January 6th Reminds Us Our Democracy Can’t Be Taken for Granted - Horowitz

January 6th Reminds Us Our Democracy Can’t Be Taken for Granted - Horowitz

This past Saturday, we marked the three-year anniversary of an unprecedented and violent attempt to block the peaceful transfer of power, incited by a president who was using the bully pulpit to repeatedly and falsely claim that the election was stolen as he attempted to cling to power by all and any means. This was Donald Trump’s last desperate gasp in what we now know was a multi-faceted and illegal effort to overturn the results of a presidential election, disenfranchising 81 million Americans who voted for his opponent. January 6th, 2021, was “a day that will live in infamy,” to borrow a phrase from FDR.

 

It is the case that our democracy and its institutions withstood this naked grab for power. The election of Joe Biden was certified that evening, and he was duly inaugurated as the 46th president on schedule two weeks or so later.  With Donald Trump now running again for president, however, January 6th and the broad threat to democracy it represents are very much still with us.  This is especially the case because the former president is doubling down on all his false claims about the 2020 presidential election, calling the January 6 rioters “hostages” and blaming it all on the FBI.  It calls to mind William Faulkner’s famous observation: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

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While the basic facts of that fateful day, as well as what lead up to it are well-established, Donald Trump with the assistance of his MAGA allies and complicit members of the conservative media have been able to convince a substantial percentage of Republicans of an alternative reality, unmoored from the truth. Unlike a substantial majority of Americans, most Republicans and Trump voters disagree that the “storming of the Capitol on January 6 was an attack on democracy that should never be forgotten,” embracing the view that “too much is being made of it” and it’s time to move on,” according to a new Washington Post/University of Maryland poll.  In fact, more than 1-in-3 Republicans believe that the FBI “definitely or probably” instigated the attack. Tellingly, 39 percent of Americans who say Fox News is their primary news source believe the FBI organized and encouraged the Jan. 6 attack, compared with 16 percent of CNN or MSNBC viewers and 13 percent who get most of their news from ABC, CBS or NBC,” The Washington Post reported.

 

Undergirding most Republicans’ dismissal of the seriousness of January 6th is that despite all the evidence, which has continued to mount over the past several years, that Mr. Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was stolen is blatantly false, only 31% of Republicans say Joe Biden’s victory was legitimate, according to the Washington Post/University of Maryland Poll.  Similarly, only about 3-in-10 voters who get their news primarily from Fox believe Joe Biden’s election was legitimate.

 

As he did throughout his presidency, Donald Trump continues to run what Jonathan Rauch has correctly called “a classic Russian-style disinformation campaign known as a firehose of falsehood.”  Dissecting Trump’s approach during his effort to reverse the 2020 election results, Rauch told CNN, “You push out as many different stories and conspiracy theories and lies and half-truths as you possibly can, in order to flood the zone with disinformation. The goal here is to confuse people, and he’s doing very well at that. This is a classic propaganda tactic. He is very good at it.”

This direct assault on objective reality is not only a prime feature of the old totalitarian Communist leaders of the Soviet Union; it is a major characteristic of the modern authoritarians that Mr. Trump continually professes to admire, such as Vladmir Putin and Viktor Orban. The ability to tell fact from fiction is essential to a functioning democracy and when a substantial percentage of the voters identified with one of our two major political parties can no longer do so that presents a serious threat, one that the rest of us must use all of our powers of persuasion to combat.

 

This is especially the case when the prime purveyor of disinformation is running again for our nation’s highest office.  This disinformation becomes even more toxic and potentially dangerous when it is wielded by the only president in our history who worked to interfere with the peaceful transfer of power.

 

 “The orderly transfer of authority as called for in the Constitution routinely takes place, as it has for almost two centuries, and few of us stop to think how unique we really are,” remarked Ronald Reagan in his 1981 inaugural address. “In the eyes of many in the world, this every-4-year ceremony we accept as normal is nothing less than a miracle.”

 

That democratic miracle is precisely what Donald Trump attempted to short-circuit.  That is the enduring relevance of January 6th—and the present danger of Mr. Trump’s attempt to regain the White House.