It has taken me several days to absorb the events of January 6, 2021. Together, we watched our Capitol building being violated by a mob seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 election. They proudly waved Trump banners and Confederate flags. Their breach of our capital forced the evacuation of the building delaying the counting of electoral votes.
In his address to his militant supporters Trump called his defeat an “egregious assault on our democracy,” urging the crowd to “walk down to the Capitol. We are going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and -women, and we are probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them. Because you will never take back our country with weakness.”
As the insurrectionists stormed the Capitol, the president, retreated to the White House to watch the events unfold on television. In my opinion, and shared by many, Trump delights in violence a symptom of his escalating narcissism. Certainly, he was delighted on Wednesday.
Chaos in Washington may be an element of American history, but it is unknown and unexperienced by my children and grandchildren. We have never witnessed an uncontrolled mob, with firearms, occupying our capital building in an effort to nullify the election in the name of freedom and democracy. As I sheltered in place from the Trumptonian plague in its many forms, attempting to understand what really happened on that day, I reverted to a handful of political commentaries and came to the following conclusion. The events of January 6 were more than an “Assault on Democracy!” Our cherished form of democracy that historians commonly referred to as the American experiment. However, the result of my readings leads me to recast the “assault on American Democracy” to an attack on multiracial democracy.
It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.”
Our history books indicate that American democracy is over 240 years old. That age refers to the democracy of the founding fathers. It is based on a Constitution that accepted the existence of slavery and imagined democracy as the responsibility of property-owning white men. On the other hand, multiracial democracy is in its adolescence. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 followed by the Voting Rights Act of 1965– I was a teenager at that time – established a multiracial democracy in America. The Constitution as described by Martin Luther King Jr. contained a promissory note whereby the blessings of liberty could be extended to all. “We the people” continue to march in uncertain formations, in an unsteady but resolute march to a More Perfect Union.
Unfortunately, the insurrectionists that broke into the Capitol building believe that their founding father’s vision of limited government and individual freedom is stained by the inclusion of those which they believed were never meant to share it. The rise of men of color to political power culminated by the election of a black president, followed by the election of a multiracial woman in 2020, now lead them to question the wisdom of the current democracy. The fragility of white men is now evidenced by their belief that they should rule by whatever power or means, by force if necessary but always under the guise of rule of law. The only democracy worth defending is one in which only those they deemed deserving are enfranchised. This belief once the domain Of Southern Democrats now appears to be adopted by the conservative movement.
For example, Senator Barry Goldwater, the godfather of the conservative movement, opposed both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act on constitutional grounds, characterizing them as tyrannical federal overreach.
William F. Buckley Jr. wrote in National Review in a 1957 editorial, “Why the South Must Prevail,” that white people, as “the advanced race,” are “entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically.”
Last year the conservative writer Christopher Caldwell insisted, in a book well reviewed by his peers, that the civil-rights movement had overthrown “the Republic established by America’s founders,” replacing it with a society in which white men occupy “the bottom rung of an official hierarchy of races.”
BOTTOM LINE:
Trump supporters across the country now believe that the nation has been stolen from them. Whether they rule by force, fraud, or law, their rule is the only acceptable outcome.
For more in-depth analysis, Refer to the writings of Adam Serwer, Ibram X. Kendi, and David A. Graham.
wayne: always insightful. Our nation was built not just by the white man, but by blacks and other people of color. Is this the kind of world that we want our children and future generations to see racism, bigotry and hate? I would hope that when i’m no longer on the face of this earth that future generations will believe in democracy and to love their fellow man as equals. It’s a shame and disgrace that people that voted for this monster, still support him.