Jan. 6: Meaning, Significance, Ramifications

The Real Tragedy of Jan. 6 Is That It’s Still Not Over  (Matt Fuller, Daily Beast)
I had a front-row seat to the riot. A year later, one thing is clear: Nothing has changed.

The Jan. 6 Insurrectionists Aren’t Who You Think They Are  (Robert A. Pape, Foreign Policy)
The people who stormed the U.S. Capitol weren’t poor, unemployed red-staters. Many were middle-class professionals motivated by the “great replacement” conspiracy theory.

How Did We Not See It Coming?  (Charles Sykes, The Bulwark)
A year ago this morning, Donald Trump woke up thinking that he might actually be able to overturn the election and stay in power.
He failed, but the country came within one vice president of a constitutional crisis — and a presidential coup.
If Mike Pence had gone along with Trump’s bizarre plan to overthrow the election, no one — and I mean literally no one — knows for sure what would have happened next.
“We keep using terms like post-factual, but it almost feels like there’s this national psychosis or amnesia about what happened a year ago. It’s not just that we’re two nations. It’s as if we live on two different reality planets when it comes to the memory of Jan. 6,” I told the AP.

America, One Year On  (Project Syndicate)
As the United States marks the first anniversary of the attack on the Capitol by supporters of then-President Donald Trump, many questions about the health of the country’s constitutional order remain unanswered. The most important is whether the American right can evolve in a way that does not threaten democracy itself.

The Assault on Trust in Our Elections  (Brad Raffensperger, National Affairs)
The crisis in which our country found itself following the 2020 election was in many respects unprecedented. Yet it also built on a years-long pattern by which losing politicians have sown mistrust in our elections. We must now wonder if every candidate who loses a major election will refuse to concede and instead set out to raise money and build support on the back of unfounded claims of corruption. To avoid that prospect, we will need to come to terms with the scope of the problem, and that won’t be comfortable for either party.

How Extremism Went Mainstream  (Cynthia Miller-Idriss, Foreign Affairs)
Washington needs a new approach to preventing far-right violence.

‘How Civil Wars Start,’ a Warning About the State of the Union, a review of Barbara F. Walter, How Civil Wars Start, and How to Stop Them (Jennifer Szalai, New York Times)
In the year since the rampage at the Capitol, chatter about a 21st-century American civil war has seeped from the fringes into the mainstream. During the Trump presidency, there were of course any number of books about political fracture; still, they mostly discussed widening but (usually) peaceable differences (Lilliana Mason’s Uncivil Agreement, Ezra Klein’s Why We’re Polarized), or they focused mainly on the historical roots of political violence (Joanne B. Freeman’s The Field of Blood, Kathleen Belew’s Bring the War Home).
…
When Barbara F. Walter began writing “How Civil Wars Start” in 2018, the few people who heard that it was “about a possible second civil war in America” thought it was “an exercise in fear-mongering,” she writes in her acknowledgments, “perhaps even irresponsible.” That “even” gives you a sense of Walter’s cautious inclinations. As a political scientist who has spent her career studying conflicts in other countries, she approaches her work methodically, patiently gathering her evidence before laying out her case. She spends the first half of the book explaining how civil wars have started in a number of places around the world, including the former Yugoslavia, the Philippines and Iraq.
….
America lucked out, Walter says, because “its first modern autocratic president was neither smart nor politically experienced.” She ticks off the risk factors that have already been met here — factionalism, democratic decay, lots of guns. There is also, crucially, a once-dominant group whose members are fearful that their status is slipping away. It isn’t the downtrodden masses that start a civil war, Walter says, but rather what she and her fellow scholars call “sons of the soil.” Their privileged position was once so unquestioned and pervasive that they simply assume it’s their due, and they will take to violence in order to cling to power.
….
Walter mostly sticks to citing the scholarship in her field, but at one point, discussing the sinister clowning of Alex Jones, she reaches for Voltaire: “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” The absurdities are by definition preposterous, but Walter’s book suggests that it would be preposterous to assume they’re irrelevant; it’s only by thinking about what was once unfathomable that we can see the country as it really is.

