Re: [WSMDiscuss] The American polity is cracked, and might collapse. Canada must prepare (Thomas Homer-Dixon) / In a deeply divided U.S., Americans struggle over how to commemorate Jan 6 (David Shribman)
Davis, Laurence
Sent: 04 January 2022 18:43
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Subject: [WSMDiscuss] The American polity is cracked, and might collapse. Canada must prepare (Thomas Homer-Dixon) / In a deeply divided U.S., Americans struggle over how to commemorate Jan 6 (David Shribman)
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Tuesday, January 4, 2022
The US in movement…, Politics in movement…, History in movement…, Movements in movement…, The future in movement… ?
[As many and perhaps most on this list know, this coming January 6 is the first anniversary of the insurrection in Washington DC on this day last year, following the US elections in November 2020 - a crowd storming the Capitol, the formal home of US democracy at the federal level. There are many today who are reading the text of what happened there, of the relentlessly unfolding aftermath, of what that insurrection was a part of, and of the larger picture that is continuing to emerge. Here are two essays on this, one very much from the Canadian perspective (Canada has a very special relationship with the US, given the long tradition of Canada being the ‘smaller’ – and ‘lesser’, and dependent – neighbour and sibling, and so where in many ways it (and Mexico) has much more at stake that all other countries) - but I think that given the role of the US at a global level, and where the consequences of what happens in the US being global, both say things that demand our sober attention and reflection, everywhere…
[On the other hand… : This said, I think that I also need to point out that both articles are focused on what is effectively mainstream US politics and ‘democracy’, and that neither article has anything to say about other currents in US society, and in particular about any of the other movements that have been and are emerging within the body of life in the US and on Turtle Island more broadly; and about their roles and potentials… Among many others, these include the feminist movements (plural), the anti-racist movements, the movements among the Indigenous Peoples of the continent, and the ecological movements -, that are, individually and collectively, also contributing to the emergence of other currents of new life and politics in the land, as seeds and sprouts in the cracks of the crumbling ruins of the past.
[As my good friend Gustave Massiah has just reminded me, and as the Italian philosopher, journalist, and political activist and theoretician Antonio Gramsci said of the world around him – in Italy, in Europe, and in the world at large - in 1929 :
“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born : Now is the time of monsters.”
[I do not at all mean to romanticise and overstate the roles and potentials of the ‘new’ movements in the present context, especially in terms of the struggles over power and meanings that are going to increasingly rise as they (or should I say ‘we’ ?) rise and as mainstream political power resists this and attempts to impose its frame. But I think that the momentous times we are living through - which is what these articles try and communicate - require that we all reflect deeply on all of this, all over the world; and including on the crucial question of power :
The American polity is cracked, and might collapse. Canada must prepare
The U.S. is becoming increasingly ungovernable, and some experts believe it could descend into civil war. What should Canada do then ?
Thomas Homer-Dixon
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Washington, Jan. 6, 2021: A police flash-bang grenade illuminates Trump protesters outside the U.S. Capitol, which they stormed after a provocative speech by the outgoing president. The Capitol insurrection was a wake-up call about the vulnerabilities in American democracy. (Leah Millis/Reuters)
By 2025, American democracy could collapse, causing extreme domestic political instability, including widespread civil violence. By 2030, if not sooner, the country could be governed by a right-wing dictatorship.
We mustn’t dismiss these possibilities just because they seem ludicrous or too horrible to imagine. In 2014, the suggestion that Donald Trump would become president would also have struck nearly everyone as absurd. But today we live in a world where the absurd regularly becomes real and the horrible commonplace.
Leading American academics are now actively addressing the prospect of a fatal weakening of U.S. democracy.
This past November, more than 150 professors of politics, government, political economy and international relations appealed to Congress to pass the Freedom to Vote Act, which would protect the integrity of US elections but is now stalled in the Senate. This is a moment of “great peril and risk,” they wrote. “Time is ticking away, and midnight is approaching.”
I’m a scholar of violent conflict. For more than 40 years, I’ve studied and published on the causes of war, social breakdown, revolution, ethnic violence and genocide, and for nearly two decades I led a centre on peace and conflict studies at the University of Toronto.
