Yes, Democrats Are Blowing It

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, June 09, 2022

 

There is some truth in this David Brooks column (“The Jan. 6 Committee Has Already Blown It”) on the January 6 hearings, which are going to be — stupidly and wrongly — more focused on the Capitol riot than on the actual attempted coup d’état of which that riot was a minor but dramatic part.

 

Brooks argues that the Democrats should be using these hearings to ask bigger and more meaningful questions about the state of American democracy, regime instability, creeping authoritarianism, and more. But should implies can, and the Democrats really can’t do that.

 

The reason the Democrats can’t make something useful out of these hearings — besides the fact that they wish to use them only for campaign purposes — is that the Democrats preemptively legitimized January 6. They didn’t know they were doing it at the time, but Democrats spent the summer of 2020 legitimizing “mostly peaceful” riots, arson, and murder during the George Floyd riots.

 

Denounce whataboutism all you like, but as a political matter, whataboutism matters and always has. It is very difficult to argue that political violence is unacceptable when you have spent so many years accepting it.

 

And, of course, Democrats have attempted to delegitimize every presidential election they have lost from 2000 onward. The main organizing idea of Democratic politics from 2016 to 2020 was that the 2016 election was somehow stolen from Hillary Rodham Clinton, who insisted that Donald Trump was an “illegitimate” president. They didn’t know it at the time, but Democrats spent those years building the political defense of the 2020 attempt to overturn the election of Joe Biden.

 

What David Brooks does not seem to understand is that Democrats didn’t blow it this week — they have been blowing it since November 2016. This is an example of Williamson’s Second Law: “When Democrats are in power, they act like they’ll never be out of power, and when Republicans are out of power, they act like they’ll never be in.” One need not make the morally illiterate case that Democratic shenanigans somehow excuse January 6 — they don’t — to appreciate that it matters what kind of example you set. Democrats think that they’re never going to have a Supreme Court nominee who gets the kind of shameful treatment they gave Brett Kavanaugh, and they were surprised when Mitch McConnell used his parliamentary powers to do quietly to Merrick Garland what Democrats did with great fanfare to Robert Bork. Democrats spent 200 years gerrymandering the hell out of every legislative district they could, and started complaining only when Republicans got better at it.

 

Republicans do not learn quickly or easily, but they do eventually learn.