WHERE WE HAVE BEEN AND WHERE WE ARE GOING
What we witnessed on January 6th was the boiling over of an antidemocratic movement. But we also saw that America simply wasn't ready to deal with that hard and pressing truth.
Even when you’re in the business of prognosticating disaster and warning of future calamities, these types of things still have an effect. That’s not to say I was surprised by the events of January 6th, 2021, because I wasn’t. Even in the days leading up to it I was convinced Donald Trump’s continued cultivation of paranoia and anger was going to lead to tragedy. In fact, I felt it deep, deep in my bones back in 2016, when I was sneaking into Trump Rallies. In August, at a rally in Charlotte, North Carolina, I’d listened to a conversation between supporters about a possible electoral loss in which one of them had groused that they might need to “take matters into our own hands.”
I knew eventually these things would come to a head. That’s not to say there haven’t been multiple tragedies that fit that description, including murders, assaults, and enough neofascistic activities to lose track of when and where they’d all taken place. But January 6th was different because it was the moment the movement tried, in plain sight, to overthrow the democratic system itself. My feeling, personally, wasn’t surprise. I knew it could happen and would happen if things continued along the same course. What I felt was a sense of exhaustion. I’d wanted so badly to avoid this. For something to change.
Undoubtedly, the Internet will be full of January 6th retrospectives today. Some will embarrassingly call for Republicans to right their ways, listen to their consciences, and come through in the end. Others will congratulate Congress for reconvening after the rioters left and sing the praises of a system holding against intense pressure. And some will dismiss the whole event as an anomaly, a brief blip that a lot of people have simply made much too big of a deal about.
These entries are as much an artifact of the tragedy of January 6th as the bits of glass from the busted windows and the urine streaked across the walls of Congress. Because what we saw that day, and what we continue to see, is a nation rife with radicalism and stricken by dangerous delusion. To continue to deny what is so very obvious and what has been so very obvious for so very long is to ensure that someday we will only see January 6th as a precursor to an even larger tragedy.
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When Congress returned there was grandstanding. Speeches condemning the attack while lauding the courage to continue on. Vice President Mike Pence, who had not only been targeted for execution by the crowd but had been approached by President Donald Trump to take part in an elaborate coup attempt, certified the election of Joe Biden as the 46th president of the United States of America at 3:42 a.m. January 7th.
Before that, 147 Republicans voted to overturn the election following the interruption by the coup attempt. This number tends to be forgotten because it doesn’t fit the narrative that, once the chambers were cleared out, America returned to normal. This same narrative was peddled by the incoming Biden Administration, whose inaugural theme was rejuvenation, a media desperate to turn the page, and any number of pundits, politicians, and personalities who want nothing more than to move forward without addressing any of the structural problems that led to that day in the first place.
The best thing that could have happened, for them, and for so many others who rely on the status quo to maintain their wealth, power, and position, was for January 6th to be remembered and treated as the crest of some awful period that lasted from the moment Donald Trump announced his presidential campaign to the second Congress returned and fulfilled their responsibility to hand the presidency to Biden. Frankly, this story is compelling. It involves an easily recognizable, cartoonish villain, a three-act structure, and a dramatic moment of violence and heroic endurance. It is an American story, ready for production in Hollywood and consumption in our living rooms.
And, like other American stories, it is nonsense. Utter nonsense. Processed, scrubbed, treated, and sold to the public because of its digestibility and the absurd notion of finality that ignores every bit of evidence that we are dealing with an ongoing, developing crisis that can only be dealt with if we knuckle down, take a long look in the mirror, and actually change the conditions that birthed it.
Those columns you’ll read today and for the weeks, months, and years to come, are in service of that story. They’re written by people who sit at the very top of their fields and enjoy access and affluence the likes of which most only dream of. They do not want to risk even a little of that. Why would they? It is so, so much easier to believe that the disease was Donald Trump, a brutish and boorish outsider, and now, since he has been swept away, and since Biden is president and the count was finished, that everything is fine and maybe, just maybe, the problem wasn’t that bad to begin with.
It is, after all, a goodnight story designed to make everyone sleep easier.
Truly, I think some people expected Trump to apologize. Maybe tuck his tail between his legs, head to Mar a Lago, and drift off into a miserable retirement. January 6th was immediately framed as the “moment the fever broke,” a chance to gather ourselves and maybe even “reach across the aisle” to a Republican Party shaken to their senses. Armed with that fantasy, some even started re-visioning the entire thing, dismissing that it was even a coup attempt. More likely a “riot.” Or an “incident.”
Even as details emerged regularly that Trump and his associate cronies had planned and plotted the entire thing, that a multifaceted attempt to stop the count and possibly even declare a national emergency was set in motion, fell on largely deaf ears. It’s all gotten largely lost in the constant hum and buzz of accelerated culture. It’s been a year, after all. Who even has the bandwidth to pay attention to something that happened a year ago?
What we have glimpsed is an amnesiac society. A failing nation so enraptured by consumerism, distraction, and the very notion of its own greatness that it is sleepwalking toward its own destruction. If you’re reading this, chances are you’ve known this for awhile and spend a lot of your time watching it take place. None of this is hidden and is obvious with even a minimum of awareness. And yet, we continue to sleepwalk in the same way we ignore climate change, societal decay, human suffering, and the myriad of crises that permeate our culture.
January 6th should have been the moment where we snapped awake. When we got serious. It should have been an alarm. But like a groggy sleeper hungover from ill-advised consumption, we drifted on through with barely a flinch. We were confronted with cold, stark reality, and we simply said no thanks. It was as if Pearl Harbor had been attacked and everyone asked, “It wasn’t really that bad, right?”
This doesn’t mean we are damned or doomed. There’s still time to right this ship, to fix these problems. But unless we get serious and unless we heed the call of history, we will eventually have another date on our calendar that we have to herald and remember. The day we lose it all.
