Reflections on the MAGA Riot
True story: I was once arrested and charged with battery against a police officer for attempting to forcibly enter (sort of) a legislative chamber while the legislative body was in session. That’s pretty much where the similarities with this week’s events end, but that episode from over 20 years ago was on my mind as I watched Trump’s right wing mob storm the U.S. Capitol Wednesday.
I was 24 years old, working in Chicago as an organizer for the political organization that later became the Working Families Party. A coalition led by ACORN and an SEIU local that represented low-wage home healthcare workers was leading the fight for a Living Wage law. In July of 1997 we were finally going to get a full council vote on the bill. Mayor Daley opposed it and his tight control of the City Council meant we were certain to lose.
About 400 people, mostly ACORN and SEIU members, turned out to watch the vote. The Mayor and the Chicago Police Department took the unprecedented step of locking the doors to the council chamber despite large numbers of empty seats. This was a violation of the Chicago open meetings law so we shifted to civil disobedience. A few of us got around the line of police blocking the door to the council chamber and began pounding on the door while the crowd chanted “Let us in!”
After a few minutes a police officer pressed me against the door and told me to put my hands behind my back. I did so immediately and he cuffed me and told me he was charging me with battery. I’m 5’6” and back then was maybe 140 lbs. soaking wet and candidly I’m far too timid to get into an actual fight with pretty much anyone let alone a police officer. I most certainly didn’t commit battery (except against the door — guilty as charged there).
You can read a pretty wildly distorted version of this episode in Stanley Kurtz’s hit job on Obama’s ACORN connections in National Review here.
Of course this week’s siege of the Capitol was nothing like this. It was a terrorist act meant to intimidate elected officials through threats of physical violence — and quite possibly carry out actual acts of violence.
While militant direct action can and has been frequently used for just causes, the substance, the content — what you are trying to accomplish — actually matters.
There’s a world of difference between militancy for justice and militancy for injustice. Parisians celebrate Bastille Day, not the 18th of Brumaire, for a reason. We don’t need to wait for posterity to pass judgement on this week’s events. It was a failed coup intended to forcibly reverse the democratic will of the majority. Rioters were willfully manipulated by lies from opportunistic politicians, and for years and years before that by a much broader conservative movement hell bent on denying not only the political legitimacy but the very humanity of non-white Americans, especially black people.
For this reason, there can be no reprieve for the likes of Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz as they now deploy ridiculous verbal contortionism to try to distance themselves from the President and the rioters. They all lied to their base for two months. Their base believed the lies. It’s not that complicated.
On several occasions throughout this interregnum, democracy was narrowly preserved, dictatorship was narrowly averted. The thin line that has saved us included public servants who resisted the lust for power and instead faithfully performed their duties. From poll workers and ballot counters, to county election administrators and secretaries of state, and even members of the judiciary. Had just a few individuals in these positions followed the President’s totalitarian impulses (as members of Congress, it should be noted, did), we’d be in a far more dire situation right now, one in which control of the Presidency would actually be in doubt. It’s really not hard to imagine that this could have been far worse — nor is it hard to imagine that it may get far worse in the weeks and months and years to come. It’s sad that one actually needs to call attention to and praise people for just doing their job, but such is the state of our democracy.
One group that doesn’t make the cut: The U.S. Capitol Police. Their bias in enforcing the law and complicity with the rioters was on full display and it was grotesque. For people like me (white people) who aren’t exposed to this reality almost daily it was a powerful reminder that in addition to addressing the overgrown scale of law enforcement in cities, we have a massive task of totally dismantling and reconstructing the culture of law enforcement. It has never been more clear to more people (though was always quite clear to some) that the current culture in law enforcement is totally irreconcilable with a pluralistic democracy. Investigations that result in removing a few “bad apples,” and even leadership changes are necessary but insufficient.
In his remarks yesterday Joe Biden repeated the trope that “This is not who we are.” To put it mildly, the historical record isn’t quite so definitive. Our history is that of a nation riddled with contradictions and constantly contested — often violently. If there’s a through line it’s the dehumanization of black Americans by white Americans seeking to retain power and wealth. The very precedent that Senator Cruz offered for his outrageous stunt was the contested election of 1876. The result of that sad episode in our history (as Lindsay Graham of all people reminded his colleagues) was the Hayes-Tilden compromise which allowed Hayes to win the presidency on the condition of removing Union troops from Southern states, effectively ending Reconstruction and ushering in the Jim Crow era.
I’m glad Mitt Romney said what he said about simply telling the truth. Telling the truth about this election is a good place to start. Telling the whole truth is going to be much harder.
