Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, in her 2018 book On Fascism, quoted a politically apathetic German who explained what it was like to be an oblivious citizen in Hitler’s Germany: “To live in this (fascist) process is absolutely not to be able to notice it…Each step was so small. So inconsequential…One no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing.”
Well, the American corn was harvested on Jan. 6 when a mob stoked by a Big Lie sought by violent means to overthrow democracy. That was textbook fascism, even if the goons who stormed the Capitol were too dense to realize it. And it remains so, even if the Senate GOP’s foes of democracy refuse to acknowledge it.
Personally, I wish there was no need for the impending Senate trial of the tinpot fascist in exile. We have enough on our plates, dealing with this pandemic and praying for policy relief. But given what happened a mere 20 days ago, we don’t have the luxury of amnesia. Not unless we want to flush our democracy values down the memory hole.
Trump’s war on truth is featured in the new bill of impeachment. It was read aloud last night on the Senate floor:
On January 6, 2021, pursuant to the 12th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, the Vice President of the United States, the House of Representatives, and the Senate met at the United States Capitol for a Joint Session of Congress to count the votes of the Electoral College. In the months preceding the Joint Session, President Trump repeatedly issued false statements asserting that the Presidential election results were the product of widespread fraud and should not be accepted by the American people or certified by State or Federal officials. Shortly before the Joint Session commenced, President Trump, addressed a crowd at the Ellipse in Washington, D.C. There, he reiterated false claims that “we won this election, and we won it by a landslide.” He also willfully made statements that, in context, encouraged – and foreseeably resulted in – lawless action at the Capitol, such as: “if you don’t fight like hell you’re not going to have a country anymore.” Thus incited by President Trump, members of the crowd he had addressed, in an attempt to, among other objectives, interfere with the Joint Session’s solemn constitutional duty to certify the results of the 2020 Presidential election, unlawfully breached and vandalized the Capitol, injured and killed law enforcement personnel, menaced Members of Congress, the Vice President, and Congressional personnel, and engaged in other violent, deadly, destructive and seditious acts.
Cut and dried, case closed. In fact, the case for conviction (and for a subsequent vote barring the crime boss from running for president again) is even stronger than the bill of impeachment suggests. Because we’ve now learned that Trump sought to engineer an eleventh-hour coup at the Justice Department, by installing a temporary attorney general who’d pressure key states to overturn their election tallies. He shelved his plot only because Justice officials threatened to resign en masse. The rabble he sent to the Capitol was merely his last resort.
And yet, despite all this incontrovertible evidence, it’s quite likely that most Senate Republicans will refuse to supply sufficient votes to convict. One would think that people who were literally put in harm’s way would recognize the wisdom of meting out punishment to the perpetrator. But no, they seem perfectly willing to bless the fascist impulse and set a precedent for future Big Lie aspirants.
Their main argument these days, for what it’s worth, is that we should all “move on” for the sake of “unity” because Trump is gone so who cares. They also contend, in an Orwellian feat of mental gymnastics, that it’s “unconstitutional” to put Trump on trial for inciting a violent insurrection against democracy. Which is a weird argument, because what’s truly unconstitutional is inciting an insurrection against democracy.
Michael Gerson, the sane conservative commentator and a former top aide to George W. Bush, is understandably aghast: “Would Republican senators still want the country to put these events behind it if 20 Capitol Police officers had been beaten to death rather than one? If Pelosi had actually been zip-tied and held hostage? If Pence had been murdered? At what point would executive incitement of a violent mob to intimidate the legislative branch meet GOP senators’ exacting standards for conviction?”
Well, for starters, the inciting president would have to be a Democrat. Especially a Black one. If a Black Democrat were to relentlessly lie about a “stolen election” and incite Black Lives Matter protestors to storm the Capitol with zip ties and fantasies of assassination, fearful Senate Republicans would convict in a heartbeat.
The high stakes in the impending Senate trial are clear. Jane Chong, a former federal appeals court clerk, frames them well: “It’s the most elementary constitutional stress test imaginable, a test of whether the system of checks and balances ordained by America’s Constitution works at all – or whether, in this age of profound political dysfunction, that system is so broken that even bodily harm and physical mayhem wreaked on the members of one branch prove insufficient to prompt the targets themselves to action.”
Nevertheless, most Senate Republicans seem poised to endorse Big Lie fascism. In Gerson’s words, “They are some of American history’s most reckless violators of democratic honor. And they seem firmly attached to their ignominy.” We patriots who believe in democratic honor have no choice but to call them out.