Not actual mountain lions. I’m not going to send them flying through the screen at you. “Certainly that would be as extraordinary a thing as I can imagine.” Maybe if you didn’t get eaten you could spend the rest of your lives debating whether it was a magic trick or just a physical cause-and-effect relationship you hadn’t figured out yet.
Anyhow, if you’re bored by 1/6 and just want a story about mountain lions, feel free to skip to the end. Otherwise:
Feel free to keep worrying. But what is the worry?
One version, let’s call it the “utmost worry,” is summed up in the New York Times editorial “Every Day Is Jan. 6 Now.” The utmost worry is that Trump-aligned Republicans are executing a strategy to pull off in 2024 what they could not in 2020. They are doing that by perpetuating Trump’s lies about voter fraud, trying to purge (through primary challenges and public mockery) Republican truth-tellers about the election, restricting voting in the states, and making oversight bodies of state and local elections more partisan. They also show an increasing taste for martial rhetoric and threatened political violence, raising the prospect of a violent coup if a legal coup (a creative use of legal loopholes to install a losing candidate as head of state) should fail.
We’ll come back to that, but let’s first acknowledge that there is plenty to be worried about even if you reject the utmost worry.
It is worrisome that the structural problems that made it possible for Trump to attempt a self-coup (to keep himself in office unconstitutionally) — e.g., the ambiguities of the Electoral Count Act — and to remain a force in our politics thereafter — e.g., uncertainty as to whether late impeachments are constitutional — remain unaddressed. I recall someone telling me shortly after 1/6 that it seemed that Trump was “neutered.” It seems to me that he is not. And even if we set aside current politics, we should be worried that some future demagogue could exploit those defects.
In their damage to long-held norms of proper presidential and partisan deportment as it bears on the transition of power, the events leading up to 1/6 also represent a decadent corruption of our politics that renders worries of an eventual Roman-style collapse into autocracy far from absurd.
And many of the individual elements of the utmost worry should trouble us even if we do not arrive at the question of how likely a coup of some kind is over any period of time. It is worrisome on its face that a significant proportion of GOP members of Congress and conservative pundits still want Trump to lead the Republican Party. It is worrisome on its face that Trump’s election lies are ongoing and reinforced by his chorus of toadies. It is worrisome on its face that partisan interest so overwhelms honesty that Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger are somehow controversial for refusing to meekly shut up, or for wanting the events of 1/6 and the things that preceded it to be investigated, while Elise Stefanik and Kevin McCarthy are in good standing. It is worrisome on its face that media demagogues who were privately horrified by 1/6 but refused to be public truth-tellers continue to exert their great influence. All these things — and one could expand the list — should trouble us even if we don’t share the utmost worry.
Reactions to reactions. I don’t quite think that if the Democrats claimed the sky was blue, the Republicans would deny it. But if the Democrats said, “The sky is blue, and so we must end the Senate filibuster and arrange a federal takeover of state elections,” a lot of Republicans would say, “But can’t you see that the sky is overcast?”
I agree with much of what was asserted in NR’s 1/6-anniversary editorial. The discussion of Trump’s guilt rang with truth. I don’t favor ending the filibuster. I see the Democrats’ “voting rights” legislation as mostly an attempted partisan power grab. I wonder why Democrats, if they’re sincere about making another 1/6 less likely, won’t work with Republicans to reform the Electoral Count Act. I think that a lot of the state-level election legislation that terrifies the Times is perfectly defensible. (On the other hand: If maintaining certain pandemic-related voting innovations — for example, 24-hour drive-through voting in Texas — would allow more people to vote without introducing greater risk of fraud, then it should be done. And I think it is lunatic, given recent history, to make election-oversight bodies more rather than less partisan.)
But you will not find in the editorial any acknowledgment that there is any reason for ongoing worry. It reads as if the danger were in the rearview mirror. From that I dissent.
The editorial also makes an artificially restricted assignment of guilt. It’s convenient to the rearview-mirror outlook to pin 100 percent of the blame on Trump, because then one needn’t talk about anyone currently in office or on TV or the radio. Nor need one recall the cowardly silence of so many Republican officials and cabinet figures between the meeting of the Electoral College on December 14, 2021, and 1/6. In short, one can ignore the breadth of the corruption by focusing on its point of maximum depth. The widespread impression, for example, that Mike Pence became a hero simply by declining to subvert the Constitution — after having stood next to Trump at rallies and uttered artfully chosen ambiguities that allowed his audience to keep believing Trump’s lies — seems to me to border on the delusional.