Today, as I watch the unfolding crisis in the United States, I see a political and social landscape flashing with warning signals.
I’m not surprised by what’s happening there – not at all. During my graduate work in the United States in the 1980s, I sometimes listened to Rush Limbaugh, the right-wing radio talk show host and later television personality. I remarked to friends at the time that, with each broadcast, it was if Mr. Limbaugh were wedging the sharp end of a chisel into a faint crack in the moral authority of U.S. political institutions, and then slamming the other end of that chisel with a hammer.
In the decades since, week after week, year after year, Mr. Limbaugh and his fellow travellers have hammered away – their blows’ power lately amplified through social media and outlets such as Fox News and Newsmax. The cracks have steadily widened, ramified, connected and propagated deeply into America’s once-esteemed institutions, profoundly compromising their structural integrity. The country is becoming increasingly ungovernable, and some experts believe it could descend into civil war.
How should Canada prepare?
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Then-president Donald Trump arrives with far-right conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh at a rally in Cape Girardeau, Mo., in 2019. Mr. Limbaugh died on Feb. 17 this year. (JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images)
In 2020, president Donald Trump awarded Mr. Limbaugh the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The act signalled that Mr. Limbaugh’s brand of bullying, populist white ethnocentrism – a rancid blend of aggrieved attacks on liberal elites, racist dog-whistling, bragging about American exceptionalism and appeals to authoritarian leadership – had become an integral part of mainstream political ideology in the U.S.
But one can’t blame only Mr. Limbaugh, who died in early 2021, and his ilk for America’s dysfunction. These people and their actions are as much symptoms of that dysfunction as its root causes, and those causes are many. Some can be traced to the country’s founding – to an abiding distrust in government baked into the country’s political culture during the Revolution, to slavery, to the political compromise of the Electoral College that slavery spawned, to the overrepresentation of rural voting power in the Senate, and to the failure of Reconstruction after the Civil War. But successful polities around the world have overcome flaws just as fundamental.
What seems to have pushed the United States to the brink of losing its democracy today is a multiplication effect between its underlying flaws and recent shifts in the society’s “material” characteristics. These shifts include stagnating middle-class incomes, chronic economic insecurity, and rising inequality as the country’s economy – transformed by technological change and globalization – has transitioned from muscle power, heavy industry, and manufacturing as the main sources of its wealth to idea power, information technology, symbolic production and finance. As returns to labour have stagnated and returns to capital have soared, much of the U.S. population has fallen behind. Inflation-adjusted wages for the median male worker in the fourth quarter of 2019 (prior to the infusion of economic support owing to the COVID-19 pandemic) were lower than in 1979; meanwhile, between 1978 and 2016, CEO incomes in the biggest companies rose from 30 times that of the average worker to 271 times. Economic insecurity is widespread in broad swaths of the country’s interior, while growth is increasingly concentrated in a dozen or so metropolitan centres.
Two other material factors are key. The first is demographic: as immigration, aging, intermarriage and a decline in church-going have reduced the percentage of non-Hispanic white Christians in America, right-wing ideologues have inflamed fears that traditional U.S. culture is being erased and whites are being “replaced.” The second is pervasive elite selfishness: The wealthy and powerful in America are broadly unwilling to pay the taxes, invest in the public services, or create the avenues for vertical mobility that would lessen their country’s economic, educational, racial and geographic gaps. The more an under-resourced government can’t solve everyday problems, the more people give up on it, and the more they turn to their own resources and their narrow identity groups for safety.
America’s economic, racial and social gaps have helped cause ideological polarization between the political right and left, and the worsening polarization has paralyzed government while aggravating the gaps. The political right and left are isolated from, and increasingly despise, each other. Both believe the stakes are existential – that the other is out to destroy the country they love. The moderate political centre is fast vanishing.
And, oh yes, the population is armed to the teeth, with somewhere around 400 million firearms in the hands of civilians.