Why the U.S. Military Isn’t Ready for Civil War  (Stephen Marche, Foreign Policy)
A significant portion of Americans seek the destruction of political authority. What if they succeed?
In the aftermath of former President Donald Trump’s election, Thomas E. Ricks for Foreign Policy asked a group of national security experts to assess the chances of a civil war over the next 10 to 15 years. The consensus stood at 35 percent. A 2019 poll from Georgetown University asked registered voters how close to the “edge of a civil war” the country was, on a scale from 0 to 100. The mean of their answers was 67.23, so almost exactly two-thirds of the way.
There are plenty of reasons to trust this assessment. The United States, as is stands, is a textbook case of a country on the brink of civil conflict. The political system has been completely overwhelmed by hyperpartisanship that renders each political decision, at best, representative of the will of only half the country. The legal system is increasingly a spoil of political infighting. The Oath Keepers, one of the largest anti-government militias, have effectively infiltrated police forces and the Republican Party. Elected officials have opened the doors to vandals who desecrate their own legislatures. It has now become perfectly normal for political representatives to call for acts of violence against their political opponents. “When do we get to use the guns?” is an acceptable question at right-wing rallies.
….
Only a spark is needed, one major domestic terrorist event that shifts the perception of the country—an anti-government patriot who takes his rage against the federal authority and finds expression in flying a drone loaded with explosives into the Capitol dome or a sheriff who decides to take up arms to defend the doctrine of interposition. It’s even possible, though unlikely, that a left-wing rejection of the police, like the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in Seattle, might force military action. Retired U.S. Army Col. Peter Mansoor, a professor of military history at the Ohio State University, is a veteran of the Iraq War who now studies the insurgencies of the past. He doesn’t have any difficulty picturing a contemporary U.S. equivalent to civil wars elsewhere. “It would not be like the first Civil War, with armies maneuvering on the battlefield,” he said. “I think it would very much be a free-for-all, neighbor on neighbor, based on beliefs and skin colors and religion. And it would be horrific.”
….
To put the matter as simply as possible, the country possesses no effective way for processing or mollifying or even slowing political violence. While there is still some room to negotiate, policymakers should at the very least clarify, or modestly untangle, the bureaucratic quagmire that inevitably faces any future use of military force on U.S. soil. Currently, any attempt by the military to do so would only exacerbate underlying tensions. The systems for dealing with breakdowns in the system are themselves broken. The question now is how long and how far the fall will be.

Beware Prophecies of Civil War  (Fintan O’Toole, The Atlantic)
The idea that such a catastrophe is unavoidable in America is inflammatory and corrosive.

The Military Stayed Out of the Insurrection, but It Isn’t Over Yet  (Peter Feaver, Foreign Policy)
Trump failed because key Republicans backed down and the military stayed out—yet critical questions remain.

Now We Know What Happens When a President Won’t Concede  (Michael Hirsh, Foreign Policy)
For 244 years, Americans have taken peaceful transitions of power for granted. But a “Republic of Laws” is a delicate flower, easily crushed by men.

What Happened on January 6  (Kevin D. Williamson, National Review)
The Capitol riot was just the tip of a very dangerous spear.
In one sense, it is simple: Donald Trump refused to accept the results of the 2020 presidential election, told many fantastical lies about the election and repeated the fantastical lies of others, and instructed a mob of his supporters to march on the Capitol and “fight,” to make what he frankly described as a show of force — which they did.
….
What happened was not a peaceful protest with a few rowdy elements.It is my view that none of the Republicans who voted against certifying the 2020 results should ever hold office again, and that no candidate who is unwilling to forthrightly condemn both the violence of January 6 and the lies that inspired that violence ought to enjoy the support of any conservative, any organ of the Republican Party, or, indeed, any American who calls himself a patriot. No candidate who cannot give a simple yes or no answer — and give the correct one — to the question of whether the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump ought to hold office. If that puts the Republican Party into the minority for a generation, then the Republican Party deserves it, having become a menace not only to the conservative principles and governance it purports to cherish but to the political structure of the nation and the Constitution itself. Those who have no use for caudillos and mobs, and who hope to see our constitutional order endure, should seriously consider separating themselves from the Republican Party unless and until it proves capable of reforming itself.

