Notes from an American Abroad: January 8, 2021
This moment in United States history asks us to take seriously everything we know and witness in order to guard against what could come still.
This week the United States experienced an attempt at mob rule — itself an extension of a nearly complete term of mob rule.
For those of you interested in the value of understanding recent events, I will ask you to think seriously about how, with less than two weeks remaining in this presidential term, the incoming leaders of both Houses of Congress as well as members across both parties want the President of the United States to be removed of all of his authority — which includes the power to start conventional and nuclear war the world over.
As journalist Masha Gessen makes clear in a retrospective about the events of this week, ‘By the end of the day, we knew remarkably little, but we knew this: the Capitol Police had been woefully unprepared for an invasion that had been easy to predict. That had, in fact, been virtually — declared by the man with the world’s biggest megaphone.’
The truth is that the president, who had never priorly served in elected or appointed office, had never once committed seriously to the study of governance, and had never outwardly showed commitment to democracy, has dedicated his entire term to undermining the critical functions of the state, which he sits atop for days longer still.
He has always been transparently authoritarian, and many writers, scholars, and journalists who study authoritarianism and autocracies elsewhere have warned America against the misplaced belief that it could not happen here for some time now.
It did happen here: a fragrant and transparent attempt to displace the will of the public, by virtue of a violent interruption (and possibly even more violent intention) towards each of the democratically elected representatives deeply ensconced in their work certifying the continuity of the republic.
In time we’ll have to commit ourselves to tracing where we should have taken Trump seriously during his time in office. As Ezra Klein of the New York Times Opinion pages said this week, ‘Trump’s great virtue, as a public figure, is his literalism.’
But, for now, I want to add my name to those asking you to take all of the voices calling both for the military to stand down in the transition, as well as those seriously seeking to remove the president from power immediately — lest we lose sight of what more could go wrong.
Indeed, more still can happen here and elsewhere, whether it includes starting a new armed conflict that could overwhelm the new administration, or forms of more nefarious interference (or noninterference where there should be action taken) into the domestic affairs of the state. Our democracy and public must be on guard for the remainder of this rocky term.