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An attendee wears a U.S. flag with guns, crosses and a pro-Trump slogan at America Fest 2021, a conservative gathering in Phoenix this past Dec. 18. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Some diagnoses of America’s crisis that highlight “toxic polarization” imply the two sides are equally responsible for that crisis. They aren’t. While both wings of U.S. politics have fanned polarization’s flames, blame lies disproportionately on the political right.
According to Harvard’s renowned sociologist and political scientist Theda Skocpol, in the early 2000s fringe elements of the Republican party used disciplined tactics and enormous streams of money (from billionaires like the Koch brothers) to turn extreme laissez-faire ideology into orthodox Republican dogma. Then, in 2008, Barack Obama’s election as president increased anxieties about immigration and cultural change among older, often economically insecure members of the white middle-class, who then coalesced into the populist Tea Party movement. Under Mr. Trump, the two forces were joined. The GOP became, Dr. Skocpol writes, a radicalized “marriage of convenience between anti-government free-market plutocrats and racially anxious ethno-nationalist activists and voters.”
Now, adopting Mr. Limbaugh’s tried-and-true methods, demagogues on the right are pushing the radicalization process further than ever before. By weaponizing people’s fear and anger, Mr. Trump and a host of acolytes and wannabees such as Fox’s Tucker Carlson and Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene have captured the storied GOP and transformed it into a near-fascist personality cult that’s a perfect instrument for wrecking democracy.
And it’s not inaccurate to use the F word. As conservative commentator David Frum argues, Trumpism increasingly resembles European fascism in its contempt for the rule of law and glorification of violence. Evidence is as close as the latest right-wing Twitter meme: widely circulated holiday photos show Republican politicians and their family members, including young children, sitting in front of their Christmas trees, all smiling gleefully while cradling pistols, shotguns and assault rifles.
Those guns are more than symbols. The Trump cult presents itself as the only truly patriotic party able to defend U.S. values and history against traitorous Democrats beholden to cosmopolitan elites and minorities who neither understand nor support “true” American values. The Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. capitol must be understood in these terms. The people involved didn’t think they were attacking U.S. democracy – although they unquestionably were. Instead, they believed their “patriotic” actions were needed to save it.
Democracy is an institution, but underpinning that institution is a vital set of beliefs and values. If a substantial enough fraction of a population no longer holds those beliefs and values, then democracy can’t survive. Probably the most important is recognition of the equality of the polity’s citizens in deciding its future; a close runner up is willingness to concede power to one’s political opponents, should those equal citizens decide that’s what they want. At the heart of the ideological narrative of U.S. right-wing demagogues, from Mr. Trump on down, is the implication that large segments of the country’s population – mainly the non-white, non-Christian, and educated urban ones – aren’t really equal citizens. They aren’t quite full Americans, or even real Americans.
This is why Mr. Trump’s “Big Lie” that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him – a falsehood that nearly 70 per cent of Republicans now accept as true – is such potent anti-democratic poison. If the other side is willing to steal an election, then they don’t play by the rules. They’ve placed themselves outside the American moral community, which means they don’t deserve to be treated as equals. There’s certainly no reason to concede power to them, ever.
Willingness to publicly endorse the Big Lie has become a litmus test of Republican loyalty to Mr. Trump. This isn’t just an ideological move to promote Republican solidarity against Democrats. It puts its adherents one step away from the psychological dynamic of extreme dehumanization that has led to some of the worst violence in human history. And it has refashioned – into a moral crusade against evil – Republican efforts to gerrymander Congressional districts into pretzel-like shapes, to restrict voting rights, and to take control of state-level electoral apparatuses.
When the situation is framed in such a Manichean way, righteous ends justify any means. One of the two American parties is now devoted to victory at any cost.
Many of those with guns are waiting for a signal to use them. Polls show that between 20 and 30 million American adults believe both that the 2020 election was stolen from Mr. Trump and that violence is justified to return him to the presidency.
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Trump supporters protest against the U.S. election result on Nov. 4, 2020, outside the Clark County Election Department in Las Vegas. (John Locher/The Associated Press)
In the weeks before the November, 2016, U.S. election, I talked to several experts to gauge the danger of a Trump presidency. I recently consulted them again. While in 2016 they were alarmed, this last month most were utterly dismayed. All told me the U.S. political situation has deteriorated sharply since last year’s attack on Capitol Hill.
