07 January 2021

Capitol Hill insurrection: the day after

cbc.ca
In AD 410 Alaric led his army of Visigoths into Rome and ransacked the city. By then Rome was no longer the capital of the western Roman Empire, but this single event sent shock waves throughout the known world. How could the founding city of the greatest empire in history be so vulnerable to barbarian tribes who could scarcely be called civilized? As we know, pagan Romans argued that, because Rome had abandoned its ancient gods, the latter had abandoned the city to its fate. Many thought Christians especially culpable, because, a generation earlier, the Emperor Theodosius had proclaimed Christianity to be the state religion, thereby angering the gods. Augustine, bishop of the north African city of Hippo, took up the challenge to defend the Christian faith from pagan accusations. The result became a classic of western literature, De Civitate Dei, known in English as the City of God.

I thought of this historical event as our family watched on television the events unfolding in Washington, D.C., on 6 January. We were, of course, horrified. It hardly seemed possible that a band of hooligans, egged on by the President of the United States, could invade Capitol Hill, breaching what we had assumed to be an effective security perimeter, and vandalize the offices of members of Congress. This is the sort of thing one associates with the Russian Federation in 1993, or a nonwestern country unschooled in the customs and constitutional procedures of democratic governance. In English-speaking democracies we have come to expect that all political actors of whatever partisan sympathies will play by the rules, acquiescing in the smooth transition of power once the electorate has made its decision at the polls. No one pretends that it's a perfect system, but, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, it is almost certainly the least worst of the political systems on offer in today's world.

If this is true--and I believe it is--then we all have an obligation to make it work, to respect the integrity of the processes, and to honour the rule of law, even when we disagree with specific laws and policies. The English constitution, to which we are heir, slowly developed a principle that is key to the successful function of our system of government, namely, that of loyal opposition. Admittedly, this has more relevance to a Westminster system such as Canada's, where the second largest party in the House of Commons is designated Her Majesty's Official Opposition. Yet even in a presidential system, where different parties may control the legislative and executive branches, majority and minority status still play a role, and allegiance to the Constitution must take precedence over partisan commitments--even more so over personal loyalty to a specific leader.

Yesterday's events have tested that principle in the United States of America, the country where I was born and raised. Since last November's election, we have been treated to the sorry spectacle of a sitting president refusing to concede his loss to his opponent, a circumstance almost entirely unprecedented in American history. In the normal course of events, a defeated incumbent president congratulates the victor, promises to support him, and urges Americans to acknowledge him as their president, even if they disagree with his policy priorities. They will, of course, continue to follow their own convictions about the nature of just governance, which means that they will indeed oppose, but in legal ways and according to the procedures laid down in the Constitution. In no case should they take the law into their own hands.

Until recently I had assumed that a political culture of respect for the rule of law was securely established in the United States, due largely to its debt to the English constitution and to the long experience of representative government extending back to colonial times. While we might expect to hear of an attempted coup d'état in Pakistan or Bolivia, we knew that it couldn't happen here. Not in the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, or the US. We're too politically stable and our constitutional traditions too resilient for that to happen.

Yet what we must learn from yesterday's events is that we can never afford take our political culture for granted. Professed conservatives are correct to argue that the edifice of civilization is precarious at best and that efforts at improvement may have the opposite effect from what is intended. Over the course of my lifetime I've seen North American culture become coarser and cruder, with the media playing an outsized role in facilitating a climate of consumerism rather than public spiritedness. I cannot help contrasting, for example, the late President George H. W. Bush, who was a fighter pilot in the Second World War and served his country in a variety of offices before attaining the White House, to the current occupant, whose fame is due largely to starring in The Apprentice and his larger-than-life business ventures.

It is disappointing to see so many Americans, whose traditions should tell them otherwise, follow someone who has repeatedly shown contempt for their country's political institutions and has cultivated a climate of personal self-aggrandizement at the expense of the public good. Many of us feared that something like yesterday's events could occur under his tenure. I sincerely hoped that we were wrong, but, sad to say, we were not.

I will have more to say about all this shortly, but I will end by observing that the system is badly broken. It is not working as America's founders intended it to work. In particular, the internal party reforms after 1968 upset the delicate balance between elected office-holders and the citizens they represent. This resulted in a system in which prospective candidates can reach the top without sufficient vetting to ensure basic competence, grasp of the responsibilities of office, and, dare I say it, patriotism. I hope to address this issue and others in the near future.

5 comments:

  1. Thank you for your comments David. I only have two brief responses.

    Equality under the law has been gone for a long time now. The foundations of liberty have been gone for a long time. I see our political system as a building being demolished after the charges have been set. For a brief moment after the foundations are blown the building appears to stand and then crumbles into dust. Metaphorically, that's where we've been for some time. The foundations are gone and have been gone for quite a while.

    I think you could say of yesterday what Emerson said of Harpers ferry. John Brown has only told us what time it is.

    My second observation is that in all of this very few people are interested in listening to another's opinion, but almost everyone is enthusiastic and eager to express their own opinion. This brief comment to you is the first written expression of even part of my opinion on the matter.

    I would like to read and understand more of your opinion on political matters. And thanks always for sharing your opinion.

