It’s not over.
Oh, sure. In a few weeks Joe Biden will be inaugurated as the 46th president of the United States. It now seems likely that the inauguration – already reduced in scale by the raging pandemic – will be conducted within an armored security bubble. But it will almost certainly take place.
The zealous and utterly misguided “supporters” of Donald Trump – with their overweening sense of entitlement and their delusions of grandeur – aren’t going to be allowed to stop the lawful transition from one administration to another.
But that doesn’t mean that they will accept reality.
And why should they? They have been coddled and babied for years by self-serving officials, media commentators, and pundits. While Trump’s open pandering to their ignorance and bigotry has been singularly destructive, he didn’t start this fire.
Right wing extremism has been a problem in the United States for more than a century. In the 1870’s, President Ulysses S. Grant mobilized federal law enforcement agencies to beat back the rising terror of the Ku Klux Klan in the post-war south. Throughout the twentieth century, the FBI and local law enforcement penetrated and dismantled dozens of right-wing terrorist groups. Since 2010, the FBI has identified right-wing groups as the greatest domestic threat America faces. No wonder Trump calls the FBI “corrupt.”
But while some law enforcement agencies have taken the right-wing threat seriously, other powerful people and groups have emboldened them, none more so than Donald Trump.
Throughout his presidency, and especially in the fraught months leading up to the 2020 election, Trump repeatedly praised right-wing groups – his “second amendment people” – including self-styled “militias,” for activities ranging from white supremacist marches, to armed invasions of state capitols, to the killing of unarmed demonstrators by vigilantees.
These groups have quickly learned that there are few – if any – consequences for their use of violence or the threat of violence. America’s gun culture, unprofessional local law enforcement, and the craven pandering of politicians hungry for the contributions and votes of committed, if deranged, “patriots” have combined to legitimize and encourage continued acts of intimidation and low-level violence.
The storming of the U.S. Capitol, intended to disrupt the certification of electoral votes and possibly derail Joseph Biden’s lawful installation as president, was simply the next step down a road we have been on for years.
And like earlier steps, this one has been without serious consequences for the people who occupied the Capitol and for the people that abetted them, even though five deaths have been attributed to the incident, including a Capitol police officer who was beaten to death and a demonstrator who was shot by police. In addition, dozens of police officers were injured and several were hospitalized while two explosive devices and a container of Molotov cocktails were found near the Capitol.
A few arrests have been made, more will certainly follow, and a few folks have lost their jobs. But Trump remains, though there are calls for his resignation, impeachment, or removal under the 25th amendment. None of these things are likely to happen, especially in light of the continued support for his clearly false ‘stolen election’ narrative by a significant number of Republican lawmakers and multiple irresponsible media outlets.
Whatever happens to Trump in the final days of his failing presidency, his malign encouragement of his “patriotic” base is certain to continue far beyond Biden’s inauguration. Trump will continue to inflame his supporters with repeated announcements that he – and they – have been betrayed.
Their responses are certain to escalate.
“It really only takes a spark to set off a significant amount of violence and once you have that violence, it becomes self-sustaining,” said David Kilcullen, the former counter-insurgency adviser to Gen. David Petraeus in Iraq and the author of five books on counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism.
“The only way you can avoid violence … is if the political leadership of both parties moves to de-escalate things and demobilize their bases,” said Harvard political scientist Steven Levitsky.
But Trump and a coterie of cynical and opportunistic Republican leaders are doing the opposite. Just hours after the Capitol was cleared of occupiers, more than one hundred Republican lawmakers voted to reject electoral votes for Joseph Biden that had been legally certified by the states, effectively endorsing the actions of the mob that fought police, broke into the Capitol, and killed a police officer.
Hopefully, the blood of the injured officers and of the protestor who was shot and killed while breaking into the building earlier had been cleaned from the floors by then.
Unsurprisingly, a YouGov snap poll today found that 45 percent of Republicans actively support the occupation of the Capitol and the interference with the work of Congress.
We are on a dark and narrow path that will take us to a place we cannot yet see but that we certainly would prefer to avoid.
Yesterday’s clash wasn’t the beginning of our troubles, and it won’t be the end.
January 7, 2021
Sources:
https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/10/politics/hammonds-trump-pardon/index.html
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/proud-boys-capitol/
https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/2021/01/06/US-capitol-trump-poll
https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjp48x/is-the-us-already-in-a-new-civil-war