Jack Goldstone, a political sociologist at George Mason University in Washington, D.C., and a leading authority on the causes of state breakdown and revolution, told me that since 2016 we’ve learned that early optimism about the resilience of U.S. democracy was based on two false assumptions: “First, that American institutions would be strong enough to easily withstand efforts to subvert them; and second, that the vast majority of people will act rationally and be drawn to the political centre, so that it’s impossible for extremist groups to take over.”
But especially after the 2020 election, Dr. Goldstone said, we’ve seen that core institutions – from the Justice Department to county election boards – are susceptible to pressure. They’ve barely held firm. “We’ve also learned that the reasonable majority can be frightened and silenced if caught between extremes, while many others can be captured by mass delusions.” And to his surprise “moderate GOP leaders have either been forced out of the party or acquiesced to a party leadership that embraces lies and anti-democratic actions.”
Mr. Trump’s electoral loss has energized the Republican base and further radicalized young party members. Even without their concerted efforts to torque the machinery of the electoral system, Republicans will probably take control of both the House of Representatives and Senate this coming November, because the incumbent party generally fares poorly in mid-term elections. Republicans could easily score a massive victory, with voters ground down by the pandemic, angry about inflation, and tired of President Joe Biden bumbling from one crisis to another. Voters who identify as Independents are already migrating toward Republican candidates.
Once Republicans control Congress, Democrats will lose control of the national political agenda, giving Mr. Trump a clear shot at recapturing the presidency in 2024. And once in office, he will have only two objectives: vindication and vengeance.
A U.S. civil-military expert and senior federal appointee I consulted noted that a re-elected president Trump could be totally unconstrained, nationally and internationally.
A crucial factor determining how much constraint he faces will be the response of the U.S. military, a bulwark institution ardently committed to defending the Constitution. During the first Trump administration, members of the military repeatedly resisted the president’s authoritarian impulses and tried to anticipate and corral his rogue behaviour – most notably when Joint Chiefs Chairman General Mark Milley, shortly after the Capitol insurrection, ordered military officials to include him in any decision process involving the use of military force.
But in a second Trump administration, this expert suggested, the bulwark could crumble. By replacing the civilian leadership of the Department of Defense and the Joint Chiefs with lackeys and sycophants, he could so infiltrate the Department with his people that he’ll be able to bend it to his will.
In the weeks before the November, 2016, U.S. election, I talked to several experts to gauge the danger of a Trump presidency. I recently consulted them again. While in 2016 they were alarmed, this last month most were utterly dismayed. All told me the U.S. political situation has deteriorated sharply since last year’s attack on Capitol Hill.
Jack Goldstone, a political sociologist at George Mason University in Washington, D.C., and a leading authority on the causes of state breakdown and revolution, told me that since 2016 we’ve learned that early optimism about the resilience of U.S. democracy was based on two false assumptions: “First, that American institutions would be strong enough to easily withstand efforts to subvert them; and second, that the vast majority of people will act rationally and be drawn to the political centre, so that it’s impossible for extremist groups to take over.”
But especially after the 2020 election, Dr. Goldstone said, we’ve seen that core institutions – from the Justice Department to county election boards – are susceptible to pressure. They’ve barely held firm. “We’ve also learned that the reasonable majority can be frightened and silenced if caught between extremes, while many others can be captured by mass delusions.” And to his surprise “moderate GOP leaders have either been forced out of the party or acquiesced to a party leadership that embraces lies and anti-democratic actions.”
Mr. Trump’s electoral loss has energized the Republican base and further radicalized young party members. Even without their concerted efforts to torque the machinery of the electoral system, Republicans will probably take control of both the House of Representatives and Senate this coming November, because the incumbent party generally fares poorly in mid-term elections. Republicans could easily score a massive victory, with voters ground down by the pandemic, angry about inflation, and tired of President Joe Biden bumbling from one crisis to another. Voters who identify as Independents are already migrating toward Republican candidates.
