January 6th Is A Test We Are Failing

Every year on the anniversary of January 6 and take stock of how much the country has done to avert a repeat. My feelings today are where they were last year: our nation is being given the test of the authoritarian strongman, and we are failing.

That failure is crystal clear now that Donald Trump is on the cusp of winning his party’s nomination for president. Not only is he not in jail, not only has he not been hounded out of public life, he has what I consider a coin flip’s chance of being president again.

Go back in time, and put yourself in the shock and chaos of January 6. Imagine someone on that day telling you that three years later Trump would be the presumptive Republican nominee. It’s a sign of how much this event has been normalized and propagandized by right-wingers that the current situation fails to upset us as it should.

In the immediate aftermath, people were far more aggressive in defending democracy. Major league baseball players demanded that the All-Star Game be moved from Georgia due to that state’s voter suppression, for example. For a minute, it even looked like the Republican Party was going to cut Trump loose.

As we all know now, that didn’t happen. The fateful moment came with Trump’s second impeachment. Mitch McConnell was not willing to vote for Trump’s removal, even though he denounced him. He, like other Republican leaders, thought he could get Trump to go away while not alienating conservative base voters. Perhaps they evenly naively thought the Republican base would abandon him.

Trump is destroying his opponents in the primary polls because that abandonment never happened. Even Republican candidates running against him have said they will pardon him if he is convicted of one of the many crimes he has been charged with.

The main blame for Trump’s continued power falls on the rank and file Republicans who still support him, the party officials and politicians who are afraid of that base, and the conservative media apparatus that has distorted the truth. Blame also goes to the decent Republicans who spoke out against Trump, then retired from Congress so that one of his supporters could grab their seats.

Cowardice is not just an attribute of such Republicans, however. Plenty of others have shown a stunning lack of bravery when faced with the current threat. Democrats mostly hoped Trump would just go away and prioritized “getting back to normal” in the aftermath. The Fourteenth Amendment should have been invoked IMMEDIATELY after the insurrection, instead of three years later. Even worse, the mainstream news media still covers events related to January 6th with its fatuous horserace framing. Despite his attempt to overthrow the government, they are back to treating Trump like a normal politician, not the wannabe dictator that he is. Why? Because they dare not leave their comfort zone as stenographers to the powerful. With the 14th Amendment cases going before SCOTUS, I am sure the courts will get a chance to chicken out as well.

The good news is that while we are failing, the test is not yet over. During the Trump administration, all kinds of people who were opposed to his policies got mobilized. Their work helped stop the worst of his excesses and laid the groundwork for his electoral defeat. If you are opposed to him, now is your time to get that spirit back. If you voted for him before, now is your time to redeem yourself. We might be failing now, but we need to fight with the knowledge that the ultimate failure is not an option.