Month: January 2021

This is awful:

Rosanne Boyland, 34, was among four of President Donald Trump’s supporters who died Wednesday inside the Capitol after breaking inside to disrupt the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s win, and her family blames the president she fervently backed, reported WGCL-TV.

“Rosanne was really passionate about her beliefs like a lot of people,” said her brother-in-law Justin Cave. “I’ve never tried to be a political person, but it’s my own personal belief that the president’s words incited a riot that killed four of his biggest fans [Wednesday] night, and I believe that we should invoke the 25th Amendment at this time.”

Boyland was knocked to the ground and crushed as crowds breached the Capitol, according to Axios, and suffered a fatal medical emergency.

“As we watched these awful events unfold we hoped that Rosanne was not among the crowd,” Cave said. “Tragically she was there and it cost her life. We have little information at this time and we are waiting with the rest of the world to uncover the specifics.”

The Kennesaw woman was photographed walking Washington, D.C., streets before the breach carrying a Revolutionary War-era flag that shows a timber rattlesnake coiled and ready to strike, threatening, “Don’t tread on me.”Advertisement:

“People were in there to start stuff, but it wasn’t supposed to be a violent event,” said friend Justin Winchell. “They basically created a panic, and the police, in turn, pushed back on them, so people started falling.”

“I put my arm underneath her and was pulling her out and then another guy fell on top of her, and another guy was just walking [on top of her],” Winchell added. “There were people stacked 2-3 deep…people just crushed.”

Friends and family say Boyland had become consumed with QAnon conspiracy theories and hatred for Biden, and they lamented they’d been unable to stop her from going to Washington or obsessing about online conspiracies.

They feel a sense of belonging and purpose in the Trump cult. Of course they do. That’s how cults work. But sadly, this cult is based on solidarity with a madman in grievance and hatred.

Timothy Snyder who wrote “On Tyranny” right after Trump was elected, has written a long piece about where we are and what we can expect in the New York Times Magazine. I highly recommend reading the whole thing when you have some time.

I have excerpted this part of it because I think it is the right analysis about the state of the two parties and particularly the Republicans: the gamers and the breakers. Gamers are mostly politicians and in my mind they are even worse than the breakers because they know what they are doing. The breakers are (mostly) just delusional people with aggressively hostile temperaments fed a non-stop diet of propaganda.

Anyway, this is worth pondering:

The Democrats, today, have become a coalition, one that does better than Republicans with female and nonwhite voters and collects votes from both labor unions and the college-educated. Yet it’s not quite right to contrast this coalition with a monolithic Republican Party. Right now, the Republican Party is a coalition of two types of people: those who would game the system (most of the politicians, some of the voters) and those who dream of breaking it (a few of the politicians, many of the voters). In January 2021, this was visible as the difference between those Republicans who defended the present system on the grounds that it favored them and those who tried to upend it.

In the four decades since the election of Ronald Reagan, Republicans have overcome the tension between the gamers and the breakers by governing in opposition to government, or by calling elections a revolution (the Tea Party), or by claiming to oppose elites. The breakers, in this arrangement, provide cover for the gamers, putting forth an ideology that distracts from the basic reality that government under Republicans is not made smaller but simply diverted to serve a handful of interests.

At first, Trump seemed like a threat to this balance. His lack of experience in politics and his open racism made him a very uncomfortable figure for the party; his habit of continually telling lies was initially found by prominent Republicans to be uncouth. Yet after he won the presidency, his particular skills as a breaker seemed to create a tremendous opportunity for the gamers. Led by the gamer in chief, McConnell, they secured hundreds of federal judges and tax cuts for the rich.

Trump was unlike other breakers in that he seemed to have no ideology. His objection to institutions was that they might constrain him personally. He intended to break the system to serve himself — and this is partly why he has failed. Trump is a charismatic politician and inspires devotion not only among voters but among a surprising number of lawmakers, but he has no vision that is greater than himself or what his admirers project upon him. In this respect his pre-fascism fell short of fascism: His vision never went further than a mirror. He arrived at a truly big lie not from any view of the world but from the reality that he might lose something.

Yet Trump never prepared a decisive blow. He lacked the support of the military, some of whose leaders he had alienated. (No true fascist would have made the mistake he did there, which was to openly love foreign dictators; supporters convinced that the enemy was at home might not mind, but those sworn to protect from enemies abroad did.) Trump’s secret police force, the men carrying out snatch operations in Portland, was violent but also small and ludicrous. Social media proved to be a blunt weapon: Trump could announce his intentions on Twitter, and white supremacists could plan their invasion of the Capitol on Facebook or Gab. But the president, for all his lawsuits and entreaties and threats to public officials, could not engineer a situation that ended with the right people doing the wrong thing. Trump could make some voters believe that he had won the 2020 election, but he was unable to bring institutions along with his big lie. And he could bring his supporters to Washington and send them on a rampage in the Capitol, but none appeared to have any very clear idea of how this was to work or what their presence would accomplish. It is hard to think of a comparable insurrectionary moment, when a building of great significance was seized, that involved so much milling around.A woman who had been pepper-sprayed leaned on the eastern door to the Capitol’s rotunda, 3:47 p.m.Credit…Ashley Gilbertson/VII, for The New York Times

The lie outlasts the liar. The idea that Germany lost the First World War in 1918 because of a Jewish “stab in the back” was 15 years old when Hitler came to power. How will Trump’s myth of victimhood function in American life 15 years from now? And to whose benefit?

On Jan. 7, Trump called for a peaceful transition of power, implicitly conceding that his putsch had failed. Even then, though, he repeated and even amplified his electoral fiction: It was now a sacred cause for which people had sacrificed. Trump’s imagined stab in the back will live on chiefly thanks to its endorsement by members of Congress. In November and December 2020, Republicans repeated it, giving it a life it would not otherwise have had. In retrospect, it now seems as though the last shaky compromise between the gamers and the breakers was the idea that Trump should have every chance to prove that wrong had been done to him. That position implicitly endorsed the big lie for Trump supporters who were inclined to believe it. It failed to restrain Trump, whose big lie only grew bigger.

