“The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” Faulkner wrote in “Requiem for a Nun.” The New York Times Editorial Board may not be brushing up on its Faulkner, but like obituaries papers now keep in digital drawers against the passing of the famous, we may be witnesses to it drafting one. A requiem for a country.
Nothing has returned to normal over the last year. “Jan. 6 is not in the past; it is every day,” the Board explains:
It is regular citizens who threaten election officials and other public servants, who ask, “When can we use the guns?” and who vow to murder politicians who dare to vote their conscience. It is Republican lawmakers scrambling to make it harder for people to vote and easier to subvert their will if they do. It is Donald Trump who continues to stoke the flames of conflict with his rampant lies and limitless resentments and whose twisted version of reality still dominates one of the nation’s two major political parties.
In short, the Republic faces an existential threat from a movement that is openly contemptuous of democracy and has shown that it is willing to use violence to achieve its ends. No self-governing society can survive such a threat by denying that it exists. Rather, survival depends on looking back and forward at the same time.
Ron Brownstein (senior editor at The Atlantic) tweets, “This entire @nytimes editorial seems an unusually personal response to some of their own conservative columnists who repeatedly use the ed page real estate to deny the threat to democracy Trump poses so as to justify backing the elected Repubs who enable & support his assault”
The violence we all witnessed one year ago was only the visible expression of the will to power exercised by Donald Trump’s allies both outside and reaching into the Oval Office. Republican lawmakers and right-wing media figures urged schemes by which Trump might retain office contrary to the will of the American voter expressed not simply in a clear majority of the popular vote, but in our constitutional contrivance for indirect election of presidents.
Those with “critical information about the planning and execution of the attack are refusing to cooperate with Congress, even if it means being charged with criminal contempt.” Or pleading the Fifth Amendment. Trump himself famously opined, “You see the mob takes the Fifth. If you’re innocent why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?” From the mouth of the would-be dictator himself.
Yet, while a bipartisan committee in the House of Representatives promises a detailed accounting and, presumably, some sort of reckoning report for action by the Department of Justice, time runs short. For the Biden administration and for us all. If Merrick Garland’s D.O.J. is investigating on its own, there is little public evidence to support even speculation. Publicly, Trump allies in and out of Congress attempt to dismiss Jan. 6 as nothing to see here.
In the states, Jan. 6 rolls on. In state after Republican-controlled state, efforts continue to put in place, under cover of law, mechanisms for Republicans to overturn elections results not to their liking. In short, to render democracy a sham.
Some bills would change the rules to make it easier for lawmakers to reject the votes of their citizens if they don’t like the outcome. Others replace professional election officials with partisan actors who have a vested interest in seeing their preferred candidate win. Yet more attempt to criminalize human errors by election officials, in some cases even threatening prison.
[…]
Thus the Capitol riot continues in statehouses across the country, in a bloodless, legalized form that no police officer can arrest and that no prosecutor can try in court.
Steven Levitsky in “How Democracies Die” outlined how authoritarians consolidate power. By “capturing the referees, sidelining the key players, and rewriting the rules to tilt the playing field against opponents. Trump attempted all three of these strategies.” His allies are enacting this program in his absence from the presidency.
A key, unwritten foundation of healthy democracy, Levitsky writes, is “mutual toleration, or the understanding that competing parties accept one another as legitimate rivals, and forbearance, or the idea that politicians should exercise restraint in deploying their institutional prerogatives.” That is, they accept that sometimes they win and sometimes they lose. Republicans now conspire to return to the kind of rigged system that secured Democrats in uncontested control in former Confederate state for 100 years.
Indeed, it appears that is the goal of Trumpism, as President Benjamin Harrison warned and the Times reminds.
Trump’s party has turned its back on democracy and respect for the will of any other citizens than its own supporters.
So what now? The Editorial Board concludes (emphasis mine):
Whatever happens in Washington, in the months and years to come, Americans of all stripes who value their self-government must mobilize at every level — not simply once every four years but today and tomorrow and the next day — to win elections and help protect the basic functions of democracy. If people who believe in conspiracy theories can win, so can those who live in the reality-based world.
Above all, we should stop underestimating the threat facing the country. Countless times over the past six years, up to and including the events of Jan. 6, Mr. Trump and his allies openly projected their intent to do something outrageous or illegal or destructive. Every time, the common response was that they weren’t serious or that they would never succeed. How many times will we have to be proved wrong before we take it seriously? The sooner we do, the sooner we might hope to salvage a democracy that is in grave danger.
Democrats engage in sophist arguments in defense of traditions protecting the voice of Senate minorities. Meanwhile, efforts, actual efforts, continue in the states to ensure minority rule becomes the rule in a United States creeping toward being a democracy in name only. At least the Times will have the obituary ready in a drawer.