The Long Shadow of January 6th

On the failure to hold power to account.

I find it difficult to concentrate on a day like today.

Reuters photo by Leah Millis https://www.reuters.com/pictures/defining-images-jan-6th-capitol-attack-2024-01-05/

Five years ago was the insurrection. It was only a mile from my house. I watched it from my phone, with my children safe indoors and unaware.

My daughters still don’t know about the attack on the Capitol. They are at an age where it would be… difficult to explain, provoking far too many questions for which there are no satisfying answers. They know instead that Donald Trump is the President, and that we do not like him very much, and that we wish the other candidate would have won. My youngest asked recently how much longer he would be President, and I told her “three more years” with a certainty that she did not notice I did not feel.

I find myself thinking today about an old essay I wrote. It was titled “Afflicting the Comfortable.” It appeared in an edited volume on the Media and January 6th. Academic writing proceeds at a glacial pace. I drafted the essay in 2022, as a contribution to a conference held on the one-year anniversary of the insurrection. I edited it in 2023, and the book was published in March 2024. As with much of my writing, the essay glances both forward and backward. It was, functionally, a warning left unheeded.

Here are the bits that matter (mostly from the introduction, with a bit of the conclusion):

There have to be consequences.

If we are to stave off the next insurrection, it is essential that the people who planned the last one face social sanctions. If January 6, 2021, becomes a badge of honor or a pathway to profit and power, then we seal the collective fate of the nation.

We can approach the problem of preventing the next insurrection from three main angles. We can focus on the mass public—the Republican Party-in-Electorate, a majority of whom now tells pollsters that they believe Trump won the 2020 election despite all evidence to the contrary. We can focus on the communication channels—the social media and partisan media that, through a mix of algorithmic and analytics-based optimization, disseminate and amplify these lies because they prove to be good for business even if they are bad for democracy. Or we can focus on the media and political elites—the small set of powerful actors who crafted the Big Lie, sought advantage through it, and are setting plans in motion for next time.

All three angles deserve attention. But it appears to me that they are often prioritized in the wrong order.

It is easiest to bemoan public misinformation and the loss of social trust and cohesion at the mass scale—to ask searching questions about why the Republican electorate has lost faith in our political institutions and to earnestly pursue efforts to rebuild that wellspring of bygone institutional trust. There has never been a social problem that “civic education” could not be rendered a solution to.

It is nearly as easy, in recent years, to blame the social media platforms. Facebook and Google spent the previous decade displacing mainstream media organizations as the gatekeeper of newsworthiness and public information/disinformation. They did so while absorbing mainstream media’s advertising revenues, hastening the decline in local journalism. The social platforms have been lousy gatekeepers, far more likely to issue belated apologies than timely corrections. And yet, precisely because of the well-earned animosity between legacy journalism and the digital platforms, there has been a rush to place the lion’s share of the blame at the new gatekeepers’ feet. (Could Facebook have done a better job of tamping down on the Big Lie in the months leading up to the insurrection? Yes. Was Facebook responsible for the insurrection? No. It was a valuable tool that ought to have rendered itself less valuable.)

The partisan elites, meanwhile, behave with an audacity that suggests they have evaluated their situation and determined they have nothing to fear and everything to gain from their association with the insurrection. The Trump-supporting masses who sacked the Capitol face jail time. The Trump lieutenants who incited the attack are invited on The Masked Singer. The members of Congress who participated in the plot to overturn the election faced a brief reprisal from corporate donors announcing they would no longer donate to insurrectionists’ reelection efforts. Those announcements lasted less than six months before the donations quietly rolled back in. At the time of this writing, it seems likely that Republican elites who supported, funded, or even participated in the insurrection will win contested primaries and go on to serve as secretaries of state, members of the House of Representatives, and governors.

It is still unclear, at the time of this writing, whether and against whom the Justice Department will bring charges. It is eighteen months after January 6th, and it is still too early to draw conclusions about efforts at elite accountability. Unless there are legal repercussions, the work of elite accountability is going to require constant normative vigilance. There is still a real risk that the January 6 insurrection will be converted into a Trumpist Woodstock. If that occurs, then future insurrection attempts become a near-certainty.

(…)

Only the Republican Party can fix the Republican Party. The U.S. government is structured such that it can function only when both parties are at least nominally committed to the work of governance. And, particularly between the geographic biases of the Senate and the electoral comforts provided by gerrymandered House districts, there is little direct pressure that Democrats, mainstream media figures, policy experts, or public intellectuals can put on Republican politicians. If conservative media and political elites abandon all pretense of belief in the myth of the attentive public, and if furthermore they decide that they simply do not have any attachment to electoral democracy, then the only hope in the short or medium term is that they be replaced by other Republicans.

Even if Democrats win every close race against authoritarian extremists, American democracy simply cannot last if it hinges on Democrats winning every close race, every time. The normative pressure must come from institutional Republicans as well. It must be significant and sustained and ultimately successful.

Creating sustained normative penalties for those associated with the insurrection is one way to help these efforts. It signals that there are still lines that cannot be crossed (and that those lines are not merely “Republican-versus-Democrat”).

Pressuring, shaming, and shunning the political and media elites behind the “Stop the Steal” message is not the sole lever for preventing the next January 6th. But I believe it is essential that scrutiny, criticism, and pressure also be brought to bear on the elites. We must afflict the comfortable, so to speak.

Otherwise, predicting the next insurrection will be a matter of when, not if.

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I cannot shake the sense, today, that we are living through the aftermath. We live in the inescapable shadow of January 6th. The insurrection ultimately succeeded, it was just delayed.

A year ago, on this blog, I wrote:

I suspect [the insurrection] is about to become a shibboleth of sorts. For at least the next two years, all judges who will be appointed to the federal bench will be expected to believe that the January 6th insurrectionists were patriots, peaceful except for the deep state infiltrators, trying to prevent an illegal power grab by the incoming Biden administration. All political appointees to federal agencies will have to hold the same beliefs. History will be rewritten to applaud their actions.

All that has effectively come to pass. There is, now, no law but Wilhoit’s Law. (“There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”) Media, tech, and business elites have determined that standing up to this administration is more trouble than it is worth. We have fewer resources to afflict the comfortable than ever before.

And so now we are governed by a Republican Party that toys with abandoning NATO and the entire post-WWII international order. (Maybe they’ll invade Greenland this year, just as a treat?) The federal government stations troops in Democratic cities and cuts off funding to Democratic states. RFK Jr. takes a wrecking ball to all public health measures, because he figures he knows better and who are any of us to contradict him. The rotting husk of Twitter now has a sexualized-child-photos-on-demand feature. Elon thinks its hilarious, so the government thinks that’s fine now I guess.

This will not last, but it is bound to get much worse before it gets better.

But I think it’s important, on the anniversary of January 6th, to recall that it also was not inevitable.

These times — the times we are living through today, the times filled with questions that have no satisfying answers — are the aftermath of our failure to hold power to account.