The breakers and the gamers then saw a different world ahead, where the big lie was either a treasure to be had or a danger to be avoided. The breakers had no choice but to rush to be first to claim to believe in it. Because the breakers Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz must compete to claim the brimstone and bile, the gamers were forced to reveal their own hand, and the division within the Republican coalition became visible on Jan. 6. The invasion of the Capitol only reinforced this division. To be sure, a few senators withdrew their objections, but Cruz and Hawley moved forward anyway, along with six other senators. More than 100 representatives doubled down on the big lie. Some, like Matt Gaetz, even added their own flourishes, such as the claim that the mob was led not by Trump’s supporters but by his opponents.

Trump is, for now, the martyr in chief, the high priest of the big lie. He is the leader of the breakers, at least in the minds of his supporters. By now, the gamers do not want Trump around. Discredited in his last weeks, he is useless; shorn of the obligations of the presidency, he will become embarrassing again, much as he was in 2015. Unable to provide cover for their gamesmanship, he will be irrelevant to their daily purposes. But the breakers have an even stronger reason to see Trump disappear: It is impossible to inherit from someone who is still around. Seizing Trump’s big lie might appear to be a gesture of support. In fact it expresses a wish for his political death. Transforming the myth from one about Trump to one about the nation will be easier when he is out of the way.

As Cruz and Hawley may learn, to tell the big lie is to be owned by it. Just because you have sold your soul does not mean that you have driven a hard bargain. Hawley shies from no level of hypocrisy; the son of a banker, educated at Stanford University and Yale Law School, he denounces elites. Insofar as Cruz was thought to have a principle, it was that of states’ rights, which Trump’s calls to action brazenly violated. A joint statement Cruz issued about the senators’ challenge to the vote nicely captured the post-truth aspect of the whole: It never alleged that there was fraud, only that there were allegations of fraud. Allegations of allegations, allegations all the way down.

The big lie requires commitment. When Republican gamers do not exhibit enough of that, Republican breakers call them “RINOs”: Republicans in name only. This term once suggested a lack of ideological commitment. It now means an unwillingness to throw away an election. The gamers, in response, close ranks around the Constitution and speak of principles and traditions. The breakers must all know (with the possible exception of the Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville) that they are participating in a sham, but they will have an audience of tens of millions who do not.

If Trump remains present in American political life, he will surely repeat his big lie incessantly. Hawley and Cruz and the other breakers share responsibility for where this leads. Cruz and Hawley seem to be running for president. Yet what does it mean to be a candidate for office and denounce voting? If you claim that the other side has cheated, and your supporters believe you, they will expect you to cheat yourself. By defending Trump’s big lie on Jan. 6, they set a precedent: A Republican presidential candidate who loses an election should be appointed anyway by Congress. Republicans in the future, at least breaker candidates for president, will presumably have a Plan A, to win and win, and a Plan B, to lose and win. No fraud is necessary; only allegations that there are allegations of fraud. Truth is to be replaced by spectacle, facts by faith.

Trump’s coup attempt of 2020-21, like other failed coup attempts, is a warning for those who care about the rule of law and a lesson for those who do not. His pre-fascism revealed a possibility for American politics. For a coup to work in 2024, the breakers will require something that Trump never quite had: an angry minority, organized for nationwide violence, ready to add intimidation to an election. Four years of amplifying a big lie just might get them this. To claim that the other side stole an election is to promise to steal one yourself. It is also to claim that the other side deserves to be punished.

Informed observers inside and outside government agree that right-wing white supremacism is the greatest terrorist threat to the United States. Gun sales in 2020 hit an astonishing high. History shows that political violence follows when prominent leaders of major political parties openly embrace paranoia.

Our big lie is typically American, wrapped in our odd electoral system, depending upon our particular traditions of racism. Yet our big lie is also structurally fascist, with its extreme mendacity, its conspiratorial thinking, its reversal of perpetrators and victims and its implication that the world is divided into us and them. To keep it going for four years courts terrorism and assassination.

When that violence comes, the breakers will have to react. If they embrace it, they become the fascist faction. The Republican Party will be divided, at least for a time. One can of course imagine a dismal reunification: A breaker candidate loses a narrow presidential election in November 2024 and cries fraud, the Republicans win both houses of Congress and rioters in the street, educated by four years of the big lie, demand what they see as justice. Would the gamers stand on principle if those were the circumstances of Jan. 6, 2025?

To be sure, this moment is also a chance. It is possible that a divided Republican Party might better serve American democracy; that the gamers, separated from the breakers, might start to think of policy as a way to win elections. It is very likely that the Biden-Harris administration will have an easier first few months than expected; perhaps obstructionism will give way, at least among a few Republicans and for a short time, to a moment of self-questioning. Politicians who want Trumpism to end have a simple way forward: Tell the truth about the election.

America will not survive the big lie just because a liar is separated from power. It will need a thoughtful repluralization of media and a commitment to facts as a public good. The racism structured into every aspect of the coup attempt is a call to heed our own history. Serious attention to the past helps us to see risks but also suggests future possibility. We cannot be a democratic republic if we tell lies about race, big or small. Democracy is not about minimizing the vote nor ignoring it, neither a matter of gaming nor of breaking a system, but of accepting the equality of others, heeding their voices and counting their votes.

It’s highly unlikely that many of those who participated in or sympathized with the marauding insurrectionists last Wednesday are going to admit they did anything wrong. And there are millions of them. But the first serious polling since the riot shows that there is some movement among a small subset of Republicans.

still:

Of course, that last question could mean that more Republicans are upset at the RINOs who failed to support their Dear Leader.

