It began in shame and dishonesty. It concludes in shame, dishonesty, cowardice, and rebellion against the Constitution.
It began in shame and dishonesty. It concludes in shame, dishonesty, cowardice, and rebellion against the Constitution.
J oe Biden gave the rioters who stormed the Capitol yesterday the obligatory stern talking-to. He wasn’t really talking to the rioters — he was talking to the nation at large, attempting to reassure America that, once he is sworn in, he will be up to the task. He won’t be, of course, but old men are entitled to their delusions.
“This isn’t who we are as Americans,” the president-elect insisted. Yes, old men are entitled to their delusions, but the rest of us are not obliged to share them. Biden could not be any more wrong: This is exactly who we are as Americans.
“We must not normalize Donald Trump!” A hundred thousand variations on that sentence have been published in the past four years. It is a stupid sentence. Donald Trump does not require normalization. He is as normal as diabetes, as all-American as shooting up your high school.
Wednesday’s riot is not the first act of political violence to take place inside the Capitol. One of the greatest men ever to serve in the Senate, the Republican abolitionist Charles Sumner, was beaten nearly to death in the chamber by a vicious Democratic slaver, Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina. It was a savage attack in response to a blistering speech: Brooks broke the gold-handled walking stick he used beating Sumner over the head, and the senator was sidelined by his injuries for three years. Brooks was a hero to the slavers, who sent him hundreds of new walking sticks in the mail. Brooksville, Fla., and Brooks County, Ga., were named for him shortly afterward.
Senator Sumner’s speech, on the question of slavery in Kansas, began:
You are now called to redress a great transgression. Seldom in the history of nations has such a question been presented. Tariffs, army bills, navy bills, land bills, are important, and justly occupy your care; but these all belong to the course of ordinary legislation. As means and instruments only, they are necessarily subordinate to the conservation of government itself. Grant them or deny them, in greater or less degree, and you will inflict no shock. The State will not cease to exist. Far otherwise is it with the eminent question now before you, involving, as it does, liberty in a broad Territory, and also involving the peace of the whole country, with our good name in history forevermore.
The attack on Senator Sumner shocked the country and divided it. It was one of the events that precipitated the Civil War. Brooks, who died young from a respiratory infection, did not live to see the Civil War he helped to start. Perhaps he would have been gratified if he could have seen the riot on Wednesday, in which the so-called patriots of the Trump movement carried the flag of the rebel slave powers.
Some things never really change.
The Trump presidency began in shame and dishonesty. It ends in shame, dishonesty, cowardice, and rebellion against the Constitution. For the past few weeks, the right-wing media, including the big talk-radio shows, has been coyly calling for a revolution. Of course they never thought they’d actually get one: That kind of talk is good for business — keep the rubes riled up and they won’t change the channel when the commercials come around on the half-hour. I never had much hope for the likes of Sean Hannity, tragically born too late to be a 1970s game-show host, but to watch Senator Ted Cruz descend into this kind of dangerous demagoguery as he jockeys to get out in front of the Trump parade as its new grand marshal has induced despair.
On May 4, 2016, I posted a little note to the Corner, headlined: “Pre-Planning My ‘I Told You So.’” It reads, in part: “Republicans, remember: You asked for this.” The path that the Republican Party and the conservative movement have taken in the past four years is not one that was forced on them — it is the product of choices that were made and of compromises that were entered into too willingly by self-interested men and women seeking money, celebrity, and power.
Of course it ends in violence — this is, after all, America.