January 6 is Every Single Day
To wake from our long national nightmare, we must grapple with the true nature of conservatism
It’s 6 AM. Again. Sonny and Cher’s I’ve Got You Babe plays on the alarm clock radio. Again.
Weatherman Phil Connors (played by Bill Murray) is stuck endlessly reliving a single day, a hell he tries to escape through clever divergence and increasingly creative suicide attempts. But to no avail; Groundhog Day just keeps coming back. Eventually Connors approaches his temporal prison with kindness and compassion, until every single moment of his day brings out the best of him.
In reality, we never get to rerun our days until we get them right. But in Groundhog Day, only a life lived to perfection can unlock the gates of freedom. And because it’s Hollywood, the day Connors finally pours love into those around him in every waking moment is followed by one where he wakes with a new lover in his arms.
This 1993 blockbuster paints individual salvation as the outcome of a constant stream of goodness. In real life, perfection is impossible – but striving toward it nonetheless benefits us and those in our orbit. Such is the case with the United States of America. To “establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense,” the preamble to the Constitution does not declare that we the people strive to form a fully perfect union. It specifically envisions a more perfect union. In their wisdom, even the founders recognized that true perfection could never be reached; rather a mercurial perfection would be our North Star as the fledgling nation grasped and grappled forward.
250 years later, the United States has become stuck in a nightmare temporal doom loop of our own. The North Star of a more perfect union has been swallowed up by the black hole of January 6, 2021. That dark day may have been the culmination of a months-long effort to overthrow the democratic order, but it was the birth of a new era in our national life. Every day has become January 6.
We failed to punish the leaders of the coup attempt. We neglected to document the full scale of the conspiracy. We re-nominated and then reelected as President the man most responsible for the crimes, who then freed those convicted for following his treasonous orders. Structural reforms necessary to prevent repeat attempts have been all but ignored; instead broad efforts to terrorize and disenfranchise voters have metastasized all over the country. We haven’t moved on from January 6; we’ve embraced it.
Why don’t we talk about this more? Why aren’t we saturated by warnings of this existential threat? In fairness, a small but growing group of elected officials, civic leaders, and journalists have expressed concern over January 6-style election theft threatening to become the American rule rather than the exception. But they are the tiny and insufficient minority.
Some members of the opposition appreciate the risk but lack the fighting spirit. Thirty percent of the House of Representatives and a full half of the Senate are lawyers; they’ve not prepared their entire lives for a crisis like this. Some Democrats feign concern over threats to democracy, but privately salivate over the expansive powers Trump has accumulated to the executive branch. These corrupt politicians will never seriously challenge an operation they plan to eventually seize for themselves. Whatever factors contribute to the deafening silence of our elites, nearly all of them are afflicted by a fundamental misunderstanding of the conservative movement – and of America itself.
Our social studies textbooks, the media, and elected officials believe (and want us to believe) that we have two equal and opposite political movements rooted in equally principled values, engaged in a good-faith fight over how best to achieve mutually agreed-upon goals. That has never been true. A more perfect union has always been the goal, to be sure, but the real battle has never been waged between parties operating in good faith over how best to achieve it. The trenches have only and always been dug by the march of progress on one side and the indefensible status quo on the other.
Donald Trump didn’t bring voter suppression to the Republican party; he brought it out into the open. MAGA didn’t take away abortion access; the Federalist Society orchestrated it over the course of decades. Antisemitism isn’t ascendant on the right; it’s endemic to it. January 6 wasn’t even the first January 6. On November 22, 2000 a group of Republican staffers and activists stormed an elections office in Miami-Dade County and violently shut down a hand recount. The “Brooks Brothers riot” effectively ended the Florida recount and sent the election to a Supreme Court that arbitrarily handed George W. Bush the presidency.
None of this is new. Not the political violence, not the state-sponsored racial terror, not the theft of free and fair elections. This has never been about Trump. This is the conservative movement. This backlash is indigenous to our republic; in every generation it has emerged to cut against the promise of a more perfect union.
