Crossing the Rubicon: the Unbelievable Day
The Putsch
Everything’s been said, but a few points are still worth reiterating.
1. The Munich Putsch was in 1923; Hitler went to jail. Ten years later, he was on his way to becoming a totalitarian dictator.
2. Caesar of course crossed the Rubicon leading his troops. Trump is a world-class coward; if he had to cross a river, he’d hire some undocumented immigrants build a bridge, so he could pay them less than minimum wage, and bribe a government official to issue the necessary license. But Caesar would have been guilty of treason(as the Roman Republic defined it) even if he’d trailed behind his troops. In our language, sedition–or Treason?. Constitutionally, in the U.S. Treason “shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.”
As to the first, it’s not necessarily just who crosses that river, but also who sends them on their way. And that he did, unequivocally; and then cheered them on from his bunker. As Gail Collins put it: “he shouted that ‘We had an election that was stolen from us…It was a landslide election and everyone knows it. Especially the other side.’ You see now that within a couple of sentences, Trump has managed to turn his call for calm with a couple of jabs that would tend to convince some people that breaking through the windows and doors of the nation’s capitol was an excellent and righteous plan.”
But not just sedition. He got Rudy Giuliani, his alleged attorney (that’s like saying that a mangy two-week old cub was MGM’s “Leo the Lion”) to make a speech that morning calling on the mobsters who’d flooded into DC to prepare for “combat.” And he was consulting with his two morally deranged sons all the time, apparently. That’s called “conspiracy” in the law. It only takes two, in fact. And he knew to whom he was speaking, and who was hearing him. QAnon, Newsmax, The Proud Boys, etc. What was being planned was not a secret–every intelligence agency in DC knew it.
So, Conspiracy to Commit Sedition. Having defined that term a couple of blogs ago, I’m not going to repeat it, but just to reemphasize: Speech can be “seditious,” if it advocates the overthrow of a government in a context that is not abstract but dangerously concrete. The CPUSA, e.g., never did anything more “seditious” than publish the Daily Worker and quote the Communist Manifesto a lot, while running various candidates for public office and supporting Henry Wallace in 1948. But total “overthrow” is exactly what Trump has been advocating since the election, and especially with respect to Georgia even before yesterday’s rabble-rouser. And a wink and a nod to violence is “advocacy,” especially when you’re so carefully and knowingly addressing an audience whom you’ve well prepared for this moment.
And as for “Treason,” what does it mean, “levying war against them?” Aiding “enemies,” as I and others have argued, has to do with “foreign” enemies, but the Article in fact doesn’t say that. Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee were traitors. The procedures for securing a conviction of treason, however, are very stringent; much easier to impeach.
3. The other question is what Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz and their like-minded co-conspirators are guilty of–not to mention more than half of House Republican Caucus, many of whom are really, not to put too fine a point on it, human scum. They and some of their Party defenders claim the right to “free speech,” but they weren’t speechifying before their supporters broke in. They could do that any time, and had done it. No, in the midst of a procedure designed to confirm the winner of an election, they were trying to prevent that from happening. Speeches can be made any time anywhere. Plotting to overturn or prevent the conclusion of a free and fair election is sedition.
And I’d just like to add, again, that their putative sincerity–which I don’t believe for a moment–is beside the point. That’s like saying that the Nazis sincerely believed that framing a Communist for the Reichstag Fire in order to overthrow the Weimar Republic would be what “the German people” really wanted. In our context, that’s “overthrow.”
To clarify this point, elections aren’t intended to produce what “the people” really want, or what polls say they want, but only what the voters manifestly want. And when you step beyond that to make claims with no foundation in fact–a question that had already been settled by the only institutions legitimately charged with making such a determination — you’re committing “sedition.” (If a jury says so.)They are criminals, and for them to remain in the Senate House is abetting a crime. But I won’t hold my breath. Claire McCaskill dubbed them “the Sedition Caucus.” I’ll always admire her for that. And let’s not forget the speech by Representative Conor Lamb of Pennsylvania, as reported by Amy Davison Sorkin in today’s New Yorker:
“We know that that attack today, it didn’t materialize out of nowhere. It was inspired by lies, the same lies that you’re hearing in this room tonight. And the members who are repeating those lies should be ashamed of themselves; their constituents should be ashamed of them.” Shame is the least of it.
4. But as bad as the mobsters and the enablers were the police. This was evident to everyone who couldn’t turn away y from the TV yesterday. White Lives Matter! The whole event looked like a 50-year reunion from some segregated post-Brown v. Board of Education Academy. To quote Joy Reid from her heart-stopping peroration, any black people making such a demonstration of force and violence would have been “arrested, shackled, or dead.” Or as Elie Mystal, writing in The Nation, put it: “The Confederacy finally stormed the capitol…because the rioters were white, they were allowed to walk away. But just imagine if they had been Black.”
Or Masha Gessen in The New Yorker: ‘The Capitol Police made more arrests on each of the first three days of the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, in September, 2018, than they did yesterday. The protesters at those hearings — most of them women, many self-identified survivors of sexual assault — were arrested for transgressions such as shouting out from the gallery, “Kavanaugh can’t be trusted!”’
