Member Newsletter
The defeated often hearten themselves with the belief that the verdict of history will be on their side. The reality is that history seldom has a verdict. It’s not like a trial where an unchanging judgment is handed down. That whole concept is mostly wrongheaded, and when there is such a judgment it is always contingent, subject to perspectives of future people we can’t hope to understand.
Today we’re seeing some commemorate the January 6th, 2021 insurrection as a shameful chapter of the past while we see a more consequential replay of the formalization of the 2024 election which looks more like a present-day vindication. Donald Trump refused to accept the results of the 2020 election, resorted to chicanery and eventual violence to upend the results of that election and to overthrow the republic itself. He failed, managed to evade legal repercussions for his actions and is now returning to power as the result of a subsequent election. Those seeking to commemorate that day four years ago as a shameful chapter upon which we are now hoping to close the book seem to ignore that we are beginning a whole new book written by the author of that shameful chapter.
A better way to look at all of this is that we remain in an intense, sometimes violent and close to deadlocked struggle over the future of the country. It is no more done today or tomorrow than it was four years ago.
It’s worth remembering that when it happened, everyone including all but Trump’s most degenerate supporters knew how bad it was. They all needed time to create a web of explanations and excuses to justify or simply dismiss the gravity of what happened. The now incoming President led a criminal attempt to overthrow the republic to reverse the outcome of an election he lost. One has to peel back so many layers of time to remember that a good percentage of corporate America announced at the time that it would stop backing members of Congress who had supported the effort by refusing to vote to certify the results of the election, a boast that required cutting off support to the bulk of congressional Republicans.
Yes, if you don’t remember, that actually happened.
The assumption underlying those pledges was that the events of January 6th were so discreditable and discredited that no party could ever stand behind them. It was the same belief that led many — likely including the incoming President himself — to believe that Trump had been permanently and irrevocably discredited by January 6th. Of course that wasn’t true at all. The mix of denial, justification and diminishment took hold almost immediately. Those Republican members of the House who’d given their votes to the effort were still there, still with power, and looked likely to have even more power after the 2022 election which Republicans seemed almost certain to win. What had seemed irretrievably outside the mainstream of acceptable behavior could by definition not be outside the mainstream if one of the two major parties supported it. So the pledges of non-support were quietly unpledged and that was that.
We’re still very much in the heart of the struggle over January 6th. For now Trump and his supporters have muddled the public verdict over what happened and reclaimed power through a subsequent election. Personally, Trump is very likely to have escaped all punishment for what happened on January 6th, 2021. What happens to his movement, what they’ll be able to do with the presidency and Congress and a dominant hold on the courts, is what we’re going to find out over the coming months and years.