The Great Divide

Intentionally or unintentionally, Congress’ elected Democratic Party leaders have won the January 6 Hearings. No matter what testimony remains to come in the final session (or sessions), the creation of the Committee was a stroke of political genius.

Electoral politics is partly a game of numbers. Win or lose is, finally, mathematical. Whether you give up before the votes are counted, as Al Gore and the Democratic Party did in 1990, or whether you contest the vote, as Donald Trump and the Republican Party did in 2020, you get a W or an L next to your name. That’s the mathematical part; there is no third column for an asterisk. Asterisks come from public opinion polls. The results of those polls can be manifested in future elections.

The polls this time are clear. Only 20 percent of those surveyed think President Biden didn’t win. And 55% of people polled think former President Trump’s actions before and after his defeat threatened democracy.

Trump, helped discredit himself, of course, by not listening to the experienced people in his administration who he had himself chosen. And instead, hurriedly putting together a small clique of opportunists. We would know very little about what those opportunists said and did if Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer had not created the January 6 Committee. And its nationally televised Hearings had not taken place. 

Now, thanks to those Hearings, all but the most walled-off true believers know that Trump made unfounded claims of electoral inaccuracy. That Trump and those acting on his orders attempted to interfere with legally established vote counting procedures. That Trump was deeply involved with groups advocating, and participating in violent post-election protests nationwide, culminating in the January 6 riot at the Capitol. 

The often referred to, but never firmly quantified, Republican “base” is nevertheless still presented as supportive of Trump and Trumpism. Not even the recent shocking Supreme Court decision about reproductive rights has shaken the Republicans “base,” according to Rich Lowry, editor of the National Review. According to Lowry, only five to eight percent of those polled think overturning Roe v. Wade is the most important issue in upcoming elections. And it simply Isn’t, says Lowry, to “turn a national election on the basis of an issue that matters to such a relatively small proportion of people.” (Washington Post, 7/14/2022)

Why then have Schumer and Pelosi, with a combined 73 years of Capitol Hill experience, therefore won?

They’ve won because those who supported Trump must now definitively divide, thanks largely to what the January 6 Hearings have revealed, And that divide does not favor the fulminating former President.

Take another look at the numbers. The always reliable web site “Electoral-Vote.Com” says (7/14): “Two new polls speak to the former president's woes. The first is from the New York Times reports that while 49% of Republican voters would support Trump if he was the Republican candidate in 2024, 50% would like to see him step down, and to give someone else a chance. The second from “Politico” says that 56% of Americans think Trump committed a crime on January 6, as opposed to 35% who think he didn't. That's a 21-point gap, and the gap grows every time the poll is repeated.” 

Polls are not elections, however. Before those begin with important primaries next month, a distressing but consistently high percentage of people will get their information about politics from television news. Which largely neglects covering politics in favor of offering car crashes, random gunfire incidents, menacing weather speculation (rarely connected to climate change) and unhealthy looking people playing summer fun in water parks and chain restaurants. But once such summer TV “fact” filled spectacles get hold of iconic footage they don’t let go. And such iconic footage now comes from January 6, 2021. We’ve seen mega-millions of times the sight of the once familiar symbol of our nation, the Washington Capitol building, under siege. Unhinged rowdies, breaking windows, chasing police, screaming, and streaming through hallways. The Commission that Pelosi and Schumer created had to examine that day. Did some smart media analyzer tell them they’d be helping to create and fix in the popular psyche an enduring image? A flag raising on Iwo Jima type image? A 9/11 Twin Towers type image? And that such an image would be compared in minds like mine, unwillingly and unknowingly, to the Capitol that was on our coins from the time we could line up the few we had and add them into money? And these naïve but ingrained images would now have every pictorial presentation of January 6? My Capitol, now under mob siege, not inviolently symbolic? The end of Trump’s overwhelming propaganda influence. The Capitol being attacked has subsumed his twitter feeds.

So are Trump and his elected and unelected acolytes no longer dangerous? Perhaps. “Less dangerous” would be a better way to put it. First of all, you don’t beat something with nothing. And President Joe Biden’s self and party are the closest we’ve had to nothing since Bill Clinton slid away. Biden needs to go away. But there are few signs yet that he knows it.

Are there Trump and Trumpoids waiting to rush in? Not hardly. They’re far from majoritarian, only tangentially focused on electoral politics and if well engaged by a political entity ready to lose big. Take, for example, the “Proud Boys.” There aren’t many of them, they’re easily infiltrated, their “pride” is attached to what they are not – Women, Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Jews, LGBT, young people – rather than what they are. The country is increasingly composed of those rising categories. So the “Proud Boys” are losers, left to drink their beer, fantasize about violent weaponry, get in fights, and drift. They would seem to have little chance of ever being a political, rather than a media, phenomenon. Then there’s the “Christian right,” fanatics who think that only when the United States becomes “united” under “god” will everything get better. Some variation on this fantasy has been present on this continent throughout our recorded history. And although it has resulted in much death, deprivation, and suffering it has never come close to controlling the country.

It’s also instructive to examine the built-in limitations of another group, the “Oath Keepers.” Perhaps, in order to avoid giving them a platform for their paranoia, the January 6 Hearing investigators have not, at least not in public, gone beyond the surface of this group. Had they done so, we would hear more about the “oath” they are supposedly keeping. It’s the one sworn to by law enforcement officers and the military, among others. What the “keepers” claim is that by not fighting against the supposed goals of social justice groups, or governments trying to help individuals and such social justice groups, those who work for law enforcement are betraying their oaths. The twists in this pretzel are too endless and obvious to withstand much contemplation. Other countries have dealt with it. In Germany, for example, a military officer (posing as an Arab refugee) was convicted of plotting to assassinate politicians in the hope of destroying an electoral democracy. Here’s what the German court said in its guilty verdict. The group’s accused ringleader “had a hardened far-right, extremist, ethno-nationalist mindset, especially racist and anti-Semitic…and had firmly decided to commit a lethal attack.” If the United States “Oath Keepers” follow their own twists, they would have to kill law enforcement people in order to have law enforcement.

It is arguably beyond the scope of a Congressional investigation like the January 6 Committee to plunge into such murk. It is decidedly not beyond the scope of the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the Attorney General to go there. Do we have such a resolute DOJ, AG, and FBI now? Lots of legal smoke swirling around fires. Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani The Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers and others may find out what the flames mean. Maybe they won’t be the last. And every time an issue comes up concerning them, guess what iconic image will be on TV? Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani et al are about to find out. Maybe they won’t be the last….

(Larry Bensky welcomes your communication at LBensky@igc.org.)