January 6, 2023
Two years ago today, rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol to stop the counting of electoral ballots that would put a Democrat in the White House. There was no doubt Joe Biden had won: his majority in the popular vote was more than 7 million and he won the electoral college by 306 votes to 232, the same margin that the incumbent Republican had called a “landslide” four years earlier when it favored him. But supporters of that incumbent, Donald Trump, believed that Democrats could not possibly have won fairly and that if they had, it simply meant their voters were illegitimate.
Their worldview had its roots in opposition to the New Deal of the 1930s when Democrats, led by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, created a new kind of government in the United States, one in which the government worked to level the playing field between workers and employers and to provide a basic social safety net. Their new government included—imperfectly, but included—Black and Brown Americans and women. And it paid for the new programs with higher taxes on the wealthy.
When the new system shored up the economy, preserved democracy, and enabled the U.S. to help destroy European fascism, most Americans—Republicans as well as Democrats—supported the new system. Over time, they expanded it, and they also began to use the government to protect civil rights. The shared belief in this active government became known as the “liberal consensus” and was so popular that most Americans never imagined it might be dismantled. Social Security, for example, the Voting Rights Act, and the Environmental Protection Agency were all simply part of the air we breathed.
But from the start, those who hated the New Deal argued that it was essentially socialism because it took money from wealthy people and redistributed it through government programs to poorer Americans, especially Black people, people of color, and women. They warned white men that they were losing control of the country as they were being outvoted by lazy minorities and demanding women.
Gradually, those people who wanted to go back to the world of the 1920s took over the Republican Party. They purged it of those Republicans who believed in the liberal consensus, calling them “RINOs,” or Republicans in name only, even though it was Republicans who had put in place many of the crucial pieces of the liberal consensus, including the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
As the old racist wing of the Democratic Party, those who hated civil rights laws, swung to the Republicans, the Democrats increasingly became the party of minorities and women, and they defended the laws that had made the government more responsive to the needs of all Americans. As they did so, Republicans, determined to destroy the liberal consensus, turned the generic word “liberal” into something close to “communist,” which actually refers to someone who believes the government should take over the means of production.
They worked to convince voters that Democrats were leftists using the government to steal from hardworking white men, and warned that letting them have a say in the government would destroy the country. When voters still elected Democrats, Republicans started to manipulate the electoral system, restricting the vote and gerrymandering districts. After 1993, when Democrats made it easier for people to vote by enabling them to register at their local Department of Motor Vehicles and other government offices, Republicans began to insist—without any evidence—that Democrats won only because they cheated.
The attack on the U.S. Capitol was the logical outcome of this rhetoric. The rioters believed they were saving the country from what Trump called “emboldened radical-left Democrats” who had stolen the election. They believed they were patriots defending the country and the Constitution from Democrats, whose policies, Trump told them, “chipped away our jobs, weakened our military, threw open our borders, and put America last.” Biden would be an “illegitimate president,” “voted on by a bunch of stupid people.” “[Y]ou'll never take back our country with weakness,” Trump told them. “You have to show strength and you have to be strong…. We fight like hell. And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore.”
The rioters did not act alone. They were aided and encouraged by radicalized Republican leaders who had bought into the idea that the liberal consensus must be destroyed. Late on the night of January 6, 2021, after the riot, 147 Republican members of Congress voted to contest the slates of electors, reinforcing the idea that the election was fraudulent, although they knew as well as anyone that election officials, judges, and even Trump’s own campaign and White House staff had dismissed those claims.
After the insurrection, Republican leaders—including House minority leader Kevin McCarthy of California—initially condemned those who participated in it, but quickly came around to protect those who had simply taken their own ideology to its logical extreme.
And now, two years later, voter suppression and gerrymandering have enabled their voters to give those same people control of the House of Representatives, where their quest to dismantle the liberal consensus has been on display. Twenty of the most extreme Republicans refused to back McCarthy for House speaker until he gave them enough power essentially to make up a third bloc in the House. McCarthy could easily have reached out to the Democrats rather than cave to the extremist right, but he refused to compromise the quest to get rid of the very legislation the Democrats—and most Americans—want.
Today saw the number of House roll call votes for speaker rack up to an astonishing 14, as McCarthy gave the extremists more and more power. By midnight, after the 14th failed vote had led Mike Rogers of Alabama* to lunge at extremist ringleader Matt Gaetz of Florida, it was clear McCarthy’s bargaining would win him the seat he so badly wanted in a 15th ballot early the next day. Scott Perry (R-PA), who was a key figure in the attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election, told CNN’s Manu Raju that among the many promises McCarthy made to get them on board was that he would not agree to raise the national debt limit without significant concessions.
