On the Brink?
I haven’t been able to get out of my head an exchange I saw on PBS NewsHour on January 6, 2022. Judy Woodruff hosted a panel that had a rather consistent make-up: On the left were George Packer and Jelani Cobb, on the former-Republican center was Stuart Stevens, and what qualified for the right was Gary Abernathy, a columnist for The Washington Post.
All four agreed that the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol was terrible, awful, horrible. Abernathy said it was “embarrassing,” which was an odd word to use, I thought. Packer and Cobb, however, were more worried about the attack a year later than they’d been in 2021. At first they thought it had been a one-off, something we’d survived, but now it seemed more like a “harbinger” of things to come, the beginning of the end of democracy in America if we didn’t start getting very serious about thwarting further attempts to undermine and overthrow our elections and curb violence.
At one point, Abernathy, who goes through the discussion with a coy smile, says: But I think [outrage over January 6th] being used politically in some cases to then extrapolate those events and say, well, we can’t have any election reform. We can’t have anything, because it’s all an effort to make what happened on January 6 happen again.
And the fact is, a lot of us would argue that our system actually worked on January 6. None of these terrible things came to be, because people like Mike Pence said, I can’t go along with that.
So there are degrees of differences here. But, in some ways, I think we’re on the same page.
To which Jelani Cobb says, firmly, We are not on the same page, Gary. And the system did not work, if we think about the law enforcement officers, the Capitol Police officers who lost their lives.
We are not on the same page.
Joe Biden got high marks for his pull-no-punches rhetoric on January 6 in calling out the insurrection and the former president for his role in it. Then a week later he got criticized for his rhetoric in Atlanta on voting rights. Well, are we going to be serious now or aren’t we? Are we going to talk about rhetoric and act like there’s a possibility of winning over Republicans in the Senate to vote for a voting rights bill or any legislation (yes, I know, the certification process needs overhaul, especially now that there’s a Democrat vice president); or a chance of getting house members to testify to a bipartisan commission being more or less run by a vocal conservative Republican, Liz Cheney; or any Republicans in office to work to try to make sure Donald Trump can never run for president again and insurrectionists within our own government pay a price for their role? Is the rhetoric supposed to match efforts to win them over? We are not on the same page at all. Right now.
Civil war and international relations scholar Barbara F. Walter is touring right now with her book, How Civil Wars Start: and how to stop them. And it’s brought “civil war” right into our discourse. Are we on the brink of civil war? What would it look like, since it obviously wouldn’t be geographically defined? In interviews, Walter asks people to imagine they drive into town one day and encounter a road block. Who has set up this road block? Who has jurisdiction over who passes along this road? It’s hard to wrap one’s head around it, and the interviewers, those calm, reasonable purveyors of news still in some sense trying to “balance” their panels, clearly cannot. What do you mean, ‘who has jurisdiction’? asks Brooke Gladstone on NPR’s On the Media. And also, What do you mean, ‘road block’?
But former US generals are worried, and using not just the term ‘insurrection,’ but also ‘civil war.’
A common phrase in headlines is “sound the alarm.” And to tell you the truth, in the past two weeks civil war has seemed a better metaphor for the comet in Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up than climate change. Not extinction-level catastrophe, but impending catastrophe. And maybe possible to ignore for a large, large swath of Americans. Not because they’re so afraid and feel so powerless they can’t face it, but because they just don’t believe something like that can happen in America. As someone pointed out recently, people do still vote. People are still able to vote. There are no lines at my precinct and I like and trust the poll workers.
I mean, who could have believed a mob of angry people would attack police officers and smash up the capitol building, threatening lawmakers? And that some of them, maybe quite a few, would have arms amassed in hotel rooms all over the D.C. area to bring in once the capitol was secured? And the sitting president of the United States would respond by telling them he loved them and supporting their anger and actions right up to calling for the hanging of his own vice president? Who could ever have believed it could happen in America?
Pundits and reporters have been struggling all year to describe what is happening. “Slow-motion insurrection” is one of my favorites. We’ve been warned that pockets of political violence will start happening throughout the country. A man stands up and asks, “When do we get to use the guns?” and he is not told, “Never. We don’t shoot our neighbors because we disagree with them.” He is told, “Don’t say that out loud.” We hear of plots undone, including a man with a car full of weapons driving across the country to kill the chief medical advisor to the president. Trucks full of guns in D.C.
And we try to wrap our minds around what is coming next. We want to be prepared, but also, we want to do something to stop it. And it becomes more and more difficult to even talk about it. Because, fundamentally, we are not on the same page.
