It is true that some of the disorder of the past few years has had a distinctly political character. But January 6 remains in a class of its own.
It is true that some of the disorder of the past few years has had a distinctly political character. But January 6 remains in a class of its own.
W hy make such a big deal about January 6?
Sean Hannity, radio host and off-the-books Donald Trump adviser, demands to know. After all, Hannity points out, there have been scores of riots, some of them deadly, over the past couple of years. Why fixate on that one?
Sean Hannity apparently believes that he has the dumbest audience in America.
The sacking of the Capitol on January 6 by a gang of enraged Trump acolytes acting on the president’s complaint that the election had been stolen from him is different from other riots because of its particular political character. Stealing Nikes is one thing, and stealing the presidency is another. Hannity knows this. Most of you know this.
But, apparently, some people need to have it explained to them.
Consider: There were 21,570 homicides in the United States in 2020. If one of the victims had been the president of the United States, we would have made a pretty big deal about it. It would have been on the news. There might have been congressional hearings. Why? If we take Sean Hannity’s view, then we should treat such a murder as one murder among the thousands of murders the United States sees in a typical year.
But, of course, we do not treat the murders of political leaders that way. We even have a special word for such murders — assassination — because they are different from your average Saturday-night recreational shoot-’em-up in Chicago.
Likewise, nobody would care about Hunter Biden’s shenanigans if his father were the president of an office-supply company instead of the president of the United States.
We care especially about the killings of political leaders not because these men and women are special people whose lives are valuable in a special way. I am sure Abraham Lincoln’s family mourned him in much the same way as any other murder victim’s family would — but the nation was convulsed because of the political consequences of the assassination.
Even Sean Hannity knows this is a problem. That is why he — along with fellow Fox News hosts Laura Ingraham and Brian Kilmeade — texted Trump’s chief of staff to ask the president to try to put a stop to the riot. It is strange that these people, who today insist that Trump had nothing to do with the violent events in question, believed at the time that he was in a position to stop them.
(Incidentally, isn’t it at least a little improper for hosts on a so-called news network to be acting in such an advisory capacity? Didn’t CNN dump Chris Cuomo for precisely that — advising the New York governor?)
What has been clear to some of us for a long time — and what is becoming more difficult to deny every day — is that the events of January 6 were part of an attempted coup d’état, one that proceeded on two fronts: As the rioters occupied the Capitol and disrupted the process of certifying the Electoral College votes, Trump’s legal minions sought madly for some pretext upon which to nullify the election. Meanwhile, Trump allies occupying several points on the far-right tail of the bell curve of glue-sniffing madness hatched all kinds of supplementary schemes, some of them involving the military.
A riot that is part of a coup d’état is not very much like a riot that is part of a coup de Target.
It is true that some of the disorder of the past few years has had a distinctly political — revolutionary — character. The CHOP/CHAZ episode in Seattle is one example. But planting your flag on a Seattle sidewalk is a very different thing from having the president of the United States and his official allies make a serious effort at an autocoup — an effort that is, we should very much keep in mind, ongoing, with Trump-aligned Republicans working to take over election-management offices and to continue their effort to delegitimize the 2020 election through lies and conspiracy kookery.
There is a place in the jails and prisons of California, Washington, and Illinois for the criminals who rioted and looted in their cities, burning businesses and carrying out all manner of havoc. And there is a place in Florence, Colo., for the people who tried to overthrow the government of the United States on January 6.
I am ecumenical enough that I hope to see justice done in both cases.