The cops were mostly white too, as far as we could tell. In the end, it could be argued that they were the worst of all in yesterday’s coup attempt. (Preventing Biden from being inaugurated, the goal of the MAGAs, would have been a successful coup, at least for the moment.) They have the sworn duty of preventing violence, not standing by while it happens. Moreover, almost all the insurrectionists just walked away, ready to take up arms again. Munich was only the first; Capitol Hill won’t be the last.
But then, just a random note, from Nicholas Kristov, at first glance–but not seond–having nothing to do with yesterday’s events:
“What county in the United States has the highest rate of tax audits?
The answer is Humphreys County in rural Mississippi, where three-quarters of the population is Black and more than one-third lives below the poverty line, because the government targets audits on poor families using the earned-income tax credit…”
5. What are we to make of all this in our own political thinking? Not so long ago ago there were some Letters to The Times, responding to an article by man, a Mr. Ali, who’d traveled across the country talking with Trump followers; and apparently lecturing them on their intellectual errors. Here are some relevant critical comments:
Mr. Ali notes that “we made jokes and we shared stories about our families.” In similar situations, I’ve tended to warm to the other person despite our differences. We may well conclude as we began — at odds. But I don’t feel as if we got nowhere. I walk away from good conversations with greater respect for the other person — in part for better understanding why and how they think, but more important for the chance to appreciate our shared humanity.
(G)enuine communication and understanding is a two-way street; you are changed as much as your interlocutor…He brought back with him the same elitist attitude that Trump supporters find so maddening.
He set out to proselytize, not to understand how millions of people could see the world so differently than he does…The idea that he could fly in from the coast for a couple of hours and change the minds of people whose lives he does not know smacks of the elitism that gave rise to Donald Trump.
Then there are respondents to those criticisms of “Mr. Ali:”
That, however, must be a two-way street. There is no way to reach someone who just shouts you down, who believes his right to do what he wants outweighs everything (and everyone) else, who picks and chooses which rules to accept only by whether or not they are good for him, who doesn’t believe that truth and facts and experience and competence have much value. I no longer believe that it’s my job — or even possible — to reach any meeting of the minds with such people. I believe we simply have to oppose and defeat them so we can be true to who we are, trying to make life better for everyone.
How are we to “reach out” to people whose opinions are founded on the likes of birtherism, QAnon and other such absurd conspiracy theories? “Yes, I understand that you believe that Hillary Clinton, Hunter Biden and George Soros stole this election to further their goal of diluting the white race out of existence, and I respect that opinion. Why can’t we just get along?”Mutual understanding requires common ground.
And on the same theme, though not from the same exchange:
Culture Warlords (by Talia Lavin) isn’t one of those books in which an intrepid author journeys behind enemy lines in order to write plaintively of our shared humanity. Yes, Lavin says, the people she encountered were human — ordinary individuals who eat, drink, sleep, and feel sadness and joy like anyone else. But it’s precisely their humanity that angers her; their hatred is “the culmination of dozens or hundreds of small human choices.” Studying the far right made her more knowledgeable about and less patient with those who tolerate it. Her research, she says, “taught me how to hate.” (From a book review).
And still on the same theme, though not from the same exchange:
Don Lemon erupted on CNN the other night: ‘Stop Saying That We Must Respect Trump Supporters Who Believe Bullsh*t!’
As for the last unpleasant word, I give it to from Paul Waldman of the Washington Post:
“It’s becoming hard to find the right words to describe what Republicans have become at this moment in history. We can call them reckless in their eagerness to undermine the functioning of government. We can call them heartless in their willingness to deprive Americans of aid in such a desperate time. We can call them unhinged in their embrace of deranged conspiracy theories. But now the Republican Party is quite literally becoming the enemy of America.”
Will it change course?
And a coda, from an interview with a Trump supporter:
“I am willing to give my life for this fight…Yes I am it’s time. I’m fighting for President DJT and The great country. If the Libs wants war well bring it.”
They’ve begun to bring it, and already they–and the President–are telling war stories like Henry V before the Battle of Agincourt. And as I’ve noted over and over again–they are armed, and they bear those arms wherever they go.
Are we listening? Are Homeland Security, the F.B.I., the Justice Department, listening? The President’s finger is notoriously “on the nuclear button.” Are they aware of this in the Pentagon, do they have plans for it? All over the nation heavily armed police forces–themselves a paramilitary force in waiting — were overwhelmingly for Trump and are systemically racist. Where is the Deep State when we need it?
6. Finally, a story I’ve told before. In the late ’90 ‘s I had a seminar at Smith College with several returning (that is, older) students in it. Two of them were Gov Majors, and I was their advisor. One, S, was a somewhat naive working-class woman from a declining factory city. We were good friends; Dorothy and I were invited to her wedding. The other G, had a checkered past and was mentally and physically toughened by it. I was her Senior Thesis advisor. As well, she had a scholarship grant which paid her to do research for me on a book I was then writing.
One day, in class, S said anent some discussion that “Fascists are like other people; you just have to talk to them.” The seminar exploded, as though repelling a personal attack. G glared at S but said nothing. Some hours later when I returned to my office there were a series of increasingly frantic emails from G: she had to talk to me, she had to apologize. I phoned her and asked her was what wrong? She replied, “Phil, I feel awful, I let you down, can you ever forgive me.” I said, “G, what are you talking about, you didn’t do anything.”
“Exactly,” she said. “I did nothing. I should have leaned across the table and punched her in the mouth!”
