Ashli Babbitt has become a martyr to many Trumpublicans. They talk of ‘ambush’ and ‘execution’ of a patriot who was fighting to save her country. Trump hails her as a hero.
She was mortally wounded during the January 6th attempted coup by a plain clothes Capitol Police Officer as she tried to climb through a smashed window in a door that was locked and barricaded. The police officer was on the other side of the door, responsible for protecting the law makers who were being escorted to safety as the mob tried to break in. He did his sworn duty (and has been cleared twice in investigations).
The drumbeat of armed insurrection on social media against a perceived ‘illegitimate’ administration is growing louder, more frequent and bolder.
Nobody knows for sure how many people are serious about this, but estimates range from 15 million to as high as 30 million.
Not long ago, I thought that civil war over Trumpism was not possible. Now, I’m not so sure.
Thomas Horner-Dixon, a Canadian academic who studies violent conflict, has been watching the growing unrest in the U.S. through his scholarly lens for years, and he sees all the warning signs.
He tells the story of encountering a new kind of talk radio when he went to the U.S. in the 80s to do his graduate work – a rising star of the right - Rush Limbaugh.
Out of curiosity and fascination he would occasionally tune in. There was nothing like this in Canada.
He remembers remarking to his American colleagues how it seemed that with every broadcast, Limbaugh was hammering a wedge into a crack between Americans and the moral authority of their government. If this kept up, he felt, one day the crack would split open.
We all know what has happened over the past 30 years. As time went on scores of imitators followed Limbaugh (there’s very good money in this game – FOX reportedly pays Carlson $6M a year!!)). They branched out from radio and into TV, giving rise to FOX News, and then into the new forms of social media enabled by the newly emerging technology of the internet. What Limbaugh started as a single voice bloomed into hundreds, all amplified by powerful new ways to get to their audience and eventually this led to Trump, the Big Lie and January 6th.
What started out as faint crack in the body politic has now split into a gaping chasm.
Today, far right politicians are openly campaigning on Trump’s Big Lie about the stolen election. They are openly talking about the possibility of taking power by force if the ballot box doesn’t work for them. What’s left of the Republican party is going along with this, at least as implied by their silence.
We can’t blame Limbaugh alone for all this. He was simply exploiting cracks that have existed since the founders drafted the constitution. Nor can we just blame the far right. The far left has become increasingly vocal and also talks of achieving social justice through less peaceful means. We saw some of that during the George Floyd demonstrations.
Today, judges, election officials, journalists and politicians are routinely getting death threats. The two sides see each other as a threat to their way of life, indeed, to the very existence of the country as they know it. Each can pick a media bubble where facts no longer matter. Indeed, what a reasonable person may see as facts are contorted into something unrecognizable. There’s no such thing as objective truth anymore, and no way to reliably find or verify truth. What used to be the traditional arbiters of factual journalism, the large national newspapers and TV network evening news programs (Walter Cronkite) are no longer trusted by the extremists. Today, ‘reality’ is whatever you want it to be. You can now easily find a conspiracy theory tailored to your liking
On the anniversary of the January 6th attempted coup, there were congressional speeches honoring the Capitol Police and remembering those who died. There were speeches about the grave threat to our democracy.
The remarkable thing about all those speeches is that with the exception of Liz Cheney (and her dad, Dick) there wasn’t a Republican to be found. They had all fled town that day. All the speeches were made by Democrats. Tucker Carlson told his FOX News audience that nothing much of importance happened on January 6th. That history would soon forget all about it.
Due to a potent mix of emotion, rage, religion, perceived injustice, and economic anxiety, all stoked by partisan commentators (like I said, very well paid), we’re now reaching a point where the country is becoming ungovernable.
Did I mention the guns? Oh yes, lots and lots of guns.
The last time we were this close to civil war was in 1860.
And oh, BTW, during his last State of the Union address in 2020, then President Trump awarded Limbaugh with the nation’s highest civilian honor – the Presidential Medal of Freedom – for his service to the nation.
Will this country tilt further into self-destruction, or will saner heads prevail. I don’t know, But the signs aren’t encouraging. In a recent survey, about 40% of Republicans said that if their politicians won’t ‘save the country’, then the citizens need to take matters into their own hands (presumably by exercising their second amendment rights), and 60% of Republicans believe there was significant voter fraud in the 2020 election.
People who study this sort of thing predict that if we do head into civil war, it will look a lot more like the ‘troubles’ in Northern Ireland in the 60s and 70s, than like the open warfare we saw in 1865 – essentially domestic terrorism. Think a hundred, or a thousand Timothy McVeighs.
For those of you who don’t know who Timothy McVeigh was, he was the Oklahoma City bomber. That act of domestic terrorism in 1995 destroyed the local Federal Building and killed 168 people, including 19 children in a day care center. McVeigh, a Gulf War army vet, met his coconspirator in army basic training. He was radicalized by white supremacist and anti-government propaganda and became a supporter of the militia movement. He felt it was his duty to act against what he saw as an out of control and oppressive government. McVeigh was quickly caught, tried, convicted and eventually executed on June 11, 2001.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklahoma_City_bombing