I’m old enough to remember watching the Senate Watergate hearings. In the bygone early ’70s, there was still a general belief – shared by members of both parties! – that democracy was a good thing and that those who threatened it should be held accountable. There were only three TV networks, plus PBS, so it was actually possible to seize the nation’s attention, and even though President Nixon and his minions lied with relentless impunity, there did come a time, albeit long after the hearings, when sane Republican senators acted in the national interest and told Nixon the jig was up.
Fast forward half a century. The House’s Jan. 6 committee, which staged its first public session June 9, is compelled to operate in a much tougher political and cultural climate. It may well fulfill its promise to lay bare – with meticulously documented evidence – the chillingly violent conspiracy to rape our Constitution and overturn a lost election. But rest assured that such revelations will fail to pierce the thick skulls of the uncountable millions who subsist on the toxic disinformation of the MAGA “media.” They will also marinate in willful ignorance, thanks to Fox News’ decision not to broadcast the hearings.
In truth, Fox’s decision to go AWOL makes perfect sense; in the tweeted words of anti-Trump Republican strategist Sarah Longwell, “I guess if my prime time lineup (Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham) spent the attempted coup frantically texting the president’s chief of staff to tell him to call it off – while simultaneously spreading false information about the attack on air – I wouldn’t broadcast the hearings about the attempted coup either.”
But, Fox aside, anyone with a functioning brain is surely hip to what really happened when Trump’s Visigoths stormed the Capitol. Even in advance of what we may learn from the hearings, five legal experts at the Brookings Institution (including a former Republican-appointed US attorney) have released a new report that states the obvious: “Trump attempted to retain power by any means necessary. Trump was personally involved in entertaining, exploring, and even attempting to enact an astonishing array of legally unjustifiable schemes to retain power. His pursuit of power by any means necessary – including endorsing and acceding to violence – is probative of criminal intent. It shows that power was the real goal, and that claims of election fraud were just a means to that end.” (Italics are mine. Read 18 U.S.C. 1512 of the federal criminal code.)
But, alas, there is no longer a bipartisan consensus about the values of democracy – or a shared belief in factual reality. One party, which is bad at messaging, is trying to protect and defend our constitutional order; the other, which is brilliant at messaging, is openly trying to destroy it. The Jan. 6 committee will expose the latter with videos and testimony, engaging our eyes and ears. But Trump’s congressional cultists, many of whom aided and abetted the treasonous insurrection, have been tasked with concocting a phony counter-narrative that will essentially hew to Orwell’s admonition in “1984”: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.”
Plus, millions more Americans have the attention spans of gnats; they’ve tuned out Jan. 6, which is so 17 months ago. Plus, millions more view “threats to democracy” as a mere abstraction – having never been exposed to civics classes in our lousy education system – and we know that such an abstraction can’t bestir the emotions the way gas prices can.
One Democratic congressman, Dean Phillips (D-Minn.), said it best the other day, telling NBC News: “Accountability, I’m afraid, is unachievable in this political era.”
How is it possible that so many Americans want to simply “move on” from the worst assault on our way of life since the Civil War – concerned not a whit that Jan. 6 was a rehearsal for a fascist takeover in 2024? A short answer: Grassroots grievances against “government”/”the elite”/”the establishment” run deep; thanks to our fractured and siloed media culture, the aggrieved can customize their own (fake) facts and stoke their paranoia; the Trump-driven GOP is clueless on governance, but stellar at nihilistic agitprop.
All of which prompts the most urgent question of all: Why should the Jan. 6 committee even try to enlighten us, if success is so far-fetched? A short answer: Because we owe it to future generations to account for ourselves. Because those of us living in the real world would do a disservice to our tottering democracy if we failed to expose and communicate the right-wing, white supremacist threat – which goes far beyond Trump.
As John Cohen, a former acting intelligence chief at the federal Department of Homeland Security publicly warns, “In my 38-plus years of law enforcement, this is the most complex threat environment I’ve ever seen. We have unacceptable levels of violence by people who are influenced and inspired by content they see online. I am really f***ing concerned about where we are.”
That’s why the Jan. 6 hearings are so important. The Brookings Institution’s legal experts mince no words: “It is difficult to imagine a more serious offense, in long-term consequences, than plotting to overturn a presidential election … The Big Lie and its consequences are still with us, posing the very real risk that Trump and his supporters will be back with more schemes aimed at disrupting and overturning our elections.”
To do nothing is tantamount to saying that the domestic terrorists have won.
Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at dickpolman7@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, July 1-15, 2022
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