Once Republicans control Congress, Democrats will lose control of the national political agenda, giving Mr. Trump a clear shot at recapturing the presidency in 2024. And once in office, he will have only two objectives: vindication and vengeance.
A U.S. civil-military expert and senior federal appointee I consulted noted that a re-elected president Trump could be totally unconstrained, nationally and internationally.
A crucial factor determining how much constraint he faces will be the response of the U.S. military, a bulwark institution ardently committed to defending the Constitution. During the first Trump administration, members of the military repeatedly resisted the president’s authoritarian impulses and tried to anticipate and corral his rogue behaviour – most notably when Joint Chiefs Chairman General Mark Milley, shortly after the Capitol insurrection, ordered military officials to include him in any decision process involving the use of military force.
But in a second Trump administration, this expert suggested, the bulwark could crumble. By replacing the civilian leadership of the Department of Defense and the Joint Chiefs with lackeys and sycophants, he could so infiltrate the Department with his people that he’ll be able to bend it to his will.
A terrible storm is coming from the south, and Canada is woefully unprepared. Over the past year we’ve turned our attention inward, distracted by the challenges of COVID-19, reconciliation, and the accelerating effects of climate change. But now we must focus on the urgent problem of what to do about the likely unravelling of democracy in the United States.
We need to start by fully recognizing the magnitude of the danger. If Mr. Trump is re-elected, even under the more-optimistic scenarios the economic and political risks to our country will be innumerable. Driven by aggressive, reactive nationalism, Mr. Trump “could isolate Canada continentally,” as one of my interlocutors put it euphemistically.
Under the less-optimistic scenarios, the risks to our country in their cumulative effect could easily be existential, far greater than any in our federation’s history. What happens, for instance, if high-profile political refugees fleeing persecution arrive in our country, and the U.S. regime demands them back. Do we comply?
In this context, it’s worth noting the words of Dmitry Muratov, the courageous Russian journalist who remains one of the few independent voices standing up to Mr. Putin and who just received the Nobel Prize for Peace. At a news conference after the awards ceremony in Oslo, as Russian troops and armour were massing on Ukraine’s borders, Mr. Muratov spoke of the iron link between authoritarianism and war. “Disbelief in democracy means that the countries that have abandoned it will get a dictator,” he said. “And where there is a dictatorship, there is a war. If we refuse democracy, we agree to war.”
Canada is not powerless in the face of these forces, at least not yet. Among other things, over three-quarters of a million Canadian emigrants live in the United States – many highly placed and influential – and together they’re a mass of people who could appreciably tilt the outcome of coming elections and the broader dynamics of the country’s political process.
But here’s my key recommendation: The Prime Minister should immediately convene a standing, non-partisan Parliamentary committee with representatives from the five sitting parties, all with full security clearances. It should be understood that this committee will continue to operate in coming years, regardless of changes in federal government. It should receive regular intelligence analyses and briefings by Canadian experts on political and social developments in the United States and their implications for democratic failure there. And it should be charged with providing the federal government with continuing, specific guidance as to how to prepare for and respond to that failure, should it occur.
If hope is to be a motivator and not a crutch, it needs to be honest and not false. It needs to be anchored in a realistic, evidence-based understanding of the dangers we face and a clear vision of how to get past those dangers to a good future. Canada is itself flawed, but it’s still one of the most remarkably just and prosperous societies in human history. It must rise to this challenge.
In a deeply divided U.S., Americans struggle over how to commemorate Jan 6
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Insurrectionists loyal to President Donald Trump rally at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021. (Jose Luis Magana/The Associated Press)
No American debated the meaning or virtue of the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor a year later. No New Yorker or Washingtonian looked for the bright spots in the carnage of Sept. 11, 2001, a year after the terrorist attacks on those two cities.
And yet, as the one-year anniversary of the siege at the Capitol approaches, Americans are furiously debating the content and the significance of the violent insurrection that followed Donald Trump’s “fight-like-hell” speech, which he made as congressional lawmakers gathered to count the Electoral College votes that sent Joe Biden to the White House.
The battle of Capitol Hill is being fought again, this time in public discourse – and Americans, perhaps even more divided today than they were on Jan. 6, 2021, are approaching this anniversary of anguish with apprehension.
