It's like the author reads USENET!
|
| The collapse of Republican resolve in the aftermath of
| Donald Trump's attempt to overturn the 2020 election on
| January 6, 2021, and Trump's continued designs on power
| have together ensured that conservatives find it necessary
| to downplay or dismiss those events as much less than what
| they were: an assault on American democracy.
| ...
<https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/01/trump-enablers-january-6-resurrection/677187/?gift=Je3D9AQS-C17lUTOnl2W8KarVg91PqDXsI4cUhsWa7k&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share>
(URL should jump paywall)

--bks

On 19 Jan 2024 20:48:29 -0000, bks@panix.com (Bradley K. Sherman) wrote:

>It's like the author reads USENET!
> |
> | The collapse of Republican resolve in the aftermath of
> | Donald Trump's attempt to overturn the 2020 election on
> | January 6, 2021, and Trump's continued designs on power
> | have together ensured that conservatives find it necessary
> | to downplay or dismiss those events as much less than what
> | they were: an assault on American democracy.
> | ...
><https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/01/trump-enablers-january-6-resurrection/677187/?gift=Je3D9AQS-C17lUTOnl2W8KarVg91PqDXsI4cUhsWa7k&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share>
>(URL should jump paywall)
>
> --bks

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Ideas
The Unwitting Trump Enablers

They sound very different from the former president’s toadies, who lavish him with absurd
praises. But they are part of the same project.
By Adam Serwer
An illustration featuring a definition of the word "insurrection" and a profile of Donald
Trump
The Atlantic; Source: Getty
January 19, 2024, 1:30 PM ET

The collapse of Republican resolve in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn
the 2020 election on January 6, 2021, and Trump’s continued designs on power have together
ensured that conservatives find it necessary to downplay or dismiss those events as much
less than what they were: an assault on American democracy.

This much was predictable. In the immediate aftermath of the attack, my colleague David A.
Graham anticipated that the events of January 6 would be “memory-holed,” and the
Republican Party’s continued dependence on Trump made that inevitable. The task of
justifying or minimizing January 6 became more urgent once courts began to consider
whether Trump’s actions that day disqualify him from seeking reelection under the
Fourteenth Amendment, which bars those who have betrayed an oath of office by engaging in
“rebellion or insurrection” from holding office again.

Rationalizing Trump’s actions demands rewriting both history and the English language.
Committed Trumpists are happy to warp reality to fit whatever distortions their leader
demands. Yet distinct from the Trump sycophants are the Trump enablers, both witting and
unwitting, more serious figures who eschew such crude gestures of devotion in favor of
cautious minimizations that obfuscate the truth rather than openly contradict it. There
are all too many serious writers willing to oblige, intelligent people making clever
arguments that amount to sophistry.

Earlier this month, the conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat endorsed the
liberal writer Jonathan Chait’s definition of insurrection as an attempt to “seize and
hold the Capitol” or “declare a breakaway republic.” After I pointed out that this limited
definition would exclude most insurrections in American history, Douthat tries a little
historical research to distinguish the Whiskey Rebellion from the assault on the Capitol
by insisting that the Whiskey Rebels’ use of “a six-striped flag representing claimed
independence for five Pennsylvania counties” amounted to proof of the existence of an
“incipient political formation in those western counties opposed to the authority of the
federal government and the Constitution.”

Adam Serwer: Who’s afraid of calling Donald Trump an insurrectionist?

This is a very thin reed for Douthat to hang his claim on, for a number of reasons. For
one, as the historian William Hogeland notes in The Whiskey Rebellion, the six-striped
flag “is unlikely to have been a flag of the rebellion—and might have been a regimental
flag of the suppressing federal army.” The Whiskey Rebels made no declaration of
secession, because the odd mix of radicals and moderates never developed a clear political
program beyond violent opposition to the whiskey tax. It is strange for Douthat to insist
on the importance of overt seditious declarations to the definition of insurrection and
then, in his own example, fail to provide one. But at any rate, this definition continues
to exclude many of the most famous insurrections in American history, from Fries’s
Rebellion to John Brown’s seizure of Harpers Ferry.