And this — which is way to high in my opinion:

53% of voters described themselves as “very proud” to be an American, down 10 points from a February 2018 survey.

How can we be proud to be American right now? How?

Update — Quinnipiac has a new poll too:

Following last week’s mob attack on the U.S. Capitol during a joint session of Congress to formally certify Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election, nearly three-quarters (74 percent) of voters say democracy in the United States is under threat, according to a Quinnipiac University national poll of registered voters released today.

Just 21 percent of voters say that democracy in the United States is alive and well.

“When it comes to whether American democracy is under threat, both Republicans and Democrats see a raging five-alarm fire, but clearly disagree on who started it,” said Quinnipiac University Polling Analyst Tim Malloy.

PRESIDENT TRUMP

A majority of voters, 56 percent, say they hold President Trump responsible for the storming of the U.S. Capitol, while 42 percent say they do not hold him responsible.

A slight majority, 52 – 45 percent, say President Trump should be removed from office. Voters also say 53 – 43 percent that he should resign as president.

“A majority of Americans hold President Trump responsible for the chaos at the Capitol, and a slight majority believe that he should be removed from office,” added Malloy.

President Trump has a negative 33 – 60 percent job approval rating, which is a substantial drop from the negative 44 – 51 percent rating he received in December of 2020.

The president’s job approval rating today ties his all-time low, which he received in August of 2017.

Voters are divided on whether they think President Trump is mentally stable. Forty-five percent say he is mentally stable, while 48 percent say he is not mentally stable. The findings are nearly identical to responses from a January 2018 poll, when 45 percent of voters said they thought Trump was mentally stable and 47 percent said he was not.

UNDERMINING DEMOCRACY

Voters say 60 – 34 percent that President Trump is undermining, not protecting, democracy. There are sharp political divides on this question. Democrats say 95 – 4 percent and independents say 64 – 28 percent that Trump is undermining democracy, while Republicans say 73 – 20 percent that Trump is protecting democracy.

Voters say 58 – 34 percent that the Republican members of Congress who tried to stop the formal certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election were undermining democracy. Democrats say 90 – 9 percent and independents say 61 – 29 percent that the lawmakers were undermining democracy, and Republicans say 70 – 23 percent that they were protecting democracy.

Eight in 10 voters (80 percent) say the individuals who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6th were undermining democracy. Ten percent say they were protecting democracy and another 10 percent are unsure. Democrats say 95 – 3 percent, independents say 80 – 9 percent, and Republicans say 70 – 17 percent that they were undermining democracy.

STORMING OF THE CAPITOL

Voters are split on whether they consider what happened at the U.S. Capitol a coup attempt or not. Forty-seven percent say they consider it a coup attempt, 43 percent say they do not, and 10 percent say they are unsure. There is a near unanimous view among voters, 91 – 6 percent, that the individuals who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6th should be held accountable for their actions.

Voters also say, 81 – 12 percent, that extremism is a big problem in the United States.

“Pick them up and lock them up. There’s no ambivalence on how to treat the mobs that breached the Capitol, and there is nearly the same level of alarm from Republicans and Democrats over extremism establishing a troubling foothold,” added Malloy.

About 7 in 10 voters (71 percent) say that law enforcement officials did not do everything they could to prevent the initial storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, while 19 percent say they did.

Seventy percent of voters say they are either very (35 percent) or somewhat (35 percent) concerned about the safety of elected officials in the United States, while 29 percent say they are either not so concerned (13 percent) or not concerned at all (16 percent).

2020 VOTER FRAUD

More than half of voters (58 percent) say they believe there was no widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, while 37 percent of voters do believe there was widespread voter fraud. That is almost identical to the response in December 2020, when voters said 58 – 38 percent that there was no widespread voter fraud.

Republicans say 73 – 21 percent that they believe there was widespread voter fraud. Democrats say 93 – 5 percent and independents say 60 – 36 percent that they do not believe there was widespread voter fraud.

21% of Republicans and 36% of Independents believe there was widespread voter fraud. Thi is the Big Lie that Republicans are not doing enough to dispel.

Wow:

In today’s Republican Party, the path to power is to build up a lie in order to overturn democracy. At least that is what Senator Josh Hawley was telling us when he offered a clenched-fist salute to the pro-Trump mob before it ransacked the Capitol, and it is the same message he delivered on the floor of the Senate in the aftermath of the attack, when he doubled down on the lies about electoral fraud that incited the insurrection in the first place…

In multiple speeches, an interview and a widely shared article for Christianity Today, Mr. Hawley has explained that the blame for society’s ills traces all the way back to Pelagius — a British-born monk who lived 17 centuries ago. In a 2019 commencement address at The King’s College, a small conservative Christian college devoted to “a biblical worldview,” Mr. Hawley denounced Pelagius for teaching that human beings have the freedom to choose how they live their lives and that grace comes to those who do good things, as opposed to those who believe the right doctrines.

The only thing worse than a right winger who’s anti-intellectual is a right winger who pretends to be an intellectual. He doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about.

The most eloquent summary of the Pelagian vision, Mr. Hawley went on to say, can be found in the Supreme Court’s 1992 opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Mr. Hawley specifically cited Justice Anthony Kennedy’s words reprovingly: “At the heart of liberty,” Kennedy wrote, “is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” The fifth century church fathers were right to condemn this terrifying variety of heresy, Mr. Hawley argued: “Replacing it and repairing the harm it has caused is one of the challenges of our day.”

…In other words, Mr. Hawley’s idea of freedom is the freedom to conform to what he and his preferred religious authorities know to be right. Mr. Hawley is not shy about making the point explicit. In a 2017 speech to the American Renewal Project, he declared — paraphrasing the Dutch Reformed theologian and onetime prime minister Abraham Kuyper — “There is not one square inch of all creation over which Jesus Christ is not Lord.” Mr. Kuyper is perhaps best known for his claim that Christianity has sole legitimate authority over all aspects of human life.