The extremists wanted this control because they seem to believe that if the U.S. stops funding the government, the programs they hate will die. To kill off the government built by the liberal consensus, they are threatening to do as Trump has advocated: take the government into default.
That is, a few extremists are willing to take our government hostage to get their way, just as extremists did on January 6, 2021.
On that day the rioters attacked law enforcement officers, hunted down elected officials, and smeared feces in the building that symbolizes self-government in order to overturn an election and overthrow our right to choose our leaders, the principle that sits at the heart of democracy, and they did it believing that they were the ones defending America. “We have overwhelming pride in this great country,” Trump told them. “Together, we are determined to defend and preserve government of the people, by the people, and for the people.”
But they were not the ones defending democracy that day. Those defending democracy were the law enforcement officers who held back the mob even at the cost of their health and even their lives, people like Daniel Hodges, Michael Fanone, Harry Dunn, Caroline Edwards, Aquilino Gonell, Eugene Goodman, Howard Liebengood, Jeffrey Smith, Billy Evans, and Brian D. Sicknick.
Those defending democracy were the election workers who protected our system even at the cost of their jobs, their safety, and their peace of mind, people like Ruby Freeman, Shaye Moss, and Albert Schmidt. They were elected officials who refused to cave to pressure to throw the election, people like Jocelyn Benson and Rusty Bowers.
When Biden awarded these fifteen people the Presidential Citizens Medal today, he reminded the audience that on this day in 1941, FDR delivered the famous “Four Freedoms” speech.
In that speech, FDR told the country that “The nation takes…much strength from the things which have been done to make its people conscious of their individual stake in the preservation of democratic life in America. Those things have toughened the fiber of our people, have renewed their faith and strengthened their devotion to the institutions we make ready to protect.”
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*EDIT: Correction on January at 10:40. I originally identified Rogers as from North Carolina. He is from Alabama. I apologize for the error.
Notes:
https://www.npr.org/2021/02/10/966396848/read-trumps-jan-6-speech-a-key-part-of-impeachment-trial
Statement of the Loudoun County Democratic Committee
Commemorating the 2nd Anniversary of the Assault on the U.S. Capitol:
Two years on and the mere mention of “January 6th” is still enough to stir the vast majority of Americans to the same sense of outrage as the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Assassination of JFK and the 9/11 terrorist assaults: each one a day that shall live in infamy.
Thousands of armed insurrectionists staged an assault upon our democracy unseen since the Civil War, wounding hundreds of law enforcement officers in an attempt to stop the peaceful transition of Presidential power that is at the core of our American democracy.
As has been outlined in brilliant detail by the January 6th Committee, those who stormed the Capital were whipped into a frenzy through weeks and months of countless Republican elected officials attending “Stop the Steal” rallies touting the “Big Lie” that the presidential election was stolen.
On November 8, 2020, one of the nation’s earliest “Stop the Steal” rallies took place in Loudoun County, in Purcellville, with then-Del. Dave LaRock, a far right-wing, Republican extremist, being joined at the podium by Elmer “Stewart” Rhodes, head of the anti-government Oath Keepers militia. Rhodes has been convicted of seditious conspiracy for his role in organizing the January 6 insurrection. While LaRock attended Trump’s January 6th warmup rally, he apparently lacked the courage of his convictions and didn’t march into the Capitol.
Another headliner at the Nov. 8th rally: Geary Higgins, currently a Republican candidate for Virginia’s 31st State Senate District.
One week later, Loudoun County Sheriff Mike Chapman, a Republican, headlined another Stop the Steal rally in Purcellville.
Multiple prominent Loudoun County Republicans were at the forefront of promoting the “Big Lie” and advocating extreme efforts to stop the peaceful transfer of power. Many of these Republicans will be on the ballot in 2023, running for state and county offices. As the campaigns take shape, we will keep track and let you know who among them played a role when our democracy was in peril in 2020 -2021.
We Democrats must not forget January 6th. We must embrace our sense of revulsion at those who sought to destroy our precious and delicate constitutional democracy. And we must honor all of those – law enforcement officers, members of Congress and all the public servants who risked their life that day to defend our democracy – who are devoted to doing the right things.
Such a sad day for our country. A morally bankrupt party is now in control with a weak and morally bankrupt “leader”.