One Year Later: Examining Trump’s Role in the Capitol Riot  (Andrew C. McCarthy, National Review)
On this January 6 anniversary, I most vividly remember the shock and fury of watching the Capitol riot unfold, the instant recognition of a blight on our history. It is America’s proud boast to have made the transition of power through peaceful, lawful means a norm for modern republics. One needn’t buy the Democrats’ politicized “insurrection” distortion to grasp that something precious is forever tarnished.
….
January 6 was an unpatriotic infamy in two acts. The first involved political and legal subversion, the second forcible subversion. The two are factually intertwined: The latter doesn’t happen without the former. But the insurmountable problem for Democrats and others whose understandable loathing of Donald Trump has shorted out their analytical facility is that Trump, the driving force of Act I, is not criminally responsible for the violence of Act II.
The oddity here is that Trump’s best defense is that his actions were “merely” impeachable, not actionably seditious.
….
In the weeks following the election, the then-president conducted a relentless campaign of deceit (which appears to have morphed into self-delusion along the way), hoping to maintain power. 
Beyond futile litigation, Trump’s “stop the steal” theater [relied on]…. [t]he big legal theory, if you want to call it that, [which] involved empowering Vice President Mike Pence to reject state-certified electoral votes.
….
Though the exercise was farcical, it is credibly undeniable that Trump violated his oath of office to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. He tried to undermine state sovereignty over presidential elections, claiming that the federal government had the power to countermand state certification of state results. He tried to browbeat Congress and the vice president to violate their duty to acknowledge the state-certified results. He tried to delegitimize Biden’s presidency (and no, the fact that Democrats did this to Bush and to Trump is not a defense — not to people who presume to call themselves constitutional conservatives). He undermined national security and stability by impeding the transition to Biden’s administration rather than assisting it. This would have been impeachable conduct even if the riot hadn’t happened.
Nevertheless, to say Trump’s condemnable behavior triggered the riot is not the same as saying Trump intended or incited a riot. What the former president wanted was reprehensible, but it was a different kind of reprehensible from the species portrayed by Democrats.

Present at the Destruction  (Richard Haass, Foreign Affairs)
Trump’s final act has accelerated the onset of a post-American world.

One Single Day. That’s All It Took for the World to Look away From Us.  (Francis Fukuyama, New York Times)
The Jan. 6 attack on Congress by a mob inspired by former President Donald Trump marked an ominous precedent for U.S. politics. Not since the Civil War had the country failed to effect a peaceful transfer of power, and no previous candidate purposefully contested an election’s results in the face of broad evidence that it was free and fair.
The event continues to reverberate in American politics — but its impact is not just domestic. It has also had a large impact internationally and signals a significant decline in American global power and influence.

Assessing the Right-Wing Terror Threat in the United States a Year after the January 6 Insurrection  (Daniel L. Byman, Brookings)
The last year saw advances and setbacks in the fight against American white supremacist, anti-government, and other violent right-wing groups. The good news is that the number of deaths from terrorism and other extreme forms of violence was low, but the bad news for 2022 is that violent rhetoric and threats are becoming normalized in everyday politics.

America’s Most Urgent Threat Now Comes from Within  (Cynthia Miller-Idriss, New York Times)
For many Americans, the events of Jan. 6 brought the issue of domestic violent extremism to the fore. Through livestreamed images, they watched as attackers equipped with zip ties and bear spray wielded flagpoles and fire extinguishers, pushed through barricades, smashed windows and called for the deaths of elected officials while gallivanting through the halls of Congress. Gallows were constructed outside. Pipe bombs were planted near the headquarters of the Democratic and Republican National Committees. At least seven people died. More catastrophic violence was narrowly averted.
Until that day, violent attacks targeting powerful symbols of America were generally seen as a threat emanating from beyond the country’s borders, like the Sept. 11 attacks.
Nearly 3,000 people were killed on 9/11. Today, however, the most urgent threat to Americans’ safety and security comes not from foreign terrorists but from the country’s own citizens. And the threat is aimed at the future of democracy itself.
What makes the threat especially pernicious is that it is not from the fringe but from the mainstream; according to one study, a majority of the arrested Jan. 6 attackers were employed, some of them teachers, chief executives, veterans, doctors and lawyers. They had an average age of around 40. So it’s easy to see why the U.S. government’s traditional counterterrorism infrastructure, built to focus on fringe extremists, is falling short.

January 6 and the Consequences of Disinformation  (Alec Dent and Khaya Himmelman, The Dispatch)
Lies about the validity of the election prompted the riots at the Capitol, and the events of the day spurred even more falsehoods.

