The Road to January 6th

Like many of you, I watched last Thursday's televised hearing of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol with a mixture of anger, sadness, and disbelief. The evidence of Der Furor's manifest unfitness for any position of adult responsibility ... much less the presidency ... is overwhelming, and the damage he has done to the nation and the world is almost beyond calculation.

But as awful as the legacy of Der Furor is, I think he was but the most recent logical bump in the torturous road down which the country has been heading since the creation of the Republic. 

We Americans are a feisty and contrarian lot, with a baked-in suspicion of and disrespect for authority that goes back to our successful revolt against a king who tried to exercise power and authority over us that we were unwilling to accept. Once we'd become an independent country, though, we needed to figure out how to govern a loose confederation of states that didn't really want to be governed by anyone else. Our first attempt to form a government resulted in the Articles of Confederation, which produced a national administration too weak to manage thirteen fractious former colonies, each with a "you're not the boss of me" attitude. We went back to the drawing board and came up with the Constitution, a flawed document we've managed to make work partly because of periodic amendment to fix major issues and partly because - until the advent of Der Furor - we've had presidents, legislators, and jurists willing to cooperate within a shared set of values and united by a love of country. 

But the suspicion and disrespect for authority that's baked into our national DNA has never quite gone away, and we've allowed it to grow and fester until it manifests itself in things like heavily-armed militias, Second Amendment zealots, white supremacists, "constitutional sheriffs," election denial, and the utter lunacy of the QAnon movement. How did we get to the point at which our sanity check has bounced?

Mistrust and suspicion of government authority - even within the government - has been building at an increasing rate since at least the presidency of Ronald Reagan and his assertion that "In the present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." The fundamental difference between the conservative/Republican and liberal/Democratic approaches to governing has hardened into a belief on the right that government should be as small, cheap, weak, and non-intrusive as possible, and on the left that government should be large and powerful enough to better the lives and fortunes of ordinary citizens ... and the twain ain't meeting.

But it's more than that.

Look at our popular books and films, and consider that a major theme of many of them is government malfeasance and abuse of authority. As far back as 1962, the novel Seven Days in May (and its 1964 film version) envisioned an attempt by a military-political cabal to seize control of the US government. Rogue government agents and their flagrant violations of the rights of American citizens are a popular theme, as are corrupt government officials, police on the take, etc. Is it any wonder that impressionable Americans believe their officials and institutions are irredeemably corrupt?

The news media fuels this public cynicism by focusing relentlessly on the things that go wrong, rather than on - or at least, mentioning in passing - the things that go right. This reflects a belief that the job of the fourth estate is to hold government's feet to the fire and courageously expose its wrongdoing, not to applaud it for doing its job ... but it contributes to the perception that everything is wrong and everyone, everywhere is corrupt.

And, of course, our political parties have done their part. Members of Congress are elected noncompetitively in districts gerrymandered to provide safe party control rather than to represent the actual choices of the electorate. Time that might be spent in legislative work is devoted to fundraising to cover the huge cost of political campaigns. Popular legislation is blocked for spurious political reasons in order to prevent the opposition party from achieving any successes that might improve their approval ratings. "Debates," when they are held, consist of ad hominem attacks and scripted talking points often unrelated to the softball questions asked by the moderators, who are selected so as to be the least objectionable to both sides. The right and duty of a sitting president to nominate Supreme Court justices is shamelessly blocked to allow the packing of the court with religious conservatives who will advance a blatantly religious agenda in defiance of the Constitution.

And the vast amounts of money needed to fund election campaigns leave officeholders beholden to the special interests who provide that money, ensuring that legislation reflects the interests of corporate and special interest donors rather than those of ordinary citizens. 

All of these things, taken together, have created an electorate with a cynical, yet sadly realistic view of a government owned by special interests and completely uninterested in any concerns more complicated than arranging tickets for a White House tour or obtaining a flag flown over the Capitol. The realization that elected officials have no particular interest in the welfare of the average citizen made even an unqualified and egotistical blowhard like Der Furor, whose only real skill was riling up crowds by sticking a finger in the eye of the status quo, seem worth betting on. That appeal was summarized by New York Times opinion columnist Bret Stephens in this insightful article, in which he admitted having misunderstood why the 45th president was (and remains) so attractive not only to his most devoted followers, but to ordinary citizens desperate enough for something better than government as usual that they would elect a boorish ignoramus like Der Furor to the chair once held by towering figures like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.

As journalist Henry Mencken observed many years ago, 

"As democracy is perfected, the office of the president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."

And,

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

Thus, we find ourselves menaced by the shrieking hobgoblins of Critical Race Theory, migrant caravans, Antifa, BLM*, and satan-worshiping cannibalistic pedophiles, which serve to distract us from the very real hobgoblins of climate change, drastic economic inequality, surging gun violence, and a general worship of ignorance.

It's taken 233 years, but we seem finally to have reached the culmination of the pressures and desires and political cognitive dissonance that drove the founding generation. We've paved for ourselves the road that led to January 6th, 2021, and beyond it to a future darker than I could ever have feared.

Have a good day. Think hard about the country you want for your children and grandchildren, and vote accordingly.

More thoughts coming.

Bilbo

* Not, of course, the Bureau of Land Management, which surely receives its share of threatening phone calls from idiots who assume it's burning down our cities to combat racism.