On our abundant capacity for willful blindness
As the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol conducts its business this summer, the phrase “willful blindness” keeps popping up. Donald Trump’s followers rejected evidence that he lost the 2020 presidential election in favor of his pre-promoted fantasy that the election was stolen through massive fraud. Public evidence builds that his closest followers knew he’d lost. Trump knew he’d lost; advisers told him repeatedly. Acolytes blinded themselves to the truth, promoted a false narrative, provoked deadly violence, and pursued illegal means for Trump to cling to power.
Brought to you by the same political party that obscured torture with legal doublespeak and rebranded war crimes as “enhanced interrogation.”
Americans have a rich tradition of avoiding discomfiting facts through denial, euphemism and obfuscation. Especially those facts that upset the soft-focused, Hallmark version of American history we teach in schools and celebrate each July Fourth.
After over 600,000 died in “The Recent Unpleasantness” (a.k.a., the “War of Northern Aggression”), and after Reconstruction and withdrawal of occupying U.S. forces, Southerners launched a reign of terror to undo the “tyranny” of sharing power with people they formerly enslaved. They sought a return of the white-supremacist old order, “oftentimes backed up by mob and paramilitary violence, with the Ku Klux Klan, the White League, and the Red Shirts assassinating pro-Reconstruction politicians and terrorizing Southern blacks.” They reimposed slavery by other means and deployed propaganda to rehabilitate treason as the noble-sounding “Lost Cause.” Jim Crow laws, racial terror and over 4,000 lynchings reduced black citizens to effective serfdom that lasted another century.
Long before reputation repair was a marketable service, Southerners rebranded white supremacism “Redemption.” It’s a thing Americans do.
Conservative pundits in the latter part of 2020 seized on critical race theory (CRT), the academic theory about systemic racism. They needed a distraction from the nationwide protests of police violence against black Americans in the wake of the video-recorded police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis that May. Republican lawmakers in several states drafted legislation that banned teaching CRT in public primary and secondary schools where it was not being taught. They sought to ban curricula based on The New York Times Magazine ‘s “The 1619 Project” that focused attention on slavery’s impact on the nation’s founding and on its lingering aftereffects.
Florida’s legislation would prohibit making anyone in public institutions or private businesses from instruction that causes others to “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin.”
Of Kentucky’s analog, lawmakers there “say they don’t want students to feel guilt or discomfort during discussions about race,” reports Louisville’s public radio station WFPL.
Basically, history must never make white people uncomfortable. Germans had to reckon with their country’s crimes in the first half of the 20th century. American exceptionalism makes reckoning with past sins a rude imposition on these shores.
Getting Trump’s right-wing “patriots,” for example, to cop to mounting a violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol in support of an autocoup by an autocrat-curious president is likely a fool’s errand. No sooner had they begun battling police hand-to-hand than they floated a narrative to spin their violence as a false-flag operation by leftists (who wisely heeded advice that day to stay home).
Should Republicans win back control of Congress in 2022 and the White House in 2024, they will face great pressure to disappear January 6th down the collective memory hole. Or else recast it as another Lost Cause, more recent unpleasantness best forgotten.
The January 6th Committee’s efforts serve to forestall those efforts and to preserve an accurate history of the Trump insurrection and attempted coup. But the endurance of that history may depend on whether Americans hold those behind the Jan. 6 attack accountable, politically and criminally, instead of embracing the kind of willful blindness that inspired it.
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