“We are called to take that message into every sphere of life that we touch, including the political realm,” Mr. Hawley said. “That is our charge. To take the Lordship of Christ, that message, into the public realm, and to seek the obedience of the nations. Of our nation!”…

The line of thought here is starkly binary and nihilistic. It says that human existence in an inevitably pluralistic, modern society committed to equality is inherently worthless. It comes with the idea that a right-minded elite of religiously pure individuals should aim to capture the levers of government, then use that power to rescue society from eternal darkness and reshape it in accord with a divinely-approved view of righteousness.

…When he was still attorney general, William Barr articulated this conclusion in a speech at the University of Notre Dame Law School, where he blamed “the growing ascendancy of secularism” for amplifying “virtually every measure of social pathology,” and maintained that “free government was only suitable and sustainable for a religious people.”

In any other administration, that outrageously un-American speech would have led to scandal and Barr’s resignation.

Christian nationalists’ acceptance of President Trump’s spectacular turpitude these past four years was a good measure of just how dire they think our situation is. Even a corrupt sociopath was better, in their eyes, than the horrifying freedom that religious moderates and liberals, along with the many Americans who don’t happen to be religious, offer the world.

…At a rally in Washington on Jan. 5, on the eve of Electoral College certification, the right-wing pastor Greg Locke said that God is raising up “an army of patriots.” Another pastor, Brian Gibson, put it this way: “The church of the Lord Jesus Christ started America,” and added, “We’re going to take our nation back!”

In the aftermath of the Jan. 6 insurrection, a number of Christian nationalist leaders issued statements condemning violence — on both sides. How very kind of them.

…The brash young senator styles himself not just a deep thinker who ruminates about late-Roman era heretics, but a man of the people, a champion of “the great American middle,” as he wrote in an article for The American Conservative, and a foe of the “ruling elite.” Mr. Hawley has even managed to turn a few progressive heads with his economic populism, including his attacks on tech monopolies.

Yet Mr. Hawley isn’t against elites per se. He is all for an elite, provided that it is a religiously righteous elite. 

Indeed. Hawley’s a Stanford and Yale alum. Which brings into question what the hell is wrong with their admissions departments.

Make no mistake: Mr. Hawley is a symptom, not a cause. He is a product of the same underlying forces that brought us President Trump and the present crisis of American democracy. Unless we find a way to address these forces and the fundamental pathologies that drive them, then next month or next year we will be forced to contend with a new and perhaps more successful version of Mr. Hawley.

Exactly. This is not over. Democracy has not triumphed.

When they said they were “crossing the Rubicon” they may not have known what they were saying and the president certainly didn’t but it was strangely apt anyway. As this NYT op-ed points out, Trump’s cri de guerre, while a clear call to overturn an election and install the loser, also an effort to annul the power of the Congress:

It is tempting to try to run out the clock on the Trump presidency. President Trump has already been impeached once and congressional leaders may assume they still lack the necessary Republican votes to convict and remove him in the Senate. Lawmakers concerned about the possibility for new abuses of power before Jan. 20 have been tempted to settle for urging the president to resign. But more is at stake than what the president might do in the next few days. If Congress declines to impeach and convict the president for his actions on Wednesday, its failure to act will weaken the basic structure of the Constitution.

The key issue is this: One of the three branches of the federal government has just incited an armed attack against another branch. Beyond the threat to a peaceful transition, the incident was a fundamental violation of the separation of powers. Prompted by the chief executive, supporters laid siege to, invaded, and occupied the Capitol building, deploying weapons and subjecting members of both chambers of Congress to intimidation and violence in an effort to produce a particular decision by force.

We have all been taught about “checks and balances” in school. The Constitutional strategy for limiting power requires that officeholders defend the institutions they occupy against what the framers called “encroachments” by the other branches. Usually encroachments are understood metaphorically, and there is time to allow the branches to work out their differences in the back and forth of political negotiation and occasional court battles. The president’s attempted encroachment on the constitutional rights of Congress this past Wednesday was anything but metaphorical.

The president aimed to reverse the decision that Congress was making on a question that the Constitution expressly reserved for the legislature. The specifically anti-congressional animus is most obvious in the fact that the only other elected member of the executive branch, the vice president, was specifically targeted in his role as president of the Senate.

At Wednesday’s rally, Mr. Trump gave some prepared remarks on the so-called evidence of election fraud, but he worried aloud that the crowd would be bored by those details. The more powerful thread running through his speech was an argument that constitutional constraints were forms of weakness, that Vice President Mike Pence and Congress should not be allowed to certify the election, and that it was time to take the gloves off and fight.

After Rudolph Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, exclaimed, “Let’s have trial by combat,” and Donald Trump Jr. said of Republican members of Congress who did not support Mr. Trump, “We’re coming for you,” the president took the stage. He praised his son and Mr. Giuliani, and then delivered a speech full of inflammatory implications. He stated: “We will never concede. We will not take it anymore.” He condemned the Republican Party for fighting like “a boxer with his hands behind his back,” urged Mr. Pence in his capacity as presiding officer in Congress, to “come through for us,” said it was up to Congress to refuse to certify the election, and then announced that he would lead the crowd down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol just after the speech. About the possibility that Mr. Pence and Congress would fail to block certification of the election on Wednesday, he said, “We’re just not going to let that happen” and then remarked on the size and devotion of the crowd.

In a way, it was also an attempt to anul the power of the Judicial branch as well since it had ruled against Trump’s election fraud cases 60 times and he refused to accept their decisions.