“Some Americans see Jan. 6 as something to be remembered but not celebrated,” said Steven Danver, a Washington State University historian and editor of the three-volume Revolts, Protests, Demonstrations, and Rebellions in American History encyclopedia. “But others see it as a rallying cry.”
The struggle over the legacy of Jan. 6 mirrors the deep political divides that are reflected in Americans’ colliding views of Mr. Trump, of the outcome of the 2020 election, and of mask and vaccine mandates.
Only slightly more than a quarter of Republicans see the Jan. 6 episode as an attack on government, according to a Quinnipiac University Poll taken in the fall, while more than nine out of 10 Democrats view it that way. A Washington Post/University of Maryland poll released Sunday found that 92 per cent of Democrats believe Mr. Trump deserves “a great deal” or “a good amount” of blame for the Capitol incident, while only 27 per cent of Republicans feel that way.
The American polity is cracked, and might collapse. Canada must prepare
‘Slow-motion insurrection:’ How Republicans seize election power
No matter what, the Capitol Hill insurrection will be an inflection point in U.S. history
In this fevered environment, with Americans opposing Americans on all the issues of the day, the planning for Thursday’s anniversary continues apace, with anxiety. Some lawmakers – including GOP Senator Susan Collins of Maine, who voted to impeach Mr. Trump and was nearly censured by her state party committee for doing so – have said the passions surrounding the event were so great that they prefer no commemorations at all.
On Capitol Hill, House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a New Year’s Eve letter to colleagues that she plans “an observance of reflection, remembrance and recommitment, in a spirit of unity, patriotism and prayerfulness” to commemorate the anniversary of the riot, which began on the East and West Fronts of the Capitol and spilled into the building itself, including her office.
The planned events include a forum for lawmakers to recall their own experiences that day. Ms. Pelosi also has invited a panel of historians, including Jon Meacham and Doris Kearns Goodwin, to place the event in historical perspective.
Ms. Goodwin said in an e-mail to The Globe and Mail that she would tell the lawmakers they need to learn as much as possible about the insurrection. “We know the end of America’s earlier stories – that the Civil War ended with the Union restored and emancipation secured [and] that the Allies defeated fascism in World War II,” she said. “Part of the anxiety we feel today is escalated by the awareness that we do not know how our story will end. But that worry can be matched by hope – for it is still up to us to write the remaining chapters of our story, which must start with establishing and preserving a full narrative of what happened on Jan. 6.”
The two major-party candidates in the 2020 election are planning contrasting events. Mr. Biden is expected to give a major address in Washington, and Mr. Trump has scheduled a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago retreat in Florida.
The very act of commemorating historical events often says as much about the time in which these episodes are evaluated as it does about the occurrences themselves.
The civil-rights march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., for example, was an immensely controversial event when it occurred in March, 1965. When its 50th anniversary was marked in 2015, the protest was celebrated as a signature moment in American history and was re-enacted by, among many others, a Black Democratic president, Barack Obama; a former Republican president, George W. Bush; and a onetime activist who was severely beaten at the bridge, Representative John Lewis of Georgia.
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One year after supporters of Donald Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol and shut down Congress, Americans still await a reckoning on the unprecedented challenge to the country's democracy. (SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)
Scholars, too, use anniversaries as occasions to take fresh looks at past events, often subjecting them to revisionist interpretations that upend the original narratives.
“Historians tend to analyze the anniversaries of major events, dramatic ones that changed the lives of millions,” Tyler Stovall, the late historian and dean of the graduate school of arts and sciences at the University of California, Santa Clara, wrote five years ago in the newsmagazine of the American Historical Association. “Wars, battles, declarations of national independence, and major cultural landmarks preoccupy us. We rarely concern ourselves with how happy these events made people; rather, we tend to see them as particularly vibrant examples of our main concern, change over time.”
The view of Jan. 6 eventually will be shaped as much by the future of American politics as by the congressional investigation currently under way on Capitol Hill, where Democrats are pressing forward with the probe, most Republicans are resisting and Mr. Trump is battling demands for documents that might provide fresh details of the day’s events.
