From its inception, the House of Representatives’ January 6 committee has been shadowed by various threats: that it would be subverted by the bad faith of Republican members, say, or that its inquiries would be stymied by uncooperative witnesses. But such practical concerns have not fully come to pass — for example, the GOP’s efforts to undermine the committee were too outrageous for Speaker Nancy Pelosi when Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy tried to include supporters of the insurrection as members, leading to a committee that only includes a pair of GOP representatives (Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger) who have proved to be no friends of Donald Trump. Likewise, not only the committee’s findings, but its effective public presentation of those discoveries, have exceeded the expectations of many skeptics. It has provided a comprehensive and comprehensible narrative of the events leading up to and on January 6; above all, it has made a fairly waterproof case that Donald Trump was an active participant and conscious wrongdoer in attempts to overthrow the 2020 election results, whether by orchestrating schemes to send fake electors to Congress or inciting mob violence to accomplish what his pseudo-legal machinations could not.
But the thorough placement of culpability on Donald Trump for the events leading up to the Capitol attack is in tension with a disquieting reality that has emerged in the weeks and months since that dark day. Just as Trump lit a fuse that led Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and hundreds of others to assault Congress, he also lit a fuse that has led the bulk of the GOP’s leadership to openly embrace his goals of election subversion and democracy destruction. As I’ve argued before, the insurrection of January 6 never ended; rather, the torch was passed to a broader array of actors who share its goal of imposing minority rule on the American majority. Whether through gerrymandering of congressional districts to ensure Democratic voters aren’t able to send representatives of their choosing to Washington, illicit purging of voter rolls to eliminate likely Democratic voters, or schemes to replace fair-minded election officials with partisan hacks more than happy to put their thumb on the scale (or worse) in favor of Republican candidates, insurrection is now the official stance of the Republican Party. And though I would argue that a movement to overthrow U.S. democracy merits the term “insurrection” whether or not it involves violence, this GOP movement clearly contains its violent elements, with Republican politicians strengthening ties to armed militias that now constitute a sort of paramilitary arm to the Republican Party in multiple states. Likewise, the GOP and the conservative media that supports it are in a full-time mode of inciting violence against their fellow Americans by suggesting that Democrats are simply a mob of BLM protestors, baby killers, and harridans aiming to emasculate the white men who deserve to rule America. (The party’s absolutist opposition to gun control, and the apparent indifference as American society is destabilized by both random and targeted shootings, should also be considered an aspect of a GOP political strategy that sees violence as fair play in achieving its goal of partisan domination.)
Without question, there’s an enormous public interest in understanding the events of January 6 and ensuring that those responsible are held to account (though, as we’ll discuss shortly, this public interest is predominantly on the Democratic side of the populace). Specifically, there’s a great need to inform the public of the full depths of Donald Trump’s depravity and treason. In this respect, the committee is performing a valuable service — a service that will become even more precious if its findings spur the Justice Department into pursuing a legal case against the former president and his high-ranking accomplices, rather than simply against the foot soldiers who did the president’s dirty work.
But now that we are reaching the end of the committee’s planned public hearings, and have been able to grasp its strategy more or less in full, it is pretty clear that it has hewed closely to a mission that prioritizes an excavation and accountability for past events, placing Donald Trump at the center of its story. The far more serious political problem we face as a country, though, is that the insurrection documented that day continues into the present, posing immense dangers to life as we know it, and that it involves many more Republicans beyond Donald Trump. The challenge for Democrats, then, is to ensure that they don’t allow the thorough and objective findings of the January 6 committee to overwhelm the larger political indictment that needs to be pursued against a Republican Party that has simply taken up where Donald Trump left off. Serving justice against Donald Trump may be necessary both on its own terms as well as for the larger push against the insurrectionary GOP, but it’s hardly sufficient on its own. Democrats need to be sure that excavating the past doesn’t come at the expense of explaining the present.
Recent comments by novelist Joseph O’Neill about the January 6 committee highlight a central challenge for Democrats should they choose to make the transition from the committee’s Trump-centric framework to one more focused on the broader GOP’s anti-democratic animus. O’Neill observes that the committee has not only made Trump the central guilty party, but has simultaneously downplayed the actual targets and victims of Trump’s plot:
I’ll say it again: there's something deeply wrong with these proceedings, in which all roads lead to Trump and away from the GOP, and in which R officials and uniformed men and women are relentlessly lionized and Dems--the victims this political aggression--are erased [. . .] Our votes were the ones being overturned. Our candidate was the one being wronged. Our people were the ones under attack. And yet we are nowhere to be seen. [. . .] This was an attempted coup by the Republican Party officials and supporters for the benefit of the Republican candidate and the Republican Party.
