The big question being bandied about on this first anniversary of the January 6 Capitol insurrection is about the proper perspective in which to place it.
It is a tricky bit of business to avoid taking a position for opportunistic reasons.
From the left comes the narrative that that day's events demonstrate that there is no substantive reason to oppose the collectivist, identity-politics-driven and climate-alarmist progressive agenda. In this telling, the fact that Trump supporters had to resort to the tactics they employed shows that they they had no policy proposals or well-thought-out vision of an American essence that withstands the push and pull of momentary shifts in the cultural winds.
What the leftists have going for them is that theirs is the proper perspective on Trumpism - which, allow me to reiterate once again, is an entirely different animal from what was recognizable as conservatism prior to 2015. An ongoing offering of essays in American Greatness, The Federalist and the Claremont Review of Books notwithstanding, there is no consistent core to Trumpism. It's a hodgepodge of protectionist economics, world-stage swagger about nothing, complete disregard for the degree of character - or complete absence thereof - of its stars and icons, and use of actually pressing problems as tools for grift and brand reinforcement (witness the endless stream of fundraising emails with throbbing headlines about stopping socialism).
Trumpists are approaching today's anniversary with the lamest sort of whataboutism, reaching back to Democratic attempts to perpetuate falsehoods about Russian collusion in the 2016 election cycle, or Stacey Abrams's unfounded whining about her 2018 Georgia governor's-race defeat. Mollie Hemingway is out with a piece today (look it up yourself; no linky love) that's preoccupied with the role of "powerful tech oligarchies" and states' attempts to compensate for the effects of an unprecedented pandemic as preparations were made for fair and efficient elections in 2020. Whether there's any appreciable degree of validity to anything she's bringing up, the fact remains that 60 courts, including a Supreme Court on which sit three Trump nominees, dismissed claims that the election process had been fishy anywhere in the country. (And this points up just how quick post-Americans in our day are to foul their own nests - that is, sully the validity of legitimate arguments they make by conflating those situations with their pet obsessions. For instance, Hemingway wrote a thoroughly researched and important book on how horribly Brett Kavanaugh was treated during his vetting for his SCOTUS seat. The public understandably has difficulty separating her defense of that good man's character from her out-to-lunch Trumpism.)
Then there's the historical-comparison angle. Was January 6 worse than, or not nearly as bad as, the 1812 British burning of the Capitol, the formation of a separate nation consisting of slaveholding states in 1860 for the purpose of waging war on the Union, the 1954 shoot-up of the House by Puerto Rican nationalists, the entire tumultuous year of 1968, or the racially charge civil unrest that has beset the country over the last eight years or so.
I don't much care for that way of approaching it. It's a lazy way to justify either dismissiveness or obsession.
If we isolate January 6 in order to examine just what was awful about it, we see that Trump was orchestrating the climate needed for its occurrence. His 2:30 AM statement on November 4, the lawsuits, the hourlong January 2 I-need-you-to-find-11,000-votes call to Brad Raffensperger, the "be there, will be wild" tweet, and his speech to his followers on the Ellipse. And I'm not interested in any kind of smokescreen about how he used the term "peaceably." He told those people that the election had been stolen and that the prospects for the country's continued existence was on the line. He stoked that crowd to maximum frenzy.
He also tried every trick in the book to pressure Mike Pence into behaving unconstitutionally. And pathetic lapdog that Pence had become, the Vice President had to hear from friend, mentor and veep predecessor Dan Quayle that avoiding his duty to oversee the electoral vote count was impossible. Pence just took it when Trump said that, if Pence didn't come around, Trump didn't want to be his friend anymore, and posed the choice of being a "patriot or pussy" as the one before Pence.
There's also the war room set up at the Willard Hotel and the Peter Navarro plan to keep Trump in office.
In this light, can there be any question that the select House committee looking into the events of a year ago is of supreme importance?
But I would not want to leave the discussion at the level of the facts herein presented. They can't be isolated from the larger problem that made this hot mess possible: Donald Trump's utter unfitness to be president. National Review sounded the alarm at the outset of 2016. In October of that year, the newly surfaced Access Hollywood tape came close to being a deal-breaker for Larry Kudlow, but he swallowed hard and stayed on the team. Karen Pence was so disgusted she tried to get Mike to withdraw his vice-presidential candidacy. On election night, she said, "Well, Mike, you got what you wanted" and refused to give him a congratulatory kiss, telling Mike to leave her alone.
Then the Trump presidency got underway, and along came the stream of outrages documented in the plethora of books written since: calling a roomful of generals dopes and babies, insulting leaders of allied nations to their faces and by phone, the utterly fruitless appeasement of Kim Jong-un, the imposition of tariffs on a wide range of goods the US buys from various trading partners, the kicking to the curb of any Republican political candidate who did not expressly declare unwavering personal loyalty to him.
January 6 was the most effective shining of the spotlight of truth about people's character - or lack thereof- with regard to the Trump phenomenon to date. Lindsey Graham, who has honed expressions of righteous indignation to an art form, has gone from saying "enough is enough" about support for Trump to saying that he deals with Trump's 'dark side' because Trump has a 'magic' lacking in other Republicans. It did not take even a month after Kevin McCarthy's January 6 call from the House floor to Trump, in which Trump, who, as we now know, was watching the insurrection live on TV and resisting pleas from family members to act decisively, toyed with McCarthy, casually telling him that maybe the insurrectionists were more upset about the election that McCarthy was, to which McCarthy had to respond by screaming, "Do you know who the fuck you're talking to?" for McCarthy to make the ring-kissing pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago.
The binary-choice argument that the Republican Party has used to justify its pathetic existence keeps getting refined to fit the times. Republican activists, apparatchiks and politicians will tell us that the vast majority of party members are grown-up, sensible, policy-steeped citizens who comprise the party's real lifeblood. They're still the ones who give the keynote addresses at Lincoln-Reagan Day dinners, who tap precinct-committee talent from the ranks of loyalists with the pedigree of sometimes several generations of party involvement. They're the ones who are focused on their communities' economic development and basic good government.
Oh, really? Is that how the likes of Liz Cheney in Wyoming, Ben Sasse in Nebraska, Tom Rice in South Carolina, Brian Kemp and Brad Raffensperger in Georgia, and Doug Ducey in Arizona came to be censured by their state parties?
The ones who most nakedly display their desperation to shore up this rotten party play the "move on" card. The American people expect their elected representatives to be about addressing the very real issues on the nation's plate and all that horses---.
No, the Republican Party is not deserving of one American's vote for any office, federal, state or local, unless it eradicates every last vestige of Trumpism. Since that's an impossible task, the conservatives and moderates who have remained on board must have nothing to do with it.
And going over to the Democrat side is no answer. A party that demonizes the likes of Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema is as fatally infected with its own nihilism as the Republicans.
So, no, there will be no yard signs at my house this year.
If your conclusion at this point is along the lines of "Wow, this guy has really given himself over to a sense of hopelessness about our political situation," you would not be wrong.
It is so very late in the day.
Imagine for a moment that David Axelrod had sat down with a Russian intelligence operative and shared, not Morning Consult-type beauty contest poll results, but the actual (and expensive) demographic cross-tabs from polling research used for campaign targeting, especially in battleground states. Leave aside the voluminous additional evidence, that fact alone would have you howling at a triple-digit decibel level with well-deserved derision toward any suggestion that such perfidy doesn’t rise to the level of “collusion”.
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