The separation of powers is one of the foundations of the system. What Trump has done, first with refusing to accept the results of the election then attempting to usurp the power of the Judiciary and the congress, is taking first steps to dictatorship. Unless we find out that Trump has been pretending to be the uneducated dipshit we’ve seen all these years, it’s highly unlikely he has thought this through in any conscious way. But what’s the difference? His actions have led to the same place.

And while it was all just an academic argument until now, his setting loose that mob of thousands of rioters to storm the Capitol while it was in joint session to threaten the congress with physical harm to stop the vote takes it beyond academic. It didn’t work. But it was, without a doubt, an attempted putsch which, if successful, would have ended with Trump as a de facto dictator. After all, it is highly doubtful he would ever agree that had lost an election in the future any more that he admitted it this time.

While life in America has gone on over the past five days — football games are still being played, people are having cookouts, kids are going sledding — much of the country is still in a state of shock over what happened on January 6th in Washington D.C. As more and more of the video footage from that day becomes available, it’s clear that what happened was far more violent and dangerous than we knew. The pictures we saw on television and social media as it was unfolding looked bad, but what has emerged since then shows that something feral, ugly and deadly was afoot in that crowd that day:

I knew this would end badly. I did not think it would end with Trump supporters beating a cop with poles adorned with American flags as they try to enter the U.S. Capitol to execute Mike Pence. https://t.co/GSPAvMqH0S

— Radley Balko (@radleybalko) January 10, 2021

The police officer beaten in that video by a Trump-motivated mob was not Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, who died of wounds from a different incident. It was another officer from the Metropolitan Police Department. That comment by Radley Balko may sound arch, but it isn’t. That is exactly what happened and it’s clear that there were many in the crowd also prepared to commit violence against elected leaders, presumably in order to force the illegal installation of Donald Trump as president on Jan. 20. That is what they came for. It’s what Donald Trump sent them there to do.

Some people on the right have tried to rationalize this by saying that violence that ensued after the George Floyd murder this summer sent the message that the best way to resolve political differences is through violence. This is beyond sophistry. Violent protests have been part of American history since the beginning, starting with the revolution itself. Violent civil unrest has happened in every decade since. The idea that liberals invented it last summer is completely absurd.

But that’s not the point. There is a difference between protests, peaceful and otherwise, which people do all over the world, and an attempt to violently overturn an election. To do that by storming a joint session of Congress, with all the representatives present, as it ceremonially certified an election is beyond anything we’ve ever seen before in this country. In all the protests, riots and uprisings, no one ever took over the U.S. Capitol and marauded through it looking for leaders chanting “we’re coming for you” and threatening to hang them. It was no protest, it was an attempted putsch, a violent overthrow of a democratic government on the basis of a Big Lie that the election was fraudulent.

Plenty of people saw it coming. Many of the ringleaders had planned the violence in plain sight and they were incited by the President of the United States and several of his henchmen. People had been pouring into DC for days, ready to rumble. The day before the riot, they held a rally in which The Big Lie was broadcast over and over:

Listen to this – he's giving away their plans for the next 4 years. https://t.co/ngI3ruYXMw

— Cathy McG (@CathyMcG2) January 6, 2021

And they thought this was gonna end peacefully??? https://t.co/NbEyA2if4h

— Ali 💪🇺🇦❤️ (@BellaCoutureAli) January 7, 2021

Everyone knew the city was filling up with far right extremists yet for reasons that are still unexplained, the authorities were unprepared at best, complicit at worst. Perhaps they believed that this group of Real Americans from around the nation (and in the Congress) were just blowing smoke when they shared their little #1776 hashtags and plotted their “Stop the Steal” insurrection. But anyone who was paying attention knew that they were focused on the Capitol where the certification ceremony would take place. Why it was left so thinly guarded is still a mystery.

We still haven’t had an official briefing from any law enforcement agency on the status of the investigations or analysis of what happened, which is unprecedented. We’ve had nothing from the Capitol Police, the city police, the FBI, the Department of Justice, no one. The worst violent attack on U.S. government property since the plane hit the Pentagon on 9/11 and there has been no communication from the federal government.

What we are left with are accounts from those who were reporting on the event both inside and outside the Capitol and from those who were inside, terrified that they were about to be taken hostage or worse. Perhaps the most heart-rending is this Buzzfeed account from some Black Capitol policemen who had to deal with the grotesque racism of these insurrectionists, (many of them flying “blue lives matter” flags) including being repeatedly called the n-word:

At the end of the night, after the crowds had been dispersed and Congress got back to the business of certifying president-elect Joe Biden’s victory, the veteran officer was overwhelmed with emotion, and broke down in the Rotunda.”I sat down with one of my buddies, another Black guy, and tears just started streaming down my face,” he said. “I said, ‘What the fuck, man? Is this America? What the fuck just happened? I’m so sick and tired of this shit.'”

Soon he was screaming, so that everyone in the Rotunda, including his white colleagues, could hear what he had just gone through.”These are racist-ass terrorists,” he yelled out.

One of the heroes to have emerged from this riot is this man:

This moment in ⁦@igorbobic⁩ stunning footage. In front of the officer, coming up the stairs, is a mass of rioters. The USCP officer glances to his left. Between those two chairs is the entrance to the senate floor. He lured them to his right, away from their targets. pic.twitter.com/knjQQ4GZ0d

— Kristin Wilson (@kristin__wilson) January 10, 2021

Reading these stories from the Black officers and seeing the footage of that lone cop facing the angry mob and luring them away from the Senators who were still being evacuated made me think about the other story of last week, the one that would have been an earthquake of its own, in a good way, if this hideous violence hadn’t happened. I’m speaking, of course, of the wonderful outcome in the two Senate races in Georgia. For the first time in American history, this Southern state voted for a Black man and a Jew for the U.S. Senate.