The Next Big Lies: Jan. 6 Was No Big Deal, or a Left-Wing Plot  (Matthew Rosenberg, Jim Rutenberg and Michael M. Grynbaum, New York Times)
How revisionist histories of Jan. 6 picked up where the “stop the steal” campaign left off, warping beliefs about what transpired at the Capitol.

Republicans’ Jan. 6 Responsibility  (Karl Rove, Wall Street Journal)
We’re in an acrimonious period of partisan tribalism and have been for some time. Both parties are guilty of overwrought denunciations of their political opponents. My criticisms are often aimed at Democrats; on the anniversary of Jan. 6, I’m addressing squarely those Republicans who for a year have excused the actions of the rioters who stormed the Capitol, disrupted Congress as it received the Electoral College’s results, and violently attempted to overturn the election.
….
To move beyond Jan. 6, 2021, we must put country ahead of party. For Democrats, that means resisting their leadership’s petty habit of aggravating partisan fault lines by indiscriminately condemning all who came to Washington that day.
We Republicans have a heavier burden. I’ve been a Republican my entire life, and believe in what the Republican Party, at its best, has represented for decades. There can be no soft-pedaling what happened and no absolution for those who planned, encouraged and aided the attempt to overthrow our democracy. Love of country demands nothing less. That’s true patriotism.

Why Republicans Keep Falling for Trump’s Lies (Rebecca Solnit, New York Times)
When called upon to believe that Barack Obama was really born in Kenya, millions got in line. When encouraged to believe that the 2012 Sandy Hook murder of twenty children and six adults was a hoax, too many stepped up. When urged to believe that Hillary Clinton was trafficking children in the basement of a Washington, D.C., pizza parlor with no basement, they bought it, and one of them showed up in the pizza place with a rifle to protect the kids. The fictions fed the frenzies, and the frenzies shaped the crises of 2020 and 2021. The delusions are legion: Secret Democratic cabals of child abusers, millions of undocumented voters, falsehoods about the Covid-19 pandemic and the vaccine.
While much has been said about the moral and political stance of people who support right-wing conspiracy theories, their gullibility is itself alarming. Gullibility means malleability and manipulability. We don’t know if the people who believed the prevailing 2012 conspiracy theories believed the 2016 or 2020 versions, but we do know that a swath of the conservative population is available for the next delusion and the one after that. And on Jan. 6, 2021, we saw that a lot of them were willing to act on those beliefs.
….
Authoritarians don’t just want to control the government, the economy and the military. They want to control the truth. Truth has its own authority, an authority a strongman must defeat at least in the minds of his followers, convincing them to abandon fact, the standards of verification, critical thinking and all the rest. Such people become a standing army awaiting their next command.

Why Protecting Liberalism Will Require a Dose of Populism  (Larry Diamond, Foreign Affairs)
More than any constitution or law, democracy rests on what the late political scientist Robert Dahl called a “system of mutual security.” Each side in the democratic contest must have confidence that the other side will play by the rules of the democratic game, accept defeat if that is its fate, and return to fight another day. The political fight must be restrained by mutual respect, mutual trust, and mutual restraint—respect for the right of opposing political forces to contest and criticize, trust that the other side will not eliminate it if it comes to power, and restraint in the methods used to contest for and hold power. No democracy can long survive a political atmosphere devoid of these norms. Yet that is the abyss into which American democracy is descending.
One year ago today, the United States suffered its most serious brush with constitutional failure since the Civil War. Many things remain unknown about the tragic and horrifying assault on the U.S. Capitol. There is no doubt, however, about the scale of the violence or about how close the United States came to seeing the peaceful transfer of power sabotaged for the first time in the country’s history. The damage of former President Donald Trump’s “Big Lie”—that he did not really lose the 2020 presidential election—has been poisonous and long lasting. Most Republicans and up to a third of the American public do not believe that President Joe Biden was legitimately elected. And a variety of different polls, using varying wording and methodologies, have all documented a growing willingness of the American people to consider or condone political violence. When the polarization between two political camps reaches the point that each side regards the other as morally intolerable, as an existential threat to the country’s future, democracy is at risk.

What I Got Wrong About Fascism  (Jonah Goldberg, The Dispatch)
The American right is not immune to the fascist temptation.

