“I’m calling all of them seditionists,” writes Ann Applebaum at The Atlantic, meaning Trump supporters who cheered but did not particpate in the Jan. 6 insurrection. There are too many to call extremists and too few to call secessionists, she believes. Neither fascists, rebels nor white supremacists seems to fit the bill.
“Not all Republicans are seditionists,” she observes, “nor is everyone who voted for Trump, nor is every conservative: Nothing about rejecting your country’s political system is conservative.” So what to do with/about the, say, 10-15 percent of Americans who are seditionists? Or about others like QAnon believer, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who get elected to Congress as a means of undermining their own government? They cannot be wished away or all locked away.
We must somehow coexist, Applebaum argues:
Here’s another idea: Drop the argument and change the subject. That’s the counterintuitive advice you will hear from people who have studied Northern Ireland before the 1998 peace deal, or Liberia, or South Africa, or Timor-Leste—countries where political opponents have seen each other as not just wrong, but evil; countries where people are genuinely frightened when the other side takes power; countries where not all arguments can be solved and not all differences can be bridged. In the years before and after the peace settlement in Northern Ireland, for example, many “peacebuilding” projects did not try to make Catholics and Protestants hold civilized debates about politics, or talk about politics at all. Instead, they built community centers, put up Christmas lights, and organized job training for young people.
This was not accidental. The literature in the fields of peacebuilding and conflict prevention overflows with words such as local and community-based and economic regeneration. It’s built on the idea that people should do something constructive—something that benefits everybody, lessens inequality, and makes people work alongside people they hate. That doesn’t mean they will then get to like one another, just that they are less likely to kill one another on the following day.
Aplebaum cites initiatives in countries such as Columbia, but admits it might be hard to invite to nonpartisan community efforts people who only open emails from “their own kind,” if you will. She also expects strong skepticism from readers. What incentive is there to try any of this? Some of these cultists are so far down the rabbit hole that they may never emerge and why bother trying: “let them learn to live with us.”
Still, nonpartisan activities such as rural food distribution have the advantage of meeting basic needs in a way that does not directly threaten recipients’ conservative views. Nonpartisan Indivisible Appalachian Ohio works on that model in southeast Ohio. Neighbors helping neighbors and, oh look, Ma, they don’t have tails or horns. Shifting people’s view of more progressive neighbors over time could shave Republican margins of victory, make Democrats more competititve in places they are not now, win back state legislatures, and slowly move true believers off the ledge.
The pro-Trump protesters who appeared at state capitols on Inauguration Day 2021 arrived in numbers countable on one hand, for the most part. The dozen or so who showed up in Phoenix brought secessionist flags. They may be few in number, yet still represent the larger minority of voters behind Trump who pose a threat to democracy so long as they remain Americans in name only.