Maybe you’re not the most courageous type and ill-suited for participation in a civil war, but I have to ask what you would have done if, on January 6, 2021, Mike Pence had simply declared himself and Donald Trump as the winners of the 2020 presidential election. Would you have woken up the next day and packed your kids’ lunches as usual? Would you have had a normal work day? Because millions of people would not have done that. They would have begun preparing to fight for Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and America’s representative form of government. I know that I personally would have considered it an act of war. I would have reached out to like-minded people to develop a plan of action. Whatever plans I might have had for my life on January 5th would have gone out the window. Much of what I had considered radical and irresponsible would have suddenly felt like a solemn duty.
The people who stormed the Capitol felt the same way, albeit based on their credulity and gullibility rather than a sober assessment of the facts. If January 6 had gone the way Trump was hoping, it would set off a violent conflict among the American populace, which would have been at war with itself. Not enough attention is paid to this irrefutable statement of reality. Trump wasn’t simply trying to stay in power or carry out a coup. He was trying to start, and then win, a war that would have cost countless lives. The fact that this did not happen should not prevent us from treating him as culpable. There’s a lot of talk about how he put Mike Pence’s live in danger, and not enough about how those who resisted him prevented him putting all of our lives in danger.
And I don’t really think the danger has dissipated all that much. Disputed elections seem to be on our horizon, and Republican officials are being nominated with increasing frequency who appear willing to do what Pence was not. So, I don’t think anyone can relax. The threat is that the American people will vote freely to effectively end their own Republic by putting people in charge of elections who will thereafter not accept defeat for their party even when legitimately defeated.
Before the voters go to the polls in November, it’s essential that the people who tried to start a civil war in January 2021 be indicted, prosecuted, and hopefully convicted, because that will send the strongest and most proper message to the electorate about what happened after Trump’s loss, and who they’re being asked to support now.
If this isn’t done out of some concern about precedent or divisiveness, the risk of civil war will go up.
I’ve posted the following stats before, but I’ll post them again because they’re relevant.
86% of current Republican Senators support the overthrow of the government in order for a Republican to remain in power.
95% of current Republican House Representatives support the overthrow of the government in order for a Republican to remain in power.
6/9 of Supreme Court justices would support the overthrow of the government in order for a Republican to remain in power.
43% of the voting population are right-wing authoritarians and will support whichever Republican fascist is in power. They will gladly support the overthrow of a communist pedophile anti-American Democratic-controlled government. And they are heavily armed.
So, this problem isn’t going away anytime soon.
If the only reaction from the majority of people who oppose outright fascism is that they’re going to Tweet their outrage, wear funny hats in a protest, and livestream the fascists entering their houses in the middle of the night to murder them, then it’s quite possible for it to happen. Because if fascists don’t get punched in the face, they murder you in your sleep and call it self-defense.
If this attempted coup goes unpunished, it was all just a trial balloon. No current crop of mainstream Republicans that could even be elected President would peacefully turn over power. And a few more years of Republican controlled state government will make it so that violence like January 6th won’t even be needed.