To Stabilize Democracy, Congress Must Reform the Way It Counts Electoral Votes  (Editorial Board, Washington Post)
Lawless as it was, the mob attack on the Capitol accompanied an attempt to validate President Donald Trump’s bogus fraud claims through ostensibly legal means. Seizing on vague language in an 1887 law governing Congress’s counting of electoral votes, Republicans such as Sens. Ted Cruz (Tex.) and Josh Hawley (Mo.) sought to reject slates from states Mr. Trump contested — even though their validity was not in real dispute. This was supposedly necessary so Congress could investigate “potential fraud and election irregularities and enact election integrity measures,” as Mr. Hawley put it. In reality, the maneuver would have opened the door to the overturning of the 2020 presidential election, and future ones, by a partisan majority of Congress, whereupon “our democracy would enter a death spiral.”
Those latter words were spoken on Jan. 6, 2021 — not by some alarmist Biden partisan but by then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). A solid majority of the Senate, Democrats and Republicans, agreed. What’s still overdue is corresponding legislative action: Congress should reform the 1887 law, known as the Electoral Count Act (ECA), before it’s used to justify more subversion of democracy.

A Year after Jan. 6, Are the Guardrails That Protect Democracy Real or Illusory?  (Dan Balz, Washington Post)
The Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol, as shocking as it was, might have seemed at the time like a last, desperate and ultimately unsuccessful attempt by loyalists to President Donald Trump to disrupt the certification of Joe Biden’s election win.
Instead, it marked the blossoming of a Republican Party with a majority that remains in denial about what happened in the 2020 presidential election and aspects of what took place at the Capitol that day. On the anniversary of an event that shook the country and ushered in a year of new threats to democracy, questions about the strength of the electoral system have rarely been more urgent.
Though debate and discord have long been part of the American experience, the Founding Fathers probably did not anticipate the conditions that exist today: A major political party in which most followers embrace falsehoods and some traffic in conspiracy theories; a former president unrelenting in his efforts to sow division and spread misinformation; and a largely broken Congress that struggles to function collectively to protect democracy, or lacks the will to do so.

America Divided  (Editorial Board, The Times)
James Madison, who was to become president of the United States, warned in the Federalist Papers in 1787 of “the mischiefs of faction”. He meant that a constitutional society must protect itself against demagogues and mobs. Never has his case for deliberative democracy been more urgent. A year ago tomorrow, rioters stormed the Capitol in Washington in an attempt to prevent Congress from certifying the election of Joe Biden as president.
Despite this chastening assault on its ideals, which cost five lives, there was little remorse and America remains polarized. Its allies, knowing the necessity of American leadership to defend liberty, can only look on with apprehension. Its enemies with pleasure. It is urgent that the world’s leading democracy exemplify once more the principle of government by consent. That requires Donald Trump to abandon his baseless claims to have been robbed of victory. Polls suggest most Republican voters believe the 2020 election was rigged. There is no truth to this canard, but the nature of conspiracy theories is they cannot be disproved. True believers will hence merely posit that the evidence for such claims is being suppressed by powerful forces.
If the myth of a stolen election is encouraged, or even tolerated, then popular disaffection will follow. According to recent polls, more than 30 percent of voters believe violence against the government is justified, and 12 per cent think Mr. Trump should “fight to be made president right now” rather than wait for the 2024 elections.
….
Democracies take many forms. They include republics and constitutional monarchies. They may have unicameral legislatures or complex separations of powers. But they all make provision for regular and free elections. They rest on the constitutional principle that the losing side, while accorded full civil rights, must peacefully cede authority to the victors.
These foundations of democracy are now in dispute. The challenge comes mainly from one part of one side. State Republican officials and members of Mr. Trump’s administration bravely insisted on upholding the constitution rather than acquiesce in the fiction of electoral fraud. Mr; Trump’s daughter Ivanka urged him to call a halt to his supporters’ siege of the Capitol. Yet the party remains in his thrall. America can easily withstand a swing of the electoral pendulum; that, after all, is what democracy entails. But at the moment a large minority of voters regards the opposing party as illegitimate. If America loses faith in its processes and values, the world will be a more dangerous place.

How Does This End?  (Zack Beauchamp, Vox)
Where the crisis in American democracy might be headed.