The following was published in the New York Times on January 1, 2022. It was written by their Editorial Board. It should be read by all Americans. I have highlighted what I feel is the crux of its message.
JL
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One
year after the smoke and broken glass, the mock gallows and the very real
bloodshed of that awful day, it is tempting to look back and imagine that we
can, in fact, simply look back. To imagine that what happened on Jan. 6, 2021 — a deadly riot at
the seat of American government, incited by a defeated president amid a
last-ditch effort to thwart the transfer of power to his successor — was horrifying
but that it is in the past and that we as a nation have moved on.
This is
an understandable impulse. After four years of chaos, cruelty and incompetence,
culminating in a pandemic and the once-unthinkable trauma of Jan. 6, most
Americans were desperate for some peace and quiet.
On the
surface, we have achieved that. Our political life seems more or less normal
these days, as the president pardons turkeys and Congress quarrels over
spending bills. But peel back a layer, and things are far from normal. Jan. 6
is not in the past; it is every day.
It is regular citizens who threaten election officials and other public servants,
who ask, “When can we use the guns?” and
who vow to murder politicians
who dare to vote their conscience. It is Republican lawmakers scrambling to make it harder for people to vote
and easier to subvert their will if they do. It is Donald Trump who continues to stoke the flames of conflict with his
rampant lies and limitless resentments and whose twisted version of reality
still dominates one of the nation’s two major political parties.
In
short, the Republic faces an existential threat from a movement that is openly
contemptuous of democracy and has shown that it is willing to use violence to achieve its ends. No
self-governing society can survive such a threat by denying that it exists.
Rather, survival depends on looking back and forward at the same time.
Truly
grappling with the threat ahead means taking full account of the terror of that
day a year ago. Thanks largely to the dogged work of a bipartisan committee in
the House of Representatives, this reckoning is underway. We know now that the
violence and mayhem broadcast live around the world was only the most visible
and visceral part of the effort to overturn the election. The effort extended
all the way into the Oval Office, where Mr. Trump and his allies plotted a constitutional self-coup.
We know
now that top Republican lawmakers and right-wing media figures privately
understood how dangerous the riot was and pleaded with Mr. Trump to call a halt to it, even
as they publicly pretended otherwise. We know now that those who may have
critical information about the planning and execution of the attack are
refusing to cooperate with Congress, even if it means being charged with criminal contempt.
For
now, the committee’s work continues. It has scheduled a series of public hearings in
the new year to lay out these and other details, and it plans to release a full
report of its findings before the midterm elections — after which, should
Republicans regain control of the House as expected, the committee will
undoubtedly be dissolved.
This is where looking forward comes in. Over the past year, Republican lawmakers in 41 states have been trying to advance the goals of the Jan. 6 rioters — not by breaking laws but by making them. Hundreds of bills have been proposed and nearly three dozen laws have been passed that empower state legislatures to sabotage their own elections and overturn the will of their voters, according to a running tally by a nonpartisan consortium of pro-democracy organizations.
Some
bills would change the rules to make it easier for lawmakers to reject the
votes of their citizens if they don’t like the outcome. Others replace
professional election officials with partisan actors who have a vested interest
in seeing their preferred candidate win. Yet more attempt to criminalize human
errors by election officials, in some cases even threatening prison.
Many of
these laws are being proposed and passed in crucial battleground states like
Arizona, Wisconsin, Georgia and Pennsylvania. In the aftermath of the 2020
election, the Trump campaign targeted voting results in all these states, suing
for recounts or trying to intimidate officials into finding “missing” votes.
The effort failed, thanks primarily to the professionalism and integrity of
election officials. Many of those officials have since been stripped of their
power or pushed out of office and replaced by people who openly say the last
election was fraudulent.
Thus
the Capitol riot continues in statehouses across the country, in a bloodless,
legalized form that no police officer can arrest and that no prosecutor can try
in court.
This
isn’t the first time state legislatures have tried to wrest control of
electoral votes from their own people, nor is it the first time that the
dangers of such a ploy have been pointed out. In 1891, President Benjamin
Harrison warned Congress of
the risk that such a “trick” could determine the outcome of a presidential
election.
The
Constitution guarantees to all Americans a republican form of government,
Harrison said. “The essential features of such a government are the right of
the people to choose their own officers” and to have their votes counted
equally in making that choice. “Our chief national danger,” he continued, is
“the overthrow of majority control by the suppression or perversion of popular
suffrage.” If a state legislature were to succeed in substituting its own will
for that of its voters, “it is not too much to say that the public peace might
be seriously and widely endangered.”
A
healthy, functioning political party faces its electoral losses by assessing
what went wrong and redoubling its efforts to appeal to more voters the next
time. The Republican Party, like authoritarian movements the world over, has
shown itself recently to be incapable of doing this. Party leaders’ rhetoric
suggests they see it as the only legitimate governing power and thus portrays
anyone else’s victory as the result of fraud — hence the foundational falsehood
that spurred the Jan. 6 attack, that Joe Biden didn’t win the election.
“The thing that’s most concerning is that it has endured in the
face of all evidence,” said Representative
Adam Kinzinger, one of the vanishingly few Republicans in Congress who remain
committed to empirical reality and representative democracy. “And I’ve gotten
to wonder if there is actually any evidence that would ever change certain
people’s minds.”
The
answer, for now, appears to be no. Polling finds that the overwhelming majority of
Republicans believe that President Biden was not legitimately elected and
that about one-third approve
of using violence to achieve political goals. Put those two numbers together,
and you have a recipe for extreme danger.
Political
violence is not an inevitable outcome. Republican leaders could help by being
honest with their voters and combating the extremists in their midst.
Throughout American history, party leaders, from Abraham Lincoln to Margaret Chase Smith to John McCain, have stood up for the union and democracy
first, to their everlasting credit.
Democrats
aren’t helpless, either. They hold unified power in Washington, for the last
time in what may be a long time. Yet they have so far failed to confront the
urgency of this moment — unwilling or unable to take action to protect
elections from subversion and sabotage. Blame Senator Joe Manchin or Senator
Kyrsten Sinema, but the only thing that matters in the end is whether you get
it done. For that reason, Mr. Biden and other leading Democrats should make use of what
remaining power they have to end the filibuster for voting rights
legislation, even if nothing else.
Whatever
happens in Washington, in the months and years to come, Americans of all
stripes who value their self-government must mobilize at every level — not
simply once every four years but today and tomorrow and the next day — to win
elections and help protect the basic functions of democracy. If people who
believe in conspiracy theories can win, so can those who live in the
reality-based world.
Above all, we should stop underestimating the threat facing the
country. Countless times over the past six years, up to and including the
events of Jan. 6, Mr. Trump and his allies openly projected their intent to do
something outrageous or illegal or destructive. Every time, the common response
was that they weren’t serious or that they would never succeed. How many times
will we have to be proved wrong before we take it seriously? The sooner we do,
the sooner we might hope to salvage a democracy that is in grave danger.
JL
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