Considering its fraught racial history — including being the home of the Moore’s Ford lynchings, which the New York Times noted “is considered by many to be the last mass lynching in American history,” and the earlier lynching of Leo Frank, a famous case of anti-semitic violence — this was a singular moment that we didn’t have time to savor and analyze. For all of its politically reactionary, racist violence and conspiracy-mongering, the country is progressing anyway. It usually does, much too slowly and backsliding often, but inexorably nonetheless. In the midst of all this horror, we shouldn’t forget that.

I’m sure there will be hours of commentary and analysis of the Capitol Insurrection and rightly so. This Trump cult has gone further than any group of Americans since the civil war to assault our government institutions and the democratic process. The big question now is if anyone in power will face consequences for what they did, starting with Trump and going all the way down the line. If there is no price to be paid for this you can bet that there will be more political violence from this faction down the road. If there is one thing in the footage that is crystal clear it’s that they’ve tasted blood — and they liked it.

Salon

This post from a few years back seem pertinent at the moment:

This interview with Madeleine Albright about her new book Fascism: A Warning is worth watching. It’s quite unfashionable in many left wing circles to suggest that Donald Trump represents anything more threatening than politics as usual. Perhaps he’s a little crude but he can’t really get anything done.

Except it isn’t politics as usual. Trump is not happening in a vacuum. This phenomenon is global.

Michelle Goldberg wrote about it on Friday:

Madeleine Albright, the former secretary of state, was born into a totalitarian age. She was only a toddler when she and her parents, who were of Jewish descent but later converted to Catholicism, fled Czechoslovakia after Hitler’s invasion in 1939. They returned following the war, but fled again in the wake of the Communist coup in 1948.

Her father, the diplomat Josef Korbel, sought asylum for the family in the United States, writing in a letter to an American official that if they returned home he’d be arrested “for my faithful adherence to the ideals of democracy.” America took them in as refugees. Korbel became an eminent foreign policy scholar, and in 1997 Bill Clinton made Albright the country’s chief diplomat, the first woman to hold that position.

At the time, the Cold War was over and the great ideological battles of the 20th century appeared settled. Liberal democracy was ascendant, and Albright’s adopted country was its most powerful champion. The arc of her life seemed to coincide with a global evolution from widespread tyranny toward expanding freedom.

So it is sad and jarring that Albright, now 80, has just published a book with the stark title “Fascism: A Warning.” The book is not just a warning about Donald Trump; Albright is concerned with the eclipse of liberal democracy all over the world and told me in a recent interview that she had planned to write on the subject before Trump’s election. But the president looms over her project. “If we think of fascism as a wound from the past that had almost healed, putting Trump in the White House was like ripping off the bandage and picking at the scab,” she writes.

The mere fact of this book would be astonishing, if Trump hadn’t pulverized our capacity for astonishment. Albright has long been an optimistic exponent of American exceptionalism, a consummate establishment figure not given to alarmist diatribes. It should be shocking that she feels the need to warn us not just about fascism abroad, but also at home.

In January, Freedom House, an international democracy watchdog, reported that 71 countries suffered declines in political rights and civil liberties last year, while only 35 saw improvements. Rather than standing against this trend, America under Trump has become part of it. As Freedom House concluded, “A major development of 2017 was the retreat of the United States as both a champion and an exemplar of democracy.”

Albright is not accusing Trump of being a full-blown fascist. He has yet to resort to extrajudicial violence — except, of course, for encouraging his acolytes to beat up protesters at rallies — and his efforts to undermine the rule of law have had only mixed success, in part due to his own fecklessness.

But Trump is, Albright told me, “the most undemocratic president” in America’s modern history. He empowers authoritarianism globally and is in turn empowered by the international growth of right-wing populism. As she writes in her book: “The herd mentality is powerful in international affairs. Leaders around the globe observe, learn from, and mimic one another.”

The historian Roger Griffin once described the core vision of fascism as “the national community rising Phoenix-like after a period of encroaching decadence which all but destroyed it.” (His italics.) Albright’s definition is broader than most academic taxonomies; she tends to use “fascism” as a synonym for authoritarianism.

Her book includes Italy’s Benito Mussolini and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, but also Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and North Korea’s Kim Jong-il, who was succeeded after his death by his son Kim Jong-un. Except for Mussolini, she has met all these men. “What they do have in common,” she said, “is this assumption, or decision, that they embody the spirit of the nation and that they have the answers and that their instincts are good, that they are smarter than everybody else and can do things by themselves.”

Trump conflates himself and the state in just this way. Many of the details in Albright’s pocket histories of various dictators are similarly familiar. Before reading it, I hadn’t realized that Mussolini had promised to “drenare la palude,” or “drain the swamp,” and that his crowds jeered and booed clusters of reporters at his rallies. (Nor did I know that Mussolini, like Trump, thought it unsanitary to shake hands.) Of Chávez, Albright writes, his “communications strategy was to light rhetorical fireworks and toss them in all directions.” He gloried in dominating the media, “boasting about his accomplishments and deriding — in the crudest terms — real and suspected foes.” (Many of his followers, incidentally, wore red baseball caps.)

The book’s echoes of the present are intentional. “One of my editors said, ‘Make the reader work for it,’” Albright said. “So you can kind of see the various steps.”

I asked Albright how she avoids despair, seeing the authoritarianism that marked her childhood now sweep the globe in her old age. “It’s something that I really do think I learned from my parents,” she said. “You have to make a way of dealing with the problems that are out there in order to avoid despair, and not just be an observer of it. And realize that we all have a role.” Her role right now is to speak out, with whatever authority her history and career confer.

Albright is well known for her collection of brooches, which she uses like shiny emojis to send subtle diplomatic messages and make wry jokes. (The Smithsonian once did an exhibition of them.) In 1999, she found out that Russia had bugged a conference room near her State Department office; at her next meeting with Russian diplomats, she wore an insect pin. When I spoke to her, she was wearing a silver brooch of a winged figure. I asked her what it was. “It is Mercury,” she said. “The messenger.”