If, for example, there is a repeat insurrection – perhaps on Thursday itself – will Jan. 6, 2021, be seen as the opening of a multi-act tragedy, rather than as a one-act drama? If American politics reaches a new equilibrium in coming years, will the current angst among progressives over the future of democracy be seen as overwrought and antiquarian, much the way Henry Clay’s views of his great early-19th-century rival Andrew Jackson may seem to us now?
“We are in the midst of a revolution, hitherto bloodless, but rapidly tending towards a total change of the pure republican character of the government, and to the concentration of all power in the hands of one man,” Clay, who twice ran against Jackson for president, said in 1833, the fourth year of the Jackson presidency. Today Jackson is reviled for his views on slavery and his campaigns against Indigenous peoples, but for at least two generations after the Second World War his presidency was regarded as a triumphal prelude to the New Deal and to a broader, more participatory American democracy.
In the passage of time, will the memory of Jan. 6 lose its power and merely take its place along with other American uprisings?
There have been so many of them that, in 1863, the historian Orville Victor published a book titled History of American Conspiracies: A Record of Treason, Insurrection, Rebellion, & c., in the United States of America, from 1760 to 1860. The preface declares: “The Federation which made us one people has not accomplished its ends without occasional insurrections against the consolidated authority.”
Before the first anniversary of Pearl Harbor, the principal controversy surrounding the Japanese attack had to do with how political figures used the event – universally condemned in the United States – to their own advantage. Six months after American entry into the Second World War, senator Harry Schwartz of Wyoming went to the floor of the chamber and attacked “whisperers who inculcate class, racial and religious hatred” and “camp followers, blinded by private ambitions and secret hatreds, intent on gathering unto themselves personal advantage.”
By the 20th anniversary, president John F. Kennedy, whose PT boat was crushed by a Japanese destroyer in Pacific combat the month Schwartz delivered his floor remarks, devoted only two sentences to Pearl Harbor in his Dec. 7, 1961, speech to an AFL-CIO convention in Florida.
“We face entirely different challenges on this Pearl Harbor Day,” he said. “In many ways, the challenges are more serious, and in a sense long-reaching, because I don’t think that any of us had any doubt in those days that the United States would survive and prevail, and our strength increase.”
Then he went on to talk about job losses, education and the balance of trade.
Today, less than 1 per cent of Americans were at least 10 years old when the country entered the war. It’s likely they are the last with any clear first-hand memories of that time. And so the reprise line of the Sammy Kaye song Let’s Remember Pearl Harbor, recorded 10 days after the Japanese attack, has lost most of its literal if not its metaphorical meaning.
Perhaps the most apt analogue to the Jan. 6 rampage is the Nov. 5, 1605, insurrection led by Guy Fawkes. It was the most famous in a series of conspiracies fomented by Catholics protesting the monopolization of power by Protestants in England. The rebels planned to assassinate King James I and blow up the House of Lords. Today the rebellion – later marked by doggerel, dating to 1742, that begins, “Remember, remember, the fifth of November” – is studied by historians, and commemorated by schoolchildren in a festive celebration involving bonfires, effigies and candy.
“The Capitol riot was a failed attempt to suborn your democratic institutions, and that is how we look at Guy Fawkes today,” said Lawrence Goldman, an Oxford historian. “Its historical significance is basically lost in ignorance now, and all you Americans have to do is to wait 400 years before the same thing that happened to Nov. 5 happens to Jan. 6.”
____________________________
Jai Sen
Independent researcher, editor
Now based in Ottawa, Canada, on unsurrendered Anishinaabe territory (+1-613-282 2900) and in New Delhi, India (+91-98189 11325)
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Jai Sen, ed, 2017 – The Movements of Movements, Part 1 : What Makes Us Move ?. New Delhi : OpenWord and Oakland, CA : PM Press. Ebook and hard copy available at PM Press; hard copy only also at The Movements of Movements
Jai Sen, ed, 2018a – The Movements of Movements, Part 2 : Rethinking Our Dance. Ebook and hard copy available at PM Press; hard copy only also at The Movements of Movements
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