An accounting is not holding the guilty to account
As refreshing as it is to see Democrats assembling a public accounting of the events surrounding the Jan. 6 insurrection, an accounting is not the same as holding people accountable. What we see in sworn statements of Trump associates who might have blown the whistle on the coup plot are attempts to wash their hands of responsibility.
Dahlia Lithwick’s distaste for former attorney general Bill Barr’s chuckles is palpable:
Former Attorney General Bill Barr was having a rollicking good time in his taped deposition that was played before the Jan. 6 committee. He used words like “rubbish” and “nonsense” and “bullshit” and “garbage” and “crazy” and “annoying” and “idiotic” and “stupid” to describe, frequently with a wide smile, how fundamentally silly Donald Trump’s claims about the 2020 election being stolen really were. Indeed, in clips of his testimony played during the committee’s second hearing on Monday, Barr essentially told us that he departed his post as the AG, because at some point he realized that the former president could no longer be reasoned with.
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It’s so strange because what Barr was describing is neither “silly” nor “bullshit” nor “nonsense.” He is instead describing a claim about election fraud that was being weaponized to thwart the orderly transfer of power. Barr waited to let us all know in part because this was all a bit of a joke, until after he was subpoenaed to testify before the committee.
Barr was hardly alone. A string of Trump campaign and White House lieutenants from “Team Normal” stood by and watched as their boss and his boot-licking crazies tossed lit matches onto the Constitution. Only now are they willing to speak out, under oath, in attempts to launder their reputations.
As disturbing as the Republicans’ lack of scruples is Democrats’ lack of recognition, even now, of how far the country has slid toward autocracy on their watch. Jamelle Bouie calls out the leadership gerontocracy that hasn’t the chops to meet the moment. Indeed, they don’t even see the moment:
What’s missing from party leaders, an absence that is endlessly frustrating to younger liberals, is any sense of urgency and crisis — any sense that our system is on the brink. Despite mounting threats to the right to vote, the right to an abortion and the ability of the federal government to act proactively in the public interest, senior Democrats continue to act as if American politics is back to business as usual.
Democratic leaders including the president continue to play at bipartisanship with adversaries “in the grip of a cult of personality marked by conspiratorial thinking and an open contempt for electoral democracy.” President Joe Biden compliments Senate Minority Leader Mitch “The Grim Reaper” McConnell as a “man of your word” and a “man of honor.” Speaker Nancy Pelosi quotes Ronald Reagan approvingly and recommends his party return to a time when it “cared about a woman’s right to choose” and “cared about the environment.”
In Jefferson Cowie’s “The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics,” the historian suggests that the period from the New Deal to the 1970s was not a transformation, but an aberration.
The Great Depression and World War II may have “forced clear realignments of American politics and class relations,” Cowie writes, “but those changes were less the linear triumph of the welfare state than the product of very specific, and short-lived, historical circumstances.”
If this is true — if the New Deal was the product of highly contingent circumstances unlikely to be repeated either now or in the future — then the challenge for those committed to the notion of a government that protects and expands the collective economic rights of the American people is to forge a new vision for what that might be. “The path forward is not clear,” Cowie writes, “but whatever successful incarnation of a liberal ‘social imaginary’ might follow will not look like the New Deal, and it might best to free ourselves from the notion that it will.”
I think you can apply a similar “great exception” analysis to the decades of institutional stability and orderly partisan competition that shaped the current generation of Democratic leaders, including the president and many of his closest allies.
Old dogs and new tricks, as it were. Biden, Pelosi, Feinstein and others came of age during the calm at the center of the hurricane. Seeing the far eye wall approaching, they lack a sense of the political danger about to befall them and us. “Even the authoritarianism on display in the Republican Party,” writes Bouie, “has antecedents in the behavior of Southern political elites at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th.”
As Nancy MacLean detailed in “Democracy in Chains,” the remnant of the southern planter class, economic royalists and academic libertarians, undertook affecting a restoration of elite dominance beginning in the late 1940s. Their goal: to save capitalism from democracy. They want to roll back the 20th century and have been patient about achieving it.
“Liberty,” as despotic capitalism understands, it is the freedom to amass great wealth unfettered by any social contract, whatever the cost to the liberties of anyone who might make claims on “makers.” They mean to hobble, if not dismantle, what we recognize as the more equal America the Bidens and Pelosis knew growing up and the rest of us saw made more inclusive from the 1950s onward.
MAGA and the entire Republican Party fell in line behind a would-be autocrat. A president plotted an auto-coup. The right has abandoned democracy and set about neutralizing it. Ron DeSantis wants to be president of a country that resembles Pinochet’s Chile.
“Millions of Democratic voters can see and feel that American politics has changed in profound ways since at least the 1990s, and they want their leaders to act, and react, accordingly,” Bouie concludes.
Republicans who did not actively participate stood by as a coup unfolded. Democrats are living in the past as tempest bears down.
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