By Kevin D. Williamson
Thursday, January 07, 2021
Joe Biden gave the rioters who stormed the Capitol
yesterday the obligatory stern talking-to. He wasn’t really talking to the
rioters — he was talking to the nation at large, attempting to reassure America
that, once he is sworn in, he will be up to the task. He won’t be, of course,
but old men are entitled to their delusions.
“This isn’t who we are as Americans,” the president-elect
insisted. Yes, old men are entitled to their delusions, but the rest of us are
not obliged to share them. Biden could not be any more wrong: This is exactly
who we are as Americans.
“We must not
normalize Donald Trump!” A hundred thousand variations on that sentence
have been published in the past four years. It is a stupid sentence. Donald
Trump does not require normalization. He is as normal as diabetes, as
all-American as shooting up your high school.
Wednesday’s riot is not the first act of political
violence to take place inside the Capitol. One of the greatest men ever to
serve in the Senate, the Republican abolitionist Charles Sumner, was beaten
nearly to death in the chamber by a vicious Democratic slaver, Representative
Preston Brooks of South Carolina. It was a savage attack in response to a
blistering speech: Brooks broke the gold-handled walking stick he used beating
Sumner over the head, and the senator was sidelined by his injuries for three
years. Brooks was a hero to the slavers, who sent him hundreds of new walking
sticks in the mail. Brooksville, Fla., and Brooks County, Ga., were named for
him shortly afterward.
Senator Sumner’s speech, on the question of slavery in
Kansas, began:
You are now called to redress a
great transgression. Seldom in the history of nations has such a question been
presented. Tariffs, army bills, navy bills, land bills, are important, and
justly occupy your care; but these all belong to the course of ordinary
legislation. As means and instruments only, they are necessarily subordinate to
the conservation of government itself. Grant them or deny them, in greater or
less degree, and you will inflict no shock. The State will not cease to exist.
Far otherwise is it with the eminent question now before you, involving, as it
does, liberty in a broad Territory, and also involving the peace of the whole
country, with our good name in history forevermore.
The attack on Senator Sumner shocked the country and
divided it. It was one of the events that precipitated the Civil War. Brooks,
who died young from a respiratory infection, did not live to see the Civil War
he helped to start. Perhaps he would have been gratified if he could have seen
the riot on Wednesday, in which the so-called patriots of the Trump movement
carried the flag of the rebel slave powers.
Some things never really change.
The Trump presidency began in shame and dishonesty. It
ends in shame, dishonesty, cowardice, and rebellion against the Constitution.
For the past few weeks, the right-wing media, including the big talk-radio
shows, has been coyly calling for a revolution. Of course they never thought
they’d actually get one: That kind of talk is good for business — keep the
rubes riled up and they won’t change the channel when the commercials come
around on the half-hour. I never had much hope for the likes of Sean Hannity,
tragically born too late to be a 1970s game-show host, but to watch Senator Ted
Cruz descend into this kind of dangerous demagoguery as he jockeys to get out
in front of the Trump parade as its new grand marshal has induced despair.
On May 4, 2016, I posted a
little note to the Corner, headlined: “Pre-Planning My ‘I Told You So.’” It
reads, in part: “Republicans, remember: You asked for this.” The path that the
Republican Party and the conservative movement have taken in the past four
years is not one that was forced on them — it is the product of choices that
were made and of compromises that were entered into too willingly by
self-interested men and women seeking money, celebrity, and power.
Of course it ends in violence — this is, after all,
America.
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