This piece by Jeet Heer discusses the recent brouhaha around AOC’s recitation of her experience during the insurrection. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend that you do. If you think that the national target of violent, right wing, vitriol didn’t have good reason to be terrified when the insurrectionists took over the Capitol, you haven’t been paying attention.
Her personal recollection is gut wrenching to anyone who has even a modicum of empathy. But there’s a bigger issue at stake even than that:
Ocasio-Cortez spoke in such personal terms in order to reject calls to move on from the events of January 6. “We cannot move on without accountability,” she insisted. “We cannot heal without accountability.”
The January 6 riot was so shocking that one would think there should be no need to insist on its importance. But the very fact that the failed insurrection revealed the explosive violence of Trumpist Republicans makes political interests vested in bipartisan cooperation all the more eager to whitewash the events.
This tendency is true not just of Republicans but also the media—and even some factions on the left. The late novelist Gore Vidal liked to quip that America should be called the United States of Amnesia. This national preference for willful forgetfulness is already evident in varied attempts to push the January 6 violence down the memory hole.
Republican Senator Lindsey Graham is among the most vocal advocates for a quick turn of the page. Appearing on Fox News on Monday, Graham warned that calling witnesses for the impeachment trial of Donald Trump would “open up Pandora’s box.” Graham added, “I hope we don’t call any and we vote and get this trial over next week when it starts.”
Republicans like Graham have obvious reasons to want the public to forget about January 6 as soon as possible. But the same tendency can be seen in media reporting on Ocasio-Cortez’s comments, which zeroed in on her revelations about sexual assault at the expense of what she said about the January 6 riot. The New York Times article was headlined, “Ocasio-Cortez Says She Is a Sexual Assault Survivor.”
That was a moving moment to be sure. Survivors of sexual assault no doubt related instantly to her emotion and discomfort in talking about it. But it wasn’t her point. She was using it to illustrate the dynamic that our politics are dealing with when it comes to these violent conspiracy addled right wingers. Trauma, which most people in the Capitol that day, not to mention the sane members of the public that watched it unfold on television, were traumatized. The country was traumatized by that violent assault on the US Capitol during a joint session of congress to try to overturn the election!
Her personal trauma informs her understanding of what that means and how important it is that perpetrators are held to account in order to move forward. Her belief that this was not just “business as usual” and requires redress was missed by people who seem to think that Trump’s heinous incitement to insurrection was somehow justified because the Democrats deserve it:
[…]
Ocasio-Cortez’s willingness to speak of her vulnerability during January 6, when she spent hours barricaded in the office of colleague Katie Porter, was a powerful reminder of why the Capitol riot still demands redress. But it wasn’t met with universal applause. Aside from the expected right-wing jeers, Ocasio-Cortez also provoked the scorn of maverick leftist Glenn Greenwald.
Speaking on the Jimmy Dore show on YouTube, Greenwald argued that by taking so strong a stance against Republicans, Ocasio-Cortez ruined an opportunity to forge a bipartisan opposition to Wall Street based on the current conflict between small investors organized on Reddit and large hedge funds.
“This week has been the most amazing week of having the left and the right unite against Wall Street,” Greenwald claimed. “Almost everybody across the spectrum supports what those Redditers are doing and is thrilled to see these hedge fund leeches suffering. It has created a major opportunity to regulate, to legislate, to reform. And Ted Cruz, whatever you think of him, reached out by saying, ‘I agree with AOC about this.’ So that was an opportunity for right and left to join together to do something that is supposedly her main reason for existing as a political figure, which is fighting income inequality, and instead she turns around and says, ‘Fuck you, I don’t want to work with you. You guys got me murdered. You’re a white supremacist.’ And suddenly the two camps divide again and over here you have the red team and over here you have the blue team cheering like morons at a fucking high school football game again because she ruined that movement. Because all she wants to do is attack Republicans and fortify the Democratic Party.”
Greenwald went on to add, “I do believe AOC was genuinely rattled by what happened at the Capitol.” But he insisted, “She made it through completely unscathed. Not even a tiny little bruise on her body. Every other member of Congress in the Democratic caucus, including Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib and others are equally demonized and they are fucking over it. They got over it. If you want to be a member of Congress, you can’t constantly center your own lived experiences, you’re not there to center yourself in every drama.“
I’m not going to comment on the grotesque “buck up, lady, you don’t have any bruises” aspect of all that. I’ll let others do that. But I will point out that the analysis of the GameStop episode is embarrassingly fatuous, as I wrote earlier.
Heer makes clear the inane naivete of the idea Cruz was acting in good faith. He is a reptilian incubus:
Greenwald’s analysis has many problems. It rests on the assumption that Cruz’s statement of agreement with Ocasio-Cortez was the beginning of a serious, good-faith effort to tame Wall Street. But Cruz is a notoriously slippery character, as distrusted by his Republican colleagues as by Democrats. Given his long-standing connections to Goldman Sachs, it’s hard to believe he would suddenly turn into a populist champion. Further, far from being alone in speaking of the trauma of January 6, Ocasio-Cortez has had her testimony affirmed and praised by colleagues like Porter and Tlaib.
Heer gets to AOC’s point, here:
The force of Ocasio-Cortez’s words rest not just on her personal testimony but also on some undeniable facts: Donald Trump, while still president, stirred up a mob to attack Congress in order to thwart certification of the election of his successor. That’s a shocking deed that undermines all calls for comity. It’s understandable why various political factions are more comfortable in forgetting and moving on. But there can be no true reconciliation until the reality of what happened is acknowledged, which includes punishment for those who instigated the riot—and for those who were complicit in it.
Public figures like Ocasio-Cortez have a moral obligation to keep the memory of January 6 alive until there is accountability. To do less would mean joining the circle of complicity
Some people just don’t think the Capitol insurrection was a big deal:
For more on the idea that AOC’s trauma is incidental and illustrative of nothing, I recommend Jill Filipovic’s latest which is just so true:
I’m sure you remember the video that featured a woman screaming hysterically, “we’re coming for that bitch. Tell fuckin’ Pelosi we’re coming for her, fuckin traitorous cunt … we’re comin’ for all of you!”
I found it to be exceptionally chilling when I first saw it. These people were out for blood and I would have been terrified if I’d been there.
How can anyone lnot see that if that rabid mob had actually found Pelosi or AOC or any of their perceived enemies in the Democratic party, that they were in mortal danger? These people were beating cops with American flags!
If you’ve forgotten that one, here it is:
I’m a little boggled that anyone who isn’t a hard right wingnut would shrug off what happened that day as just another protest. But I guess if the people these “protesters” were hunting down are your enemies, you just don’t care much.
Just for the record, if a bunch of left wingers went after Marjorie Taylor Greene like this I wouldn’t excuse it. In fact, I wouldn’t excuse it if anyone did it. It’s horrifying.