Good morning, and Happy Insurrection Day. Today, while you’re at work, a bearded man in a Viking helmet will come down your chimney and scatter your papers about and maybe steal a family picture. Be sure to leave out some milk and conspiracy theories. He’ll need the fuel to keep him going on this magical holiday.
I will be completely honest with you. I don’t want to write about this subject. Because of the deep partisan divide in this country, it’s impossible to say anything about it without someone getting mad and leaving you angry comments on Twitter or Facebook. I will get an email or two today. Maybe some tweets. But it will be from people who refuse to acknowledge the other side’s point in an argument.
The January 6 riot at the capitol was an absolute disgrace. The people who went there with the purpose of hunting down politicians, erecting gallows and demanding Mike Pence be hanged, and leaving pipe bombs at the DNC and RNC should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Their behavior was disgraceful, and Donald Trump’s own repeated claims of a stolen election and that something be done at least indirectly fueled that fire.
A lot of conservatives and Republicans would very much like to turn this into a cause to celebrate. That this is the behavior of people fighting for what they thought was right. They will do this not because they actually believe it, but because they are afraid of the lingering power of Trump and his followers and they know that condemning it may hurt their chances of winning re-election, especially in a critical midterm year.
However, let’s not kid ourselves into thinking this was a major insurrection or coup attempt. Nothing that group could have done at its worst would have overthrown the country. Thankfully, the worst didn’t happen. But Congress still would have gotten together and certified the results of the election, and Joe Biden would still be the President of the United States today. This was a riot. One with the potential to be violent, but the perpetrators were more akin to live-action roleplaying enthusiasts than violent revolutionaries.
Karl Rove, in writing an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal, points out that Republicans would not be behaving this way if Democrats had done it after claiming the 2016 election was stolen.
So, on this anniversary, here’s a simple thought experiment: What if the other side had done it? What if in early January 2017, Democrats similarly attired and armed had stormed the Capitol and attempted to keep Congress from receiving the Electoral College results for the 2016 presidential election?
What if Democrats claimed that Donald Trump’s razor-thin victories in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin resulted from extensive voter fraud and should be rejected, despite having failed to establish in a single court that extensive fraud had actually occurred?
What if some of these Democrats breached the Capitol defenses and threatened violence against the Republican speaker, Paul Ryan, and Republican Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell?
What if they insisted that in his role as Senate president then-Vice President Joe Biden had sole authority to seat Hillary Clinton’s electors from any contested states and thereby hand her the presidency?
If this happened, would some of my fellow Republicans have accepted it as merely a protest? Would they have called patriots those charged with violent acts against our country, its laws and Constitution? Would they have accepted such extralegal means to change the outcome of a presidential election?
No they would not. I’m certain of that.
And Rove is absolutely right. But it’s also worth pointing out that the Democrats and the media have been very comfortable with people on their own side taking part in violent, destructive political protests for the last couple of decades.
Erick Erickson pointed as much out this morning. Here’s a long excerpt (sorry, Erick), but he says it all better than I would have anyway.
In 2009, progressive activists stormed the State Capitol in Madison, WI. The Wisconsin State Journal reported it in eerily similar language to January 6. “Thousands of protesters rushed to the state Capitol Wednesday night, forcing their way through doors, crawling through windows and jamming corridors,” reported the paper. Progressives were trying to stop a vote making Wisconsin a right-to-work state, which would undermine labor union powers. Speaker Nancy Pelosi called it an “impressive show of democracy” and said she stood with the protestors. The media was mostly matter of fact about it and by no means condemnatory.
In Texas, protestors stormed the State Capitol in Austin to stop Republicans from passing a pro-life measure. Most news anchors and reporters who covered it for the national press almost all explicitly excused the protestors and made Texas State Senator Wendy Davis a national figure and heroine for feminism. She rode the fame to several electoral defeats in Texas and talking head gigs on CNN and MSNBC.
In Washington, D.C. progressive activists stormed the United States Capitol to stop the vote on Brett Kavanaugh and to intimidate United States Senators. Major news outlets were almost all uniformly on the side of the protestors. Some reporters explicitly cheered on the protestors on their social media accounts. News networks like NBC all but colluded with Democrats to stop Kavanaugh.
Nevermind the frequent claims that George W. Bush was illegitimately elected, that Stacey Abrams’ election was stolen, that Harry Reid got away with straight-up lying about Mitt Romney and even admitting it, and the violent protestors that used the Black Lives Matter movement as a cover for their own anti-government and anti-America destruction of private property and businesses in the summer of 2020.
All of which the media went along with or explained away. Never forget the “fiery but mostly peaceful” protests that resulted in millions of dollars worth of damage and the destruction of peoples’ lives.
We can go back and forth on all of this. Neither side has a better case than the other. It’s all objectively terrible, and no one seems really interested in actually making any of it better. They simply want to utilize the bad actions of their opponents for fundraising and campaigning while ignoring the bad actions of their allies.
There are people genuinely upset over the riot that took place a year ago today. Rightfully so. It was an absolute disgrace and people should be punished for it. But I don’t think it should be taken as a serious coup or insurrection attempt. It was a barely coherent riot that sought chaos more than anything else. Mere hours later, Congress was back to work. Nothing changed.
The problem with going wall-to-wall with coverage of it right now is that one year from today, when the midterms are over, the media and the Democrats will move on to some other outrage. This is their midterm strategy because they don’t really have anything else. And there’s isn’t much polling showing it’s working, either. They’ll move on to the next outrage.
Will January 6, 2021, make it into the history books? Probably. It will be a couple of sentences in the section on 21st Century Populism, toward the end of the section on Donald Trump’s presidency and legacy. It did not and will not have much impact on America.
But we should let it impact our behavior. Everyone, on both sides, should give up on the chaotic violence. Maybe then something can actually get accomplished.