I heard a lot of people say over the past four years, “it can’t happen here.”

Yeah…

“If the US had Canada’s Covid-19 death rate,” a Vox headline declares, “225,000 more Americans would likely be alive today.” The body of the article (no pun intended) reads:

While there are nations with higher death rates, this still puts the US in the top 20 percent for deaths among the world’s developed countries, with more than twice the death rate of the median developed country.

Some numbers to put that in perspective:

• If the US had the same death rate as the European Union overall, nearly 79,000 Americans who died of Covid-19 would likely still be alive (unless they died of other causes).
• If the US had the same death rate as Germany, more than 212,000 Americans who died of Covid-19 would likely still be alive.
• If the US had the same death rate as Canada, nearly 225,000 Americans who died of Covid-19 would likely still be alive.
• If the US had the same death rate as Australia, nearly 361,000 Americans who died of Covid-19 would likely still be alive. Fewer than 12,000 would have died, compared to the 365,000 who died in reality.
• If the US had the same death rate as Japan, nearly 363,000 Americans who died of Covid-19 would likely still be alive — and fewer than 10,000 Americans would have died of the disease.

In Los Angeles, aurhorities expect to have Dodger Stadium set up by the end of this week as a mass vaccination site capable ultimately of delivering 12,000 doses per day (CNN).

With little national coordination from the Trump White House, vaccine roll-out continues to pose problems (USA Today):

Anger and frustration are surging across the country as the federal government leaves states to handle the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines. Through Friday, states had received 22.1 million doses of the vaccines. Of those, about 6.7 million – less than one-third – had been administered.

Poor messaging and inconsistent procedures are forcing people to scramble on their own to find vaccines.

Can it get worse? Yes it can:

The much-criticized rollout by the Trump administration has laid the groundwork for a scenario in which the rich and the politically connected use their money and power to cut in line and get vaccinated before everyone else, they said.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has already threatened to impose fines of up to $1 million and revoke the licenses of doctors, nurses and others who don’t follow state and federal vaccine distribution guidelines, which currently place a priority on inoculating front-line health care workers and nursing home residents.

There have been reports in Miami of big hospital donors getting the first crack at the vaccine and in New York of tycoons flying their friends down to Florida to get inoculated with doses earmarked for a retirement home.

And in Colorado, some teachers are crying foul after nurses and educators in wealthier public school districts and private schools got inoculated first.

Bio-ethicist Arthur Caplan of New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine said in an interview last month, “Anything that’s seen as life-saving, life-preserving and that’s in short supply creates black markets.”

Great. They say bad things come in threes. So, global pandemic, insurrection/civil war, and what? Alien invasion?

It turns out wanting to star in your own insurrection film is not that bright an idea if your revolution fizzles. On top of closed-circuit cameras mounted all over the Capitol, it seemed every other would-be revolutionary was shooting cell phone video. Those images plus TV and print photos are ready-made evidence for authorities trying to identify and arrest participants in the Trump insurrection. Not wearing masks during a raging pandemic as a political statement makes it easier than it otherwise would be.

Arrest records provide details of some of the “very fine people” behind the riot (AP):

The insurrectionist mob that showed up at the president’s behest and stormed the U.S. Capitol was overwhelmingly made up of longtime Trump supporters, including Republican Party officials, GOP political donors, far-right militants, white supremacists, members of the military and adherents of the QAnon myth that the government is secretly controlled by a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophile cannibals. Records show that some were heavily armed and included convicted criminals, such as a Florida man recently released from prison for attempted murder.

The Associated Press reviewed social media posts, voter registrations, court files and other public records for more than 120 people either facing criminal charges related to the Jan. 6 unrest or who, going maskless amid the pandemic, were later identified through photographs and videos taken during the melee.

The evidence gives lie to claims by right-wing pundits and Republican officials such as Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., that the violence was perpetrated by left-wing antifa thugs rather than supporters of the president.

Like we needed AP to confirm that. Here’s one:

Michael Thomas Curzio was arrested in relation to the riots less than two years after he was released from a Florida prison in 2019 after serving an eight-year sentence for attempted murder. Court records from Florida show that he shot the boyfriend of his former girlfriend in a fight at her home.

For some reason people like that see themselves in Mr. “I Could Shoot Somerone on Fifth Avenue.” Here’s another:

Also facing federal charges is Cleveland Grover Meredith Jr., a Georgia man who in the wake of the election had protested outside the home of Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, whom Trump had publicly blamed for his loss in the state. Meredith drove to Washington last week for the “Save America” rally but arrived late because of a problem with the lights on his trailer, according to court filings that include expletive-laden texts.

“Headed to DC with a (s—-) ton of 5.56 armor-piercing ammo,” he texted friends and relatives on Jan. 6, adding a purple devil emoji, according to court filings. The following day, he texted to the group: “Thinking about heading over to Pelosi (C——’s) speech and putting a bullet in her noggin on Live TV.” He once again added a purple devil emoji, and wrote he might hit her with his truck instead. “I’m gonna run that (C—-) Pelosi over while she chews on her gums. … Dead (B——) Walking. I predict that within 12 days, many in our country will die.”

Beside weapons found with Meredith at a Washington, D.C. Holiday Inn “agents also seized a stash of THC edibles and a vial of injectable testosterone.”

Many others who attended the riot claim they never inhaled, um … invaded the Capitol * :

Commanders at the U.S. Army’s 1st Special Forces Command at Fort Bragg in North Carolina are investigating Capt. Emily Rainey’s involvement in the Wednesday rally. The 30-year-old psychological operations officer told the AP she led 100 members of Moore County Citizens for Freedom who traveled to Washington to “stand against election fraud” and support Trump. She insisted she acted within Army regulations and that no one in her group broke the law.

