Jan 7, 2022
The Many Unanswerable Questions on the Jan 6 Anniversary
This riot has revealed the chaos and fragility of American politics once and for all. No one appears to have a sound solution.
A year ago, on January 6, a long-planned riot took place. On that day, the 2020 presidential loser belligerently issued an order to his supporters to launch an attack, likening the reality of his loss to “egregious assault on our democracy” and coercing Vice President Mike Pence, who was counting state ballots at the time, to somehow reverse the election results.
Then-President Trump almost single handedly premeditated this attack. After he lost the 2020 election, he concocted a Big Lie with his legal, political and media enablers, using all sorts of false evidence to claim that his electoral opponent, Democratic candidate Joe Biden, had stolen the election. Trump’s call sparked multiple protests and rallies of thousands of supporters in Washington, D.C., and on Jan. 6, it turned into the worst political unrest in U.S. history since the Civil War.
The world witnessed what happened next: hundreds of Trump supporters chanting “stop the steal” and “hang Mike Pence”, wearing pro-Trump clothing and waving right-wing slogans began to drive away and intimidate the Capitol Police officers who were keeping order, even beating them up, injuring more than 100 officers. After far outnumbering the police, they began breaking the glass of Congress with guardrails and sticks, and fishtailed down these breaches and stormed into Congress. There were many members of Congress who were on thin ice after learning of the building invasion and even sent farewell text messages to their families. Thanks to the resourcefulness of the few congressional police officers inside the building, no members of Congress were attacked by the thugs. Only after countless people discouraged him did Trump then reluctantly take to social media to encourage his supporters to leave Congress. However, the hangman’s noose outside the Capitol that was supposed to hang the vice president, the Capitol police officer who died in the line of duty for stopping the mob, and the death of Ashli Babbitt, who was killed by police for forcing her way over, all tell us that this riot has revealed the chaos and fragility of American politics once and for all.
Biden’s Strong but Empty Condemnation
A year later, President Biden, attempting to pick up the pieces, finds himself helpless in the face of the dire consequences of the riot. However, it is clear to him that former President Trump, who single-handedly stirred up the anger and attacks on American democracy by weaving a web of lies, must be the one to be firmly refuted. A year ago, Capitol police officer Brian Sicknick died protecting the Capitol, and was publicly mourned by lawmakers in the Capitol rotunda. Now, in the same place, Biden criticized the former president directly, saying that his “bruised ego matters more to him than our democracy or our Constitution…he can’t accept he lost” and likened his call for supporters to besiege Congress to “putting a dagger in the throat of our democracy.” He said that although he did not actively seek this battle, he would not back down, but would continue to protect Congress and American democracy with his actions. Many in the media saw the speech as a departure from Biden’s previous relatively patient and calm style of delivery, with a sharp and direct tone contrary from his previous style that had repeatedly avoided discussing Trump directly.
At the ceremony remembering the Capitol attack, Democratic politicians tried hard to make the moment more solemn. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer led a moment of silence on the House and Senate floors, respectively. In the afternoon, Democratic lawmakers provided public testimony, followed by a candlelight vigil on the steps of the Capitol where dozens of people gathered.
At the same time, the vast majority of Republican political figures chose to remain silent and refused to participate in the ceremony held by the Democrats, except for Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney and her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, who have repeatedly and vehemently criticized Trump’s statements and actions since the riot.
Such a split not only makes one wonder again how hollow Biden’s grand words at the ceremony were. Historically, Democratic politicians, represented by Clinton and Obama, often have eloquent oratory skills and are able to express their political aspirations and love for American democracy in mellifluous words. However, it is also in these two former Democratic presidents that we see a Republican Party that is increasingly unconcerned with the rules of politics, using fuss and rhetoric to persuade voters to fall in favor of themselves, and successfully did so in the midterm elections.
Today’s Republican Party, after former President Trump’s distasteful exit from the presidency, remains loyal and obsequious to him. Faced with a slim margin of only 50 Democrats in the Senate and a logjam of bills that have failed to pass due to reasons such as the refusal to repeal the filibuster, there is nothing left for Biden to do in Congress except to denounce Trump. On the other hand, Biden has done nothing effective in the face of the successive Republican legislation that has challenged American democracy at the federal and state levels. The Freedom to Vote Act, which would have made automatic voter registration possible, made Election Day a holiday, established a minimum 15-day early voting period for federal elections, and banned partisan gerrymandering, failed to gain 60 votes and became a huge humiliation to the Biden administration’s efforts to “protect democracy.”
It is true that the restrictions of filibustering and the influence of conservative Democratic Senator Joe Manchin in the Senate are naturally holding him back, but the inability to successfully align the goals of his party is itself a form of inaction.
Rewriting the Jan 6 Narrative
What’s even more disturbing is that more and more Republican voters have begun to understand the Capitol riot in their own way. Not long after the riot ended, words began to spread on social media that the riot was actually planned and executed by the left-wing anarchist group Antifa, with MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell being one of the earliest proponents of this faux theory. Although this rumor quickly dissipated, there are still a group of conservative activists and government officials loyal to Trump that actively used various sources to distort the evidence and deny that the attack was linked to Trump’s desire to use his own supporters to violently change the outcome of the democratic vote.