The Democrats deserve plenty of criticism for their opportunistic use of 1/6. But if Republican officials and conservative talking heads had shown the courage to repudiate and refute Trump’s lies after the election, the Democrats might not have had an opportunity.
Feel free to keep saying “insurrection” and its derivatives. I understand why conservative legal commentators oppose it as a description of 1/6. They are reacting to an utmost-insurrection thesis according to which what happened on 1/6 was comparable to a sustained armed rebellion, with the implication that Trump and his co-conspirators can be held to have violated federal law. I grant the legal argument to the contrary.
But Jeffrey Scott Shapiro was quite wrong to say in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed that
the events of Jan. 6, [in addition to failing to meet the legal definition of “insurrection”], . . . fail to meet the dictionary definition of insurrection, which Merriam-Webster defines as “an act or instance of revolting against civil authority or an established government.” A usage note adds that the term implies “an armed uprising that quickly fails or succeeds.” A closely related term, “insurgency,” is “a condition of revolt against a government that is less than an organized revolution and that is not recognized as a belligerency.”
Other near synonyms include “rebellion,” “revolution,” “uprising,” “revolt” and “mutiny.” All require two elements, neither of which was present in the Jan. 6 breach — the organized use of violent force and the aim of replacing one government or political system with another.
Hogwash. First, 1/6 was precisely “an act or instance of revolting against civil authority or an established government.” It was also what Merriam-Webster calls the “essential meaning” of the term, namely “a usually violent attempt to take control of a government.” 1/6 was violent; it was a revolt against civil authority; and it was meant to take control of the government for the purpose of thwarting the lawful transition of power.
Second, Shapiro doesn’t mention that five of the six example sentences for the word “insurrection” at the dictionary entry are about 1/6. Nor that Merriam-Webster’s editors chose “insurrection” as runner-up for 2021 word of the year, putting it below a great big photo of 1/6. So it would seem that the authority Shapiro appeals to disagrees with him.
Third, it is just not true that the “near synonyms” all require the elements Shapiro claims they do. Look at the usage note for yourself. The terms are not restricted to governments and political systems, although they might be so restricted without rendering “insurrection” inapt as a common-language description of 1/6. Nor are the terms restricted to organized attempts, although 1/6 included certain limited forms of organization. Shapiro’s claims here would seem to be pure error or invention.
It is, I admit, true that the usage note says that “insurrection” implies “an armed uprising that usually fails or succeeds.” This is the closest Shapiro comes to having a point. If your idea of an insurrection is one in which every insurrectionist carries a firearm, 1/6 does not fit. But some of the insurrectionists used improvised weapons (a flagpole, a fire extinguisher — no, not the fire extinguisher that supposedly but retractedly was thrown at Brian Sicknick, rather a different one) or brought weapons other than firearms (e.g., the pepper spray used against Sicknick). Some individuals indeed had firearms and have been charged with gun crimes. One person brought Molotov cocktails, a handgun, and a rifle. (He said that he’d been keeping the Molotov cocktails in his truck “for some time,” as one does.) Further examples could be adduced.
Meanwhile, the Oxford English Dictionary — subscription required, but you can probably access it with a library card — defines “insurrection” as “the action of rising in arms or open resistance against established authority or governmental restraint; with plural, an instance of this, an armed rising, a revolt; an incipient or limited rebellion.” Note the first “or,” allowing “open resistance” to qualify as insurrection even without arms. Note the second semicolon. Note “incipient or limited.” Note that the usage examples include (from H. H. Milman’s History of Latin Christianity) “The people broke out in instant insurrection, declared their determination to renounce their allegiance.” An instant determination to renounce allegiance is not a pre-planned, pre-armed revolt, but apparently it can still be called an “insurrection.”
Retreating from semantic geekery for a moment to describe the thing itself, I would say that a distinguishing feature of 1/6 is that it was not only against the law but targeted at the law and at our government of laws. It was, to repeat, an effort to take control of the government for the purpose of thwarting the lawful transition of power. Whatever words we use, we need to be clear about that.
My own settled term of description would be “insurrectionary riot.” By using “riot,” I mean to differentiate 1/6 from a sustained, centrally organized, fully armed rebellion. “Insurrection” does have a range of meanings, and it’s reasonable to want to differentiate 1/6 from the insurrection that led to the Civil War. But 1/6 was a riot of a particular character, and that character was insurrectionary.
On the other hand . . .
People can be deluded, and if they are, it is mitigating. I’m sure that many of the rioters sincerely believed that Trump had won the election and thought themselves to be restoring the law and the Constitution. I do not think those specific people had an insurrectionary intent. I in fact feel considerable sympathy for them and would not categorically oppose leniency. They believed what they believed because they had been fed outrageous lies for two months.
