A Year Later
It’s January 3rd, 2022; a year since the Insurrection that almost kept Donald Trump in office against the will of the American voters. I’ve been looking back at my essays here on Our America from that week. The overall theme was: we are in a time of crisis, a time when our Republic is at risk – what will we do?
And the answer to that, so far, is nothing. Sure, they tried to impeach and convict Trump, but “after the fact”, after the inauguration of Joe Biden. The fifty Democrats/Independents who made up the majority voted to convict, as did seven Republicans. But that fell well short of the necessary sixty-seven needed. As Republican Senate Minority Leader McConnell told us at the time, the “Courts” were the “proper” place to hold Trump accountable for his actions.
But a year later, we are far from seeing Donald Trump “in the dock”. He’s still raising hundreds of millions of dollars. That money is ostensibly going to his 2024 Presidential Campaign, but it’s also his “legal aid” money, and used to buy political influence throughout the country. In fact, a year after the shock of the Insurrection, we are just about back to the “normal” of pre-Insurrection Trumpian times. It’s as if that was a bad dream; one to be shrugged off and forgotten.
Bad Dream
The “bad dream” is that there has been no justice, no apportionment of responsibility for the Insurrection. Sure, hundreds of the “pawns”, the “soldiers” who followed their mistaken cause up the steps of the Capitol and into the hallowed halls, are being put on trial. But they are exactly that: pawns in the game. Not even the rooks and bishops have been charged, much less the King. It’s as if the pawns played the chess match all by themselves.
And this weekend on several of the national Sunday shows, I heard a new “Trumpian” talking point, just like the old Kelly Ann Conway days. “It was Trump’s fault, but now it’s Joe Biden’s fault. He was elected to ‘heal’ the nation, and instead he’s pushed all of these Roosevelt-like New Deal changes. So it’s Biden’s fault that folks are still turning to Trump”. Remember what the Majory Stoneman Douglas kids chanted, after the shootings and the pablum served by the Republican leadership? I call BS.
Mythical GOP
Republicans: if it was Trump’s fault, then call him out for it. If it was Trump’s fault, then denounce his actions. If it was Trump’s fault, then Republicans take your own Party, and purge the evil from your ranks. Then you’ve “earned” the right to complain about Biden.
Here’s a little “inside baseball”. When NBC’s Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd suggested on Sunday, that there were many Republicans who, whispering behind closed doors, speak out against Trump, NBC’s Congressional Correspondent Garrett Haake literally rolled his eyes and shook his head. He’s on the Hill, talking to Congressmen all the time. He knows.
The myth of the “closet anti-Trump” Republican is just that, a myth. Either they are the few that are “out”, Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger and the like; or they are co-opted into Trumpism. There is no middle ground, no “backroom reasonableness”. The myth of the “Grand Old Party” that will someday return to reason has sold out to the votes that Trump represents. Ask former Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel, who is molded into a Trump-clone, in hopes of being a US Senator.
History Rhymes
After the American Civil War, there was a period of time called the Reconstruction. It was a time when the changes to the South, the end of slavery and the citizenship of the Freedmen, was enforced by Union military presence. There were Black Congressmen and even a Black Senator from Mississippi (Hiram Revels), backed by the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the US Constitution. Reconstruction, was not, as my generation was taught in our sanitized history classes, a time “undeserved military occupation of Southern soil”. It sought to consolidate the gains won by the hundreds of thousands of dead on the battlefields of the war, including 40,000 Black men.
Who Won
But changing society seemed a bridge too far for the politicians of the 1870’s. In the contested Presidential election of 1876, a deal was cut. The apparent winner, Democrat Samuel Tilden of New York, was denied southern electoral votes. Instead, Republican Governor of Ohio Rutherford B. Hayes became the President of the United States. In return, the troops were removed from the South, and a law written to prevent them from returning, the Posse Comitatus Act. Soon the South disenfranchised Black voters, and created Jim Crow Laws to build a segregated society.
It’s been over one hundred and fifty years, and we are still struggling with the results of those decisions in the 1870’s. After the Insurrection that was the Civil War, the Union won the battles, but lost the peace. After the Insurrection of January 6th, 2021, who won?
That question is still not answered.
Essays After the Insurrection
- No Guardrail – 1/7/21
- The 25th – 1/8/21
- Revenge – 1/9/21
- Politics and the Republic – 1/10/21
- Compromise or Revolution – 1/11/21
