Reflections on Insurrectionists–Your Thursday Not-So-Lighthearted Open Thread

As you surely know by now, today marks one year since an outgoing President attempted to disrupt the 219 year old American tradition of peaceful transition of power.

This is probably going to be my only post on DFO without links and one of maybe two or three without jokes.

I honestly cannot convey how sick to the stomach I have felt the last 24 hours reflecting on the reality of, the emotions of, and the state of play one year on from a group of Americans being incited to storm the Capitol in an insurrection rooted in lies, bigotry, and hate. And if you think they were “tourists” then you’re living in an intentionally-curated alternate reality/news bubble ignoring the violent actual reality of a seditionist mob whipped up by a sitting party to take the seat of government by force and overturn an election result.

It is insane that the American consensus is anything other than “violent insurrection to overturn an election result is wrong.” The last few years have laid bare a chilling truth: we live in insane times.

Literally one sitting Republican House member attended this morning’s moment of silence at the Capitol for the police officers who died as a result of last year’s violence. That was Congresswoman Liz Cheney (R?-Wyoming), whom the Republican Conference has stripped of her leadership position for the crime of not belonging to a cult, and she was there with her father, former Vice President and friend-hunting enthusiast Dick Cheney. Zero other Republican Members of Congress even bothered to show up.  Is this even worth being outraged about?  I don’t know. There are SO MANY things to be outraged about that it is just exhausting.

I’m not going to link to them here, but a number of sitting Republican elected officials–many of them formerly considered “reasonable,” “moderate,” or “decent” or “human” have had the unmitigated gall to attack Democrats for “politicizing” January 6th today. I think the closest metaphor here might be if an arsonist lights your house on fire and then criticizes you for calling the fire department. And I am fucking furious with the political arsonists in this country.

There have been a LOT of think pieces written about January 6th–some like Matt Fuller’s piece are a first hand account of being in the Capitol when it was breached and the real time reactions and subsequent perspectives on the members involved; others like the Vox piece interviewing academic experts on political conflict and civil war to predict if we’re closer to the Troubles in Northern Ireland or the Hutus and the Tutsis; others are revisionist screeds calling for those arrested for storming the Capitol to be released from prison. They’ve all got me so angry and depressed that Lady BFC has mandated a 24 hour twitter timeout for me (that I have egregiously failed to adhere to) and asked me to stop talking about which countries have easy visa processes for if/when we need to move.

Many of you know that I used to live in DC (and here’s some news–probably moving back there soon). You may not know that I worked on Capitol Hill and in the Capitol itself for a solid portion of my time there. So when I watched with horror as “protestors” with Blue Lives Matter flags beat the shit out of cops in order to desecrate the Capitol building and potentially lynch then-Vice President Pence and as many Democratic Members of Congress as possible, it wasn’t just outrageous and saddening, it was traumatic.

Not only was I devastated as an American that pretend patriots were actively undermining democracy, I had a personal and guttural reaction to the stories of hill staffers locked in offices and parts of hallways fearing from their lives: there but for the grace of G-d go I. One thing goes differently in my career and I’m in the Capitol that day, fearing from my life from unabashed antisemites who were not just enthusiastic about undoing an election, they were bloodthirsty. This amalgam of Proud Boys, Confederate cosplayers, MAGAts, and suburban realtor housewives with private jets were hell bent on preventing the election from being certified and physically harming anyone who tried to stop them. These are not patriots. They are nightmare nitwits in that they’ve been coddled to believe they are entitled to get exactly what they want and armed in case they don’t. And had I still worked on the Hill, one of them could have tried to break down my boss’s office door to beat the shit out of me for the crime of believing in democracy over Fox News. I cried that day and on and off for days after thinking about that damage to the building, the institution, and our naivete that our country was still fundamentally decent. Because in a decent democracy, people accept the outcome of an election. In a decent country, neighbors don’t allow this to happen.

I haven’t spoken to one of my best childhood friends for 361 days. We’ve been friends since age 6. I was the co-best man at his wedding. He’s always been a Republican, but a “moderate” one who “wasn’t a big Trump guy” and still voted for him and we just stopped talking about politics when he was regurgitating Fox News propaganda about President Obama years prior. But when the Bears were playing (atrociously) against the Vikings on January 10th and he texted me as he did whenever they were playing, I was too raw to hold back on asking him if he supported the actions of his fellow Republicans and if he and other “moderate” Republicans had a responsibility to rein in the wackjobs now making up the base of the party electorate. He bothsidesed it, compared the storming of the Capitol to property damage at BLM protests, and I fucking lost it. We haven’t spoken (or texted) since, despite his wife’s overtures to not “let politics ruin a 30+ year friendship.”

This isn’t politics. It’s decency. It’s humanity. It’s citizenship. It’s a departure of values so unexpected as to be diametrically opposed and unrecognizable anymore.

And as a result, he was not at my wedding this past fall.

The oft cited (and perhaps erroneously attributed to Edmund Burke) quote that the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing rings truer and truer. But I would also add that it requires us to reassess the good men in this situation. At the core of the issue behind the literal 70% of Republicans who do not believe that President Joseph Robinette Biden won the last election is the fundamental othering in American conservative politics. Modern Republicans, especially the base, do not believe that my vote is worth the same as their vote. Democrats–who happen to be a multicultural group slightly different than the more homogeneous and monochromatic GOP–are not “real Americans” and are lesser citizens, so our votes should not count as much. Plus, once you’ve decided (or been convinced by Tucker Carlson and/or Alex Jones and/or OANN) that Democrats are “the enemy,” you can justify any measures to oppose them in order to get your way–including violent sedition.

I’m not even going to get into the idiocy of the sitting members of Congress claiming the Presidential election was illegitimate but their own election on the very same ballot was legitimate. Or the “you can’t blame these people who were misled” takes, because plenty of elected officials who KNOW the election was legitimate were and are happy to go along for the ride as long as they can get their Lord Acton on. There are two parties right now–one that believes in the right to vote and a functioning democracy, and one that doesn’t. One that believes in reality, and one that doesn’t. One that condemns political violence, and one that foments it. Don’t bothsides that shit. Don’t denigrate the memory of those actual patriots that died as a result of the behavior of traitors like Ashli Babbit. Don’t be ok with a world where political violence is rewarded. Don’t be ok with business as usual after the trauma of January 6th.

I don’t have a clear call to action here. I don’t even have a lot of optimism on how we can get out of this. The electoral structures of this country are stacked in favor of the minority of citizens, and the entirety of the GOP + Manchin and Sinema won’t do anything about it. More political violence is likely inevitable. The Josh Hawleys of the world are more likely to support another armed insurrection than accept a democratically-elected Democratic President. And far too many otherwise reasonable people are just fine with this status quo. But I’m not going to allow people who are ok with it to be in my life because I actually love America, not just power for me at the expense of others. That’s actual patriotism, not painting yourself up in red, white, blue and/or grabbing a confederate flag en route to destroying the very symbols of our country along with more and more of its soul.