This sympathy for the sincerely deluded makes me all the angrier at the former president, the cabal that executed the legal aspect of the self-coup plot while he executed the media aspect, and every member of Congress who voted against counting electors. I would wish we could exile them to some miserable scrap of atoll were it not that they would probably mount a successful reality-TV show there (The Sorest Loser? The Biggest Liar?) as prelude to a post-Elba-like return. I certainly hope never to find myself at a fancy dinner with them. I’d have to propose a toast in the spirit of the former Kanye West’s beautiful song “Runaway.”
Not everything bad can be judged by its consequences. An obvious point, but one that comes to mind when people bridle at comparisons of 1/6 to 9/11. 9/11 caused some 3,000 deaths and billions of dollars in property damage; by those criteria, 1/6 isn’t even in the same galaxy. But 9/11 was not the work of internal enemies at the highest heights of our politics. It did not reveal that the holder of the highest office in the land, and his supporters in the media and in Congress, cared more about themselves or about their hatred of the Left than they did about democracy and the Constitution.
1/6 and 9/11 are in certain respects incommensurable, but the feeling of sadness I had on 1/6 was something I had not felt since 9/11. It was quite vivid. I felt a certain way and tried to figure out where I recalled it from, and then I remembered the feeling of 9/11.
Impeaching Trump Now and Then — Part II: Then. Part I is here. I promised a Part II, which would look back on Trump’s first impeachment and trial. But then I realized I didn’t have much to say beyond what I’d written at the time of that first impeachment.
So I will simply add one thought, in response to something the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board said a year ago in calling on Trump to resign:
Mr. Trump’s many opponents are crowing in satisfaction that their predictions have been proven right, that he was never fit to be President and should have been impeached long ago. But Mr. Trump’s character flaws were apparent for all to see when he ran for President.
Sixty-three million Americans voted to elect Mr. Trump in 2016, and that constitutional process shouldn’t be easily overruled[,] as Democrats and the press have demanded from nearly his first day in office. You don’t impeach for anticipatory offenses or for those that don’t rise to the level of constitutional violations. This week’s actions are a far greater dereliction of duty than his ham-handed Ukrainian interventions in 2019.
What kind of bird squawks at straw men? The argument for impeaching Trump the first time was not that it would prevent predictable “anticipatory offenses.” Nor was it merely that Trump’s character was flawed in ways we all knew about. Certainly it was not that he was “ham-handed.” Rather, it was that Trump had shown a disposition to thwart the implementation of signed legislation in order to dig up some dirt on his presumed opponent and boost his reelection chances. I think this did raise a constitutional concern, since we saw that Trump was willing to place his own interest above the duties of his office as defined in the document he had sworn an oath to uphold. His campaign of election-related lies leading up to 1/6 was a much more spectacular and consequential display of the same disposition to corruption, even if no one could have specifically predicted it.
Mountain lions. As promised. (This is not, by the way, the experience I mentioned toward the end of a recent post. That was a car crash.)
I like to run on trails in the foothills where I live, and the foothills sometimes have mountain lions in them. Suburban yards in the valley sometimes have mountain lions in them.
I have traditionally preferred to run at night, usually sometime between 11 p.m. and 2 a.m. It’s cooler at night; I often feel energetic then and want to tire myself out; and at night you typically have the trail to yourself.
Nocturnal running in the foothills comes, however, with an elevated risk of mountain lions. They are mostly crepuscular and nocturnal creatures. Not always. I saw a mountain lion years ago during the daytime on a little-trafficked trail. Coming around a bend, I heard a rustle and glimpsed its hindquarters and tail — unlike those of any other animal on the continent, absolutely unmistakable — as it darted into the brush. Presumably it had heard my approach and gotten spooked. The encounter, brief though it was, frightened me, and once I thought I was at a safe distance (see instructions below on mountain-lion encounters) I ran home as fast as I could.
Frights fade. That memory often came to mind during my nighttime runs in more recent years. I knew the risk at night was greater. But I brushed it off, thinking the odds were still so low that I might as well enjoy my run. My usual trail is mostly treeless, so there isn’t much cover of the sort where mountain lions lie in wait. I never took precautions beyond clapping my hands when approaching a few copses of scrub oak or running up a small gulch filled with the same. (The gulch additionally connects with a canyon down which runs a creek, just the sort of place mountain lions like to be.) On the off chance a mountain lion was hidden in the brush, my clapping, I hoped, might spook it away. And, wearing my headlamp, I wouldn’t look like any sort of normal prey.