In this response, Douthat does not mention his prior insistence that an insurrection is
defined by the declaration of a “breakaway republic” or an attempt to “seize and hold the
Capitol.” Rather, he offers a new one: “What transforms a political event from a violent
riot or lawless mob (which Jan. 6 plainly was) to a genuinely insurrectionary event is the
outright denial of the authority of the existing political order and the attempt to
establish some alternative order in its place.” By this definition, January 6 was
obviously an insurrection, even if Douthat misses that by mistaking the rhetoric of
counterrevolution for its substance.

As the writer John Ganz notes, the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s March on Rome,
commonly described as an insurrection, did not culminate in a direct violent overthrow of
the government. Rather, the violence and disorder from fascist militias persuaded King
Vittorio Emanuele III to deny aid to then–Prime Minister Luigi Facta and appoint Mussolini
in his place after Facta resigned. This was formalized within the existing political and
legal framework, Ganz points out, even as the political violence provided the necessary
external force. Mussolini was even sworn in by the king and took an oath to him and the
constitution. Every counterrevolution imagines itself to be a restoration of a glorious
past; that does not mean it is one.

We needn’t look abroad for examples of insurrectionary political violence that did not
present themselves as the establishment of an alternative order, however. The 1898 coup in
Wilmington, North Carolina, in which white-supremacist Democrats won office by terrorizing
Black voters away from the polls, did not fundamentally change the structure of the local
government. They “won” an election through force and fraud and then forced the local
government to resign at gunpoint so they could be replaced. The false legalism was a
crucial component of the assertion of legitimacy on the insurrectionists’ part; it did not
mean that no coup had taken place. A coup does not cease being a coup because paperwork or
procedure is involved; even deposed kings and emperors signed letters of abdication.

The men who executed a coup in Wilmington believed themselves not usurpers of the
established political order, but agents of its restoration, because, as they put it, the
Framers “did not anticipate the enfranchisement of an ignorant population of African
origin.” And in this they have something in common with the January 6 rioters, who were
told by Trump and his co-conspirators that unless they forced then–Vice President Mike
Pence and Congress to go along with overturning the election, their country would be
lost—as Trump said, cities like “Detroit and Philadelphia” could not “be responsible for
engineering the outcome of a presidential race.” That Trump and his co-conspirators sought
to seize power through legalistic channels to provide a thin veil of legitimacy is a
common characteristic of insurrections. This is why Judge David Carter described their
plan as “a coup in search of a legal theory.”

If Trump had been successful in using the mob to intimidate Pence into rejecting the
electoral votes, or Congress into accepting his fake electors as planned, and therefore
unlawfully seizing power, it would have been the establishment of an alternative order and
a denial of the existing political order, as Douthat defines insurrection. That would be
true even if Trump and his supporters had insisted it was a continuation, much as the
insurgents in Wilmington did, because a foundation of American democracy—the peaceful
transition of power—would have ended for the first time in its history. It is absurd to
assume that Trump, having defied the rule of law by seizing power in the first place,
would then govern as if bound by it.

Quinta Jurecic: January 6 is exactly what the Fourteenth Amendment was talking about

Members of Trumpist militias who showed up on January 6 believed that political violence
was necessary. As noted in the House’s January 6 report, the Oath Keepers leader Stewart
Rhodes, later convicted of seditious conspiracy, told followers in late 2020, “Either
Trump gets off his ass and uses the Insurrection Act to defeat the Chicom puppet coup or
we will have to rise up in insurrection (rebellion) against the ChiCom puppet Biden.” The
Proud Boy Charles Donohoe “believed that storming the Capitol would achieve the group’s
goal of stopping the government from carrying out the transfer of presidential power,”
according to the report. During the planning for January 6, the report describes Proud
Boys leader Enrique Tarrio telling his girlfriend that revolution was “what every waking
moment consists of.” Douthat’s denial that January 6 was an insurrection requires ignoring
what the insurrectionists themselves believed they were doing. The political aims of the
most hard-core January 6 rioters in overthrowing established authority, and the means by
which they sought to achieve them, were far more clearly stated than the objectives of the
Whiskey Rebellion.