Among those who denied the seriousness of the attack, conservative Fox News headliner Tucker Carlson was one of the most vocal. From the outset, he labeled the chaos documented in video and photos as a small group of people and rationalized their behavior as a true display of discontent and anger over the election results, ignoring the fact that no election fraud was proven in court. To further whitewash the mob who participated in the riots and faced legal liability for doing so, he released a series of documentaries in November 2021 that referred to the judicial proceedings and punishment of the invaders as a “patriot purge,” even going so far as to claim that these people, and the nation’s pro-Trump population, were treated like members of al-Qaeda, and were subjected to extrajudicial action.
To make his claim tenable, Carlson interviewed Ali Alexander, the organizer of the rally before the Capitol riot, but failed to mention that Alexander was subpoenaed by the congressional committee investigating the attack for allegedly instigating the riot. The documentary also largely glosses overI reports and videos of how the rioters attacked police with stun guns and flag poles, and racially abused against a Black Capitol police officer. Carlson also extolled about Ashli Babbitt’s “sacrifice,” ignoring the fact that she was shot for breaching a barricade and the officer who shot her was cleared of responsibility after a thorough investigation. In Carlson’s narrative, the prosecution of the Capitol rioters is the next “war on terror” that will eventually lead to the detention of all right-wingers imprisoned.
Such demagoguery has had the obvious effect: Nearly a year after Biden has been elected president, a poll shows that still only 55 percent of respondents believe he was legitimately elected. The poll also noted that more than half believe that violence against the elected government, like the congressional riots, will increase in the coming years, and 37 percent have lost all hope in American democracy.
Is the Worst Yet to Come?
One year after the attack on the Capitol, the Justice Department continues to move forward with the largest investigation in FBI history, with more than 700 arrests already made and hundreds of perpetrators still at large, along with prosecutions and convictions that can be expected to continue for years to come. Yet this wide-ranging investigation has so far failed to pinpoint the responsibility directly how the former president and his political allies. The daunting challenge today, in addition to those faced by Biden and Congress, is that for Attorney General Merrick Garland, he must prosecute everyone responsible for the riot to the fullest degree.
In a televised address on the anniversary of the riots, Garland said the current tracking numbers are just the beginning. He said he is implementing a more traditional investigative strategy of starting small and ramping up the investigation of more serious offenders. Existing verdicts show that most of the riot’s participants were prosecuted and sentenced on relatively minor charges like trespassing, and that could change the nature of the congressional riots: what was widely seen as a failed violent coup would be invoked as an out-of-control political rally. Those in power who actually incited and promoted the violence, such as Trump himself, his lawyer Giuliani, those Republican lawmakers who denied the election results and others who pushed the envelope, have not really faced much of a price so far.
Biden and Congress need to be thoroughly aware of a reality that could embarrass them: the American political system was dysfunctional long before Jan. 6, and this riot may yet be nothing more than a relatively mild manifestation of it. Since the 1970s and 1980s, business interests and conservative activists have waged a long and sustained demonization attack on public institutions and government functions, and have imposed this ideology on the entire American public as they gained power. As budgets were cut, these government agencies began to become increasingly unable to perform their functions properly, and public trust in the effectiveness of government naturally went down. The development of this political and economic model established the reality that today neoliberal ideology is deeply entrenched in the United States, and time and again the government has chosen to refuse to help in the face of a crisis of public trust. In the aftermath of the Great Recession, the Obama administration bought into the rhetoric of a group of lobbyists as opposed to helping the public, choosing to bring back Wall Street Firms and automobile manufacturers from the dead with untold amounts of money. The Obama administration’s solution to the crisis ultimately led to the rise of Trump and a group of Republican politicians who refused to have faith in the U.S. government; a violent coup like the Capitol riot that could forcibly change public opinion was likely in the works to consolidate their hard-won power years before it happened.
It is important to understand that Trump supporters are not all the group of farmers and laid-off workers who were abandoned because of the internationalization of the United States, as reflected in the media reports of 2016. Statistically, the vast majority of the riot participants charged were business owners and white-collar workers, most of whom had completed high school, college or even higher degrees. For example, Jenna Ryan, a Texas real estate agent from a wealthy family, flew to Washington on a private jet and broke into the Capitol dressed in luxury brands, as if she were a participant in a posh picnic trip. She was sentenced to 60 days in prison for her part in the riot, but she showed no remorse, claiming on social media that she was going to use the time to “lose 30 pounds.”
The origin of the violence that attempted to overthrow the government a year ago was officially the insecurity of Trump and their supporters. With that base being mostly white and male, and fearing that the privileges will be increasingly challenged in a diverse American life that is rapidly changing its racial demographics, they chose to overthrow American democracy. If no part of American society and government realizes that this is an imminent threat and a ticking time bomb that can only be addressed by strong legislation that strengthens voting rights and seriously punishes perpetrators, then there will come a time when right-wingers will further rationalize these attacks until democratic government is completely extinct in America.