Federal authorities have arrested the now-infamous zip-tie guys seen in pictures in the well of the Senate. Retired Air Force Lt. Colonel Larry Brock was arrested Sunday in Texas. Internet and federal investigators identified the maskeless Brock (seen in a green helmet, green tactical vest) by unit patches on his gear. Nashville bartender Eric Gavelek Munchel wore a mask to hide his identity. But again, his distinctive tactical gear made him easy to pick out in enough photos and video before and after the assault. He too was arrested on Sunday.

In the aftermath of the assault and in anticipation of more unrest leading up to the Jan. 20 inauguration for President-elect Joe Biden, airlines called on the TSA to place identified rioters on the no-fly list:

“We support the swiftest action with clear consequences and clear rules for keeping these people off planes,” Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA), a union representing 50,000 flight attendants on 17 airlines, said.

Rep. Bennie G. Thompson, the Chair of the House Committee on Homeland Security, has called for the Capitol rioters to be added to the TSA’s No-Fly List, but that may not happen before the inauguration.

That was Thursday. Nelson said in a statement some pro-Trump flyers on their way to the Wednesday rally engaged in “mob mentality behavior” on flights.

Two people removed so far from tonight’s flight to DC ahead of the #StopTheSteaI2021 rallies tomorrow. pic.twitter.com/lvXlYiD2Xd

— Jabin Botsford (@jabinbotsford) January 6, 2021

An American Airlins pilot threatened to land his 4-1/2 hour, Washington Dulles-to-Phoenix flight in Kansas on Friday after rowdy Trump fans began chanting “USA! USA!” :

American Airlines on Thursday announced that it will no longer serve alcohol on flights to and from the nation’s capital after flight attendants ‘were forced to confront passengers exhibiting politically motivated aggression towards other passengers and crew.’

Alaska Airlines is not waiting. It banned 14 travelers from future flights on Friday after “unacceptable” behavior on a flight leaving Washington Dulles for Seattle:

Seattle-based Alaska said a number of passengers on a flight out of Washington late Thursday “were non-mask compliant, rowdy, argumentative and harassed our crew members.”

Such actions guarantee future scenes such as the one filmed at a Washington, D.C.-area airport Sunday. One sobbing MAGA straggler got booted from his flight home.

People who broke into the Capitol Wednesday are now learning they are on No-Fly lists pending the full investigation. They are not happy about this. https://t.co/5GfHo1eVU8

— Ray [REDACTED] (@RayRedacted) January 10, 2021

We don’t know the man’s identity or why the TSA (or the airline) placed him on a no-fly list. It seems he feels facing consequences is only for people who don’t love America enough to ransack the Capitol.

Police in some cities arrested Black Lives Matter protesters last summer merely for stepping off the curb.

* UPDATE: Rainey, who received “a career-ending letter of reprimand for her actions at an earlier protest in the Fort Bragg area,” has resigned her commission.

Michael Brenner in the Washington Post:

A mob of several thousand outraged people rampaged through the streets of the city after a long rambling speech by their leader inciting them to do so. Some used violence. Windows were broken, shots were heard, there was bloodshed. The leader of the pack demanded the political swamp be drained. After a tumultuous few hours, order was restored and elected officials emerged from their hiding places.

No, this is not Washington, D.C., Jan. 6, 2021. This was Munich, Nov. 8, 1923. The instigators did not come to Munich to support a president who was voted out of office. They did not gather in front of the nation’s seat of power, but rather started their rally in a beer cellar where a young Adolf Hitler seized control after silencing the politicians and the crowd assembled there with a pistol shot to the ceiling. Obviously, the circumstances surrounding the storming of the U.S. Capitol are very different from those of the Munich Beer Hall Putsch. But Germany during the 1920s offers crucial lessons for us today about how democracies become imperiled.

That, to say the least, is the biggest understatement of 2021 so far, and likely to remain so.

Timothy Snyder in the NY Times:

 The lie outlasts the liar. The idea that Germany lost the First World War in 1918 because of a Jewish “stab in the back” was 15 years old when Hitler came to power. How will Trump’s myth of victimhood function in American life 15 years from now? And to whose benefit?

This is one reason I could barely sleep or concentrate last week. Not only because of what was happening, but because of what will happen.

Snyder again:

The claim that Trump was denied a win by fraud is a big lie not just because it mauls logic, misdescribes the present and demands belief in a conspiracy. It is a big lie, fundamentally, because it reverses the moral field of American politics and the basic structure of American history.

The Beer Hall Putsch. The Stab in the Back. The Big Lie. They’re terrible songs in a playlist from hell. Never heard these songs before? Then for God’s sake, for Buddha’s sake, for the sake of yourselves, your families, your friends and lovers — everything you hold dear — read The Death of Democracy now.

I love being wrong but what I’m seeing is a deliberate, carefully plotted attempt by prominent Republicans to emulate the precise, appalling steps of Hitler’s rise to power, to use the Nazis’ story as the perfect template for their own mad ambitions. And we are responding exactly the way Weimar did, with politicians extending olive branches, facile mockery, and the desperate wish that we all just get along.

Unfortunately, none of that will work. Krugman:

…if history teaches us one lesson about dealing with fascists, it is the futility of appeasement. Giving in to fascists doesn’t pacify them, it just encourages them to go further.

So why have so many public figures — who should have known what Trump and his movement were — tried, again and again, to placate them by giving in to their demands? Why are they still doing it even now?

So far, the lesson for Trumpist extremists is that they can engage in violent attacks on the core institutions of American democracy, and face hardly any consequences. Clearly, they view their exploits as a triumph, and will be eager to do more.

For this isn’t over.

Indeed, it is not. We’re only at 1923. It took ten more years for the Nazis to consolidate power and start setting up the infrastructure for the extermination of millions. But in the Internet age, unless we wake up and are very lucky, it will be 1933 again before we know it.