was wrong not to take up the appeal that resulted. And, contrary to what Democrats and their media cheerleaders insist, election fraud is fairly common, and indeed widespread, in the United States, which is why we put people in jail for it every year. At the same time, none of this suggests that the 2020 election was — pick your favorite adjective — “rigged,” “stolen,” “fraudulent,” or anything else of the sort. There are irregularities and improprieties in every election year, and, sometimes, the courts do not rule the way they should. None of this provides a basis for invalidating the 2020 election. The efforts of Donald Trump and his allies to do that amounted to an attempt to overthrow the government of the United States and install an illegitimate president on illegitimate grounds, and the riot at the Capitol was intended to instill the fear of physical violence in legislators and government functionaries who might resist.

 

It is my view that none of the Republicans who voted against certifying the 2020 results should ever hold office again, and that no candidate who is unwilling to forthrightly condemn both the violence of January 6 and the lies that inspired that violence ought to enjoy the support of any conservative, any organ of the Republican Party, or, indeed, any American who calls himself a patriot. No candidate who cannot give a simple yes or no answer — and give the correct one — to the question of whether the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump ought to hold office. If that puts the Republican Party into the minority for a generation, then the Republican Party deserves it, having become a menace not only to the conservative principles and governance it purports to cherish but to the political structure of the nation and the Constitution itself. Those who have no use for caudillos and mobs, and who hope to see our constitutional order endure, should seriously consider separating themselves from the Republican Party unless and until it proves capable of reforming itself.