If the hearings fail to offer a moral reckoning, it will be because no one involved is in a position to credibly provide one.
If the hearings fail to offer a moral reckoning, it will be because no one involved is in a position to credibly provide one.
W illiam Makepeace Thackeray’s masterpiece, Vanity Fair, was published with a subtitle: “A Novel without a Hero.” Whatever genre the January 6 hearings belong to — documentary? comedy? circus? — they are telling a story without a hero, a characteristic story of our unheroic time.
As I have argued at some length, the invasion of the Capitol and the vandalism and violence associated with it were a sideshow, and should be understood as such. The main event was Donald Trump’s attempt to find some legal or procedural fig leaf for invalidating the 2020 presidential election, and by that means to remain in power — a coup d’état under color of law. Tyrants always fortify their regimes with borrowed prestige: borrowed from the law, from religion, from science, and, above all, from “the People.” But tyranny is tyranny.
Some of my friends on the right scoff at the idea that this amounted to anything more than a farce, something more than Rudy Giuliani’s taking a long final drunken piss on what remained of his reputation, but they are wrong: It was only thanks to the integrity of a few minor officials of whom nobody had ever heard before Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election — if there are any heroes in this story, they are them — that this did not end up being a more acute crisis than it was. Replaying the Battle of Athens in the age of social media and mass shootings is a short road to national chaos.
The white whale for Democrats remains finding a way to charge Trump with a crime for his role in this. My National Review colleague Andrew C. McCarthy often observes the error of trying to find a legal solution to a political problem, and this is fundamentally a political and moral problem rather than a legal one. If there is a fruitful criminal-law strategy to be pursued, Democrats have not discovered it: They have been trying to find a prosecutable crime with which to charge Trump since before he took office, and they haven’t even come up with an Al Capone charge from Trump’s taxes, his “charity” shenanigans, or his rather creative campaign-finance practices. The only shots they have landed have been merely Trump-adjacent. (That is convenient for Trump, who has made it perfectly clear that he does not care at all what happens to the people around him.) Progressives who continue to claim that Merrick Garland is always right on the cusp of hauling in Donald Trump increasingly sound like Louise Mensch writing about the marshal of the Supreme Court back in the day, or any number of persistent QAnon cultists.
Of course, such crimes as have been identified in this matter should be prosecuted vigorously and punished with positive severity, but we should understand — and, I think, we may be beginning to understand — the uncomfortable truth: The law isn’t going to save us here. If we give in to the fantasy that we can legislate our way out of this mess or prosecute our way back to republican virtue, we are only “dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.” That is a project that inevitably will end in failure and disappointment. Being good citizens is not easy, but maintaining a free society without good citizens is impossible.
Republicans complain that Democrats only want to use these hearings to boost their chances in the midterm elections, that Democrats want to distract voters from the Biden administration’s failures abroad and at home, that Democrats are trying to drive inflation out of the news and the political discourse, that Democrats do not now and never have actually cared about political violence and showed that during the summer before the 2020 election, that Democrats themselves used some very questionable legal pretexts to try to overturn a presidential election they lost in 2000 and insisted that the 2016 was illegitimate, that their media allies are pumping up the January 6 story while relegating plots to assassinate Supreme Court justices all the way back to page A20 — and Republicans are absolutely correct about all that. And that matters as more than a matter of rhetoric: If the January 6 hearings do not provide a legal reckoning, it will be because the law does not provide for one; but if the January 6 hearings fail to provide a moral or political reckoning — and, of course, they will fail in that way — it will be because there is no one in a position to deliver such a reckoning.
Representative Liz Cheney is an admirable figure, but her marginalization within the Republican Party — a judgment on the Republican Party more than it is a judgment on her — deprives her of the status necessary to be the champion here. Joe Biden is at least as corrupt and incompetent as Donald Trump is and at least Trump’s equal in his contempt for the rule of law and the constitutional order — if anything, he is more dangerous than Trump was in that respect, because he is a professional politician who understands the fundamentals of how the machinery is operated, something Trump never was apparently interested in figuring out during the 25 minutes a day he wasn’t on Twitter or watching Fox News or on Twitter tweeting about what he was watching on Fox News.
Democrats will sometimes concede that their recent tolerance of political violence and their two decades of election rejection are a problem because they give Trump partisans a talking point, but that isn’t nearly enough: They have to understand that these things are bad in and of themselves. They will have to develop a deeper and more genuine sense of political morality if they ever want to have anything like the kind of standing that would enable them to do what actually needs to be done in these hearings. It’s not just that you can’t go from “rioting is social justice” in July to “riots are sedition” in January — it’s that you shouldn’t be starting from “rioting is social justice” in the first place, and, if you are, you have already lost the game. The fact that Republicans have cynical, self-serving reasons for not taking the Democrats seriously does not erase the fact that there are excellent reasons for not taking the Democrats seriously — contempt for what the Democratic Party embodies and stands for is in fact a moral necessity.
Instead of self-examination, Democrats offer: “I don’t get why these Republicans are so radical and angry, and, also, everybody who retweets a joke I don’t like should lose his job. Also, Reihan Salam is a Christo-fascist white supremacist.” They will dream up more things of that nature as needed. And if these hearings go nowhere, which is likely, and if Democrats get pulverized in November, which also is likely, what are Democrats going to say? “We just didn’t realize how racist this country really is!” Because racism is why thinking people don’t want Elizabeth Warren, the whitest woman since Eunice Wentworth Howell, in charge of writing our laws.
That is very difficult stuff to take seriously. And, so, most people who are not psychically dependent upon Twitter validation to get through the day do not take it seriously. As the Democratic activist and political scientist Ruy Teixeira recently put it: “You don’t beat crazy with less crazy — you beat crazy with not crazy. The first party to figure that out is going to be in pretty good shape.”
But there isn’t any political juice for any up-and-coming Democrat in being not crazy, while there would be a lot of juice in putting Donald Trump in jail and, short of that, in making florid dramatic pronunciations that Donald Trump belongs in jail and would be there if not for some subtle and uncorrectable defect in our legal system.
In a democratic republic, the law is what the people say it is. Writing laws is a careful business and one you want to keep on a short leash: Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges, and all that. But the American problem is prior to the law. We may need better laws, but we much more urgently need better Americans. This is a demand-side problem: Our politics is what we demand it be. What Americans demand right now is . . . this, this hideous dog’s-breakfast of ugliness, stupidity, and greed. And this will persist exactly as long as we allow it to persist.
Eventually, someone will have to stand up and summon up the scorn to call this contemptible spectacle what it is, even though nobody wants to hear it, even though it will win him no votes, even though it will irritate his friends and estrange his allies.
Even at the risk of being a hero.