O’Neill is spot on about the danger of the committee negating the culpability of the GOP, but he also gets to something else crucial about the limitations of the work of the January 6 committee: in making a case that Donald Trump was trying to overthrow American democracy, it has prioritized a true and important but somewhat abstract offense over an equally true and important but far more concrete one — that Donald Trump was seeking to negate not simply the general will of some theoretical and composite American voter, but the will of living, breathing Democratic voters. O’Neill’s point about this effectively being a GOP assault from the get-go is correct — Donald Trump was indeed not just serving his own interests, but those of the GOP. This fact has by now been definitively validated by the Republican Party’s subsequent willingness to cover for Donald Trump’s actions — a willingness that encompasses a majority of House Republicans voting to reject the election results even after the coup; the GOP’s eagerness to subvert the January 6 investigation; and, most damningly, the party’s continued embrace of Donald Trump as the party’s de facto leader and its continued determination to finish his war on American democracy.
And this leads us to the central challenge that the Democrats need to navigate if they are to pursue the necessary fight against GOP authoritarianism: they must clearly communicate to their voters and other persuadable Americans that this Republican war is not just being pursued against democracy, but specifically against Democrats. It is the difference between rallying people around a more abstract threat, and rallying them in a way that unites their personal and altruistic interests. The second strategy is simply far more effective than the first, and is essential to mobilizing Democratic voters against an authoritarian GOP.
To pursue the most effective defense of democracy, then, Democratic leaders must understand that they also need to rouse Democratic voters on an openly partisan basis. To defend democracy, they must be honest with their supporters, and name not just Donald Trump but the Republican Party as being opposed to the basic notion that Democratic voters should be able to shape the country’s future. Rallying the American people to oppose the GOP’s war on democracy necessarily involves communicating to them that the GOP is also at war with Democratic Party values. From public education and accessible, affordable health care to stopping climate change and ensuring women have bodily autonomy, the GOP’s war on democracy is inextricable from a war on the most essential elements of a free and fair society backed by the Democratic Party and Democratic rank and file.
The Democratic establishment must also understand that it needs to be an unabashed advocate for the interests of its voters, not just for an abstract vision of democratic fairness. The GOP is already doing a bang-up job of ensuring that the minority it represents is able to assert a disproportionate amount of power in the country. Democratic leaders need to concentrate more on making sure they’re representing the interests of the people who sent them to Washington in the first place, and less on worries about alienating unpersuadable voters. Being open to the partisan nature of the GOP’s war on democracy also means Democrats accepting that for millions of Republican voters, this war is a feature, not a bug. Millions of Republicans have now repeatedly shown their clear preference for Republican rule at the expense of basic democratic ideals, up to and including broad support for a president who came close to pulling off a coup. These are not people who can be persuaded to join a defense of democracy, particularly when they view democracy as prioritizing the interests of their perceived enemies (aka fellow citizens who happen to be Democrats) over their own.
Conversely, failing to emphasize that the GOP’s war on democracy is properly understood as a war on millions upon millions of Democratic voters who in fact constitute an American majority should be seen as a dereliction of duty by Democratic leaders — an inappropriate demobilization of voters who have shown repeatedly over the last several years that they stand ready to defend both democracy and their personal interests at the polls. In 2016, they rejected Donald Trump, who only managed to attain the presidency through the vestigial stupidity of the Electoral College; in 2018, they gave the Democrats congressional majorities; and in 2020, they put Joe Biden in the White House. Even now, with polls showing Joe Biden at deeply low levels of personal popularity, enough Democratic voters are still energized enough to show the race for control of the House in a dead heat; as observers like CNN’s Ron Brownstein point out, the anti-Trump coalition seems to have enough juice left in it to somewhat counter the headwinds of economic uncertainty and Biden’s deep unpopularity.
Democrats must avoid the dead end of letting the January 6 committee be the last word on Donald Trump’s coup attempt, and on the way his war against democracy and Democrats has been enthusiastically adopted by a GOP that is busily cutting loose its few remaining ties to American democracy. The GOP is coming for Democratic voters — coming for their most basic rights, from their ability to marry who they choose to whether they live in a land that isn’t constantly befouled by burning forests, killer hurricanes, and inhuman temperatures. Democratic leaders have a commitment to defend their voters, or make way for leaders who understand this non-negotiable responsibility.