The collapse of Republican resolve in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election on January 6, 2021, and Trump’s continued designs on power have together ensured that conservatives find it necessary to downplay or dismiss those events as much less than what they were: an assault on American democracy.
This much was predictable. In the immediate aftermath of the attack, my colleague David A. Graham anticipated that the events of January 6 would be “memory-holed,” and the Republican Party’s continued dependence on Trump made that inevitable. The task of justifying or minimizing January 6 became more urgent once courts began to consider whether Trump’s actions that day disqualify him from seeking reelection under the Fourteenth Amendment, which bars those who have betrayed an oath of office by engaging in “rebellion or insurrection” from holding office again.
Rationalizing Trump’s actions demands rewriting both history and the English language. Committed Trumpists are happy to warp reality to fit whatever distortions their leader demands. Yet distinct from the Trump sycophants are the Trump enablers, both witting and unwitting, more serious figures who eschew such crude gestures of devotion in favor of cautious minimizations that obfuscate the truth rather than openly contradict it. There are all too many serious writers willing to oblige, intelligent people making clever arguments that amount to sophistry.
Earlier this month, the conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat endorsed the liberal writer Jonathan Chait’s definition of insurrection as an attempt to “seize and hold the Capitol” or “declare a breakaway republic.” After I pointed out that this limited definition would exclude most insurrections in American history, Douthat tries a little historical research to distinguish the Whiskey Rebellion from the assault on the Capitol by insisting that the Whiskey Rebels’ use of “a six-striped flag representing claimed independence for five Pennsylvania counties” amounted to proof of the existence of an “incipient political formation in those western counties opposed to the authority of the federal government and the Constitution.”
the Whiskey Rebellion from the assault on the Capitol by insisting that the Whiskey Rebels’ use of “a six-striped flag
They were flying both trump flags, and the confederate battle flag at Jan 6. Not that the flags actually matter in terms of defining it as an insurrection, but …. Yeah. This oversight isn’t “unwitting”.
Trump enablers are similar to what the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt describe in Tyranny of the Minority as “semi-loyal democrats.” Whereas “loyal democrats clearly and consistently reject antidemocratic behavior, semi-loyal democrats act in a more ambiguous manner. They try to have it both ways, claiming to support democracy while at the same time turning a blind eye to violence or antidemocratic extremism.” Levitsky and Ziblatt warn that “history teaches us that when mainstream politicians take the more expedient path of semi-loyalty, tolerating or condoning antidemocratic extremists, the extremists are often strengthened, and a seemingly solid democracy can collapse upon itself.”