But to reconcile with this reality, liberal elites would have to acknowledge the evil of Trumpism is not unique to this moment or this Republican party. Career Democrats would have to explain how they allowed this to happen – not over the course of ten years, but over the course of ten presidential elections. To accurately identify the true villains in our national drama, liberals would have to shelf any argument that blames “both sides” or the “extreme right and the extreme left.” Centrists would be exposed for advancing the compromise position between freedom and tyranny.
Too many are too complicit to reorient themselves around the true dynamics preventing our country from moving forward, leaving us in a permanent state of insurgent terror. On Friday, Congresswoman Adelita Grijalva was pepper sprayed and gassed by ICE agents as she attempted to conduct federally-mandated oversight of their actions. The Department of Homeland Security claimed the assault never occurred, warning: “Presenting oneself as a ‘member of Congress’ doesn’t give you the right to obstruct law enforcement.”
Set aside that she was not obstructing and that ICE hate crimes are not law enforcement, this language is particularly chilling given that Grijalva was prevented from being sworn into Congress for seven weeks following her election this fall. In a democracy where every day is January 6, the Republican Speaker of the House can simply choose not to seat duly elected members. And once they’re seated, the Department of Homeland Security will denigrate them and their district with the language of delegitimization.
When every day is January 6, the moment a Republican rising star checks her loyalty to the party’s leader is the moment her family is hit with online harassment and pipe bombs. In a state of permanent January 6, Minnesotan Democratic leaders are assassinated and mosques everywhere are firebombed.
The conservative movement believes your vote doesn’t count because it considers you a lesser human being. It always has and it always will. Raw supremacy is the core value and function of conservatism; nothing else. Al Franken was right: “Republicans think Obama is 3/5 of a President.” But Franken, for all his incisive humor, joined the rest of his Senate caucus in rolling over while Mitch McConnell and the Republicans stole Obama’s Supreme Court appointment.
Masses of Americans can no longer deny that we have a two-party problem. Democrats and Democrat-aligned influencers regularly contribute to the dehumanization of gender, ethnic, and religious minorities. Liberals and “Never Trump Republicans” continue pushing for a slightly less obscene version of Reaganomics. These conservatives in blue ties are soft supremacists more on board with January 6 than opposed to it. None of these ghouls will bring us out of the abyss.
The good news is that voters are a lot smarter than we used to be. A lot smarter. It has become exponentially more difficult to manufacture popular consent for genocide, a facially absurd war of conquest, or unspeakable levels of inequality. The right-wing propaganda just isn’t landing, and the centrist (right-lite) propaganda isn’t either. Every day we continue to relive January 6 further infuriates people from across the political spectrum, creating the space for transformative change to occur.
To mobilize the radicalized masses, I have argued that an American Nuremberg will be necessary to heal the country and move on from Trump once and for all. But justice alone won’t solve our conservatism problem, and it won’t fix the structural issues that have enabled minority rule to first slow and then repeal the advance of a more perfect union.
It doesn’t matter who you are or where you come from – if you’re willing to speak the truth and fight for real and lasting change, you’ll have Americans’ support. We need leaders with a new narrative, with a sober and brutal reflection of the mistakes that brought us here so they can prescribe a way out. There are a hundred creative ways to reform our minoritarian government structures; let’s hear them all. Let’s debate a hundred visions for a society that guarantees healthcare, housing, education, and nutritious food. Let’s build a new political spectrum genuinely rooted in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, on the ashes of a spectrum that currently runs from good to evil.
When Weatherman Phil Connors fully embraced his humanity, his entire existence became a testament to the greater good. But only after exhausting every dastardly instinct did he turn and begin experimenting with his better self. May we soon exhaust our national will to dominate and destroy, casting aside nihilism for a rediscovered humanity and a reemergent North Star. Democracy can once again be beautiful: it will take a very long time, but our fate is not yet sealed.
The United States will never be perfect, but my god has it become the furthest thing from that in such a short time. We will never know the exact moment we’ve hit bottom. Perhaps the moment has already occurred, and the slow, organic alchemy of collective redemption is already underway. We won’t know the exact moment we’ve turned things around, but we’ll never forget the day we finally wake up from this long national nightmare.
Fantastic article.
Very good despite the couple of minor typos 😉😘