But then.
Last April I took one of these nocturnal runs. It was an overcast night, notably darker than usual. It was also quite windy, with the winds blowing from the foothills down into the valley; this would have made it harder for an animal in the hills to smell me or see me before I was upon it. And I couldn’t do the clapping thing, since, having neglected my laundry, I was wearing a pocketless pair of old shorts and holding a car key in one hand.
I was having a nice run when, about halfway up the gulch, there appeared this pair of spectacular large yellow eyes glowing my headlamp back at me. They were maybe 20 to 30 feet ahead. I couldn’t see any of the body, but the eyes looked exactly like this.
I froze. I could not believe what I was seeing; the cliché becomes literally true as you feel your mind running away toward comforting possibilities. A deer? No. These eyes were too low to the ground and too close together, and deer keep to higher elevations that time of year anyway.* A person? Obviously no. This could have been one only thing,** and it might have wanted to eat me.
My instinctive reaction was to do precisely what you should not do if you ever run into a mountain lion, which is to make a rapid movement away from it (this can trigger the pouncing and chasing instinct). I lurched backward for just a step, and the thing immediately moved too. I lost the eye reflection because it had moved out of my headlamp, but the sound was of some kind of rapid rushing in the brush. It was either bounding at me or running away.
So then I halted and did what you should do if you run into a mountain lion, which is to look as big as possible and scream as loud as you can. (You might also throw things or kick some gravel at it, but by no means should you reach down to pick up impromptu ammo or keep filming with your stupid cellphone.) I waved my hands over my head and screamed until I realized that the mountain lion had stopped moving. I continued to scream and scream and scream. I then slowly backed down the trail, still waving my hands and screaming and praying in my head in some mostly preverbal way. I kept doing that for a good quarter mile on my way back to the vehicle.
I saw the eyes one more time as I scanned the terrain with my headlamp. They were high on a hill above me, at what I took to be a safe distance. They were watching me. And there was now a second, identical pair of eyes there next to the first. Mountain lions are usually solitary, but subadult siblings will sometimes stick together after separating from their mother, and the time of year made this a real possibility. I have no doubt that that’s what I saw. Everything about the eyes and the behavior confirms it; no other suitable candidate is available.
The experience was entirely terrifying, but thrilling, too. It felt even slightly magical, almost as if I’d come face to face with the magnificent creature that had once fled my presence in daylight. Almost as if it had vanished into the brush that day and rematerialized before me so many years later.
But do you know what I’ve never done since? Gone trail-running at night.
* * *
The obvious moral is that one shouldn’t be cavalier about low probabilities of catastrophic harm. It’s easy to make that point in the abstract and know that it’s true. But when you see the potential disaster standing in front of you and yet are spared, you feel the danger in a new way, or perhaps feel it for the first time. Or so you do unless you have some independent and powerful inclination or incentive not to.
When Trump started to lie about the election, the tendency of most Republicans was toward complacency. Sure, he was lying, but Democrats have lied about election fraud too. The system would work. Everything would go off without a hitch once the Electoral College had met. We shouldn’t worry about the convocation of protesters to Washington for the “Stop the Steal” rally. It was just a protest.
And then the Capitol got stormed.
For a few days, there was widespread honesty about what had happened and who had caused it. But ever since, those who insist on speaking — or, as it were, waving their hands and screaming — the truth about Donald Trump and the 2020 election have been marginalized in the Republican Party, villainized by rightist pundits, and often treated even by honorable and honest politicians and intellectuals as an unwelcome distraction from other business. Trump might run in 2024 but can’t possibly win, we are told. (Couldn’t that make it more dangerous?) The system will surely work again, we are told.
For my part, I am not going to write off the “utmost worry.” That doesn’t mean I’m making a prediction. But we saw the mountain lions. They’re still out there, and they have not ceased to be dangerous.
Notes (5/17/23):
*My general impression is that deer come down in the winter, retreat up as the snow melts, and then descend again once there is something worth eating in people’s yards and gardens, but I don’t hold this view with complete confidence.
**I ought to have considered the possibility of bobcats, and did not perhaps because I have never seen a bobcat in the wild but had seen a mountain lion on a trail before. Nonetheless, I do not believe that I saw two bobcats. The eyes were very large, and the response to my presence was stalking and preying behavior (the first animal holding its ground after seeing me and then immediately moving toward me when I lurched back; both animals continuing to watch me as I retreated). As far as I can tell from reading about bobcats and observing video footage of the reaction of one to a headlamp-like beam of light, they would be skittish around animals, or probable animals, larger than they.