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  2. I do not condone the violence. I admit that the mob were Trumpsters (had they been by and large false flagged Antifa--although one identified arrestee was a BLM activist--there would've been burning and looting).

    But I do not believe the mob was egged on by the President, any more than the people who burned the inner cities in the 1960's were egged on by MLK Jr. When a mob gathers, it often can and does take on a life of its own. It will also carry and run with any verbal ball offered it, regardless of what the speaker intended to say.

    Yes, America had an entrenched culture of respecting rule of law, political compact, and constitutional orer. Yet over many a decade, the large swathe of Middle America whose basic political instinct is to trust legitimate authority has put up with slander and misrepresentation by a large media-legal-governmental-academic complex. The attack on the Capitol may well be our Middle America showing it has lost faith in our system; and Confucius rightly said in the 5th century B.C. that without popular confidence, the state cannot stand (Analects 12:7).

    Unhappily, we had a campaign during which VP-elect Harris stated she hoped that the Antifa and BLM demonstrations and occupations would carry on through the election. Hence, when Pres-elect Biden called the mob "thugs", he was technically correct, but given his Veep's statements, he looks much like a dweller in a glass house practicing his stone-throwing technique.

    Courageous, out-of-the-box leadership willing to engage in real dialogue rather than the 50.1% self-appointed "enlightened" lecturing the 49.9% supposedly unwashed could pull us back from the brink. But I don't see it, especially with our Speaker of the House Pelosi more concerned to enforce "non-binary" language to accommodate <1% who are transgender when there is 39% of our population that rightly or wrongly believes the election was won by fraud. Sure, they could be wrong, but they are there.

    The [mostly] conservative mob was despicable. But for the past sixty years, they have been attentive pupils in a political school dominated by the Left--even if they've been unwilling in a compulsory school. They have basically shown that two can play at any game the immoderate Left proposes, no matter how detrimental to society at large.


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  3. Well said David. I do think that the opponent of the loser from the previous Presidential election, and his side, need to face up to their own contribution to the mess, in that they did not adequately and forthrightly address the implicit challenge to public governance according to the US constitution when their opponent made the comments: "if I lose it will be because the election has been rigged." That sufficient numbers in the US federal electorate saw this as sufficient reason to vote against the incumbent's return should not allow us to blind ourselves to the "all sides" contribution of to the current "State absolutist" trends we still face. And that, as you say, is wider than just North America or the "west". For that reason I'd add the phrase "procedural outcomes" to "even when we disagree with specific laws and policies" because though the courts have judged there was no evidence of fraud this does not mean that the electoral system is now actually what justice requires. But I recognise you've got a better handle on the fine grain of previous attempts to reform as with your foreshadowing discussion of the 1968 party reforms ... the issues raised about "judicial oversight" indicate to me, here in Australia, that the challenges to public governance are indeed gobal. Political parties themselves need reform.

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  4. Hi David,
    As you say you want to continue this thread, I wanted to make a few suggestions:
    1) Please provide a link or further explanation where you claim that President Trump instigated to violence. This is a very serious claim, and somewhat unexpected in light of his condemnation of the events, so needs to be referenced somehow.
    2) You'd need to address the concerns that I have now heard from several sources that the people entering the Capitol included BLM and Antifa members, as evidenced in photos and video footage. Also, why were the police/security called back before the evening's event, such that people had a better chance of breaking in? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LESlvuXrKN4
    3) Of course the recurring question is why violence from the right (if it was that) is always being condemned, whereas the same violence from the left is tolerated. For example, you also did not write in the same tones about the violent BLM protests earlier this year, which may be even more concerning that what happened this week.
    Martin

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  5. Speaking of Byzantine, that describes the US presidential election process quite well, I think. It takes more than a year to elect the next president, including several sequential steps, some of which (viz the electoral college) few Americans understand. And every state gets to choose their own methods of voting. The whole affair is fraught with virtue signalling, false promises, demonization of the opponent, and raw power mongering.

    You speak of the "current occupant" of the position, but you need to remember who the alternative was in 2016. How the US political machinery arrived at two such unlikely and unpleasant candidates for this most powerful position, speaks to the brokenness you mention. Furthermore, you must be aware that everything you think you "know" about said occupant, you have obtained from the mainstream media, who by all accounts, clearly hate the man with a vengeance! Can what they report about him be trusted as fair and balanced? Recall that we soak up and come to believe what we read and hear, especially if it is one sided.

    In my opinion, the 2020 presidential election was won by the mainstream and social media for Joe Biden. I expect that most of his votes were against Trump rather than for Biden. In so doing, the credibility of the media has been further reduced below whatever levels it had previously sunk. As anyone with an open mind can see, those media made every effort, valid or otherwise, to cut down and disparage Trump for the past five years, while studiously avoiding reporting anything good about him, or bad about Biden and Harris. Some social media giants have even blocked the sitting President of the USA from posting on their platforms!

    I also hold the media responsible for much of the extreme polarization now evident in the USA, and growing here in Canada. The media has long lost any pretence of neutrality in social issues and matters political! It is sad to watch them sink into blatant partisanship and a progressive echo chamber. If this was not obvious leading up to the election, it became clear the day after as the thin veneer of balance fell away, exposing the raw hatred for everything and everyone Trump-related.

    The final straw (and one indicator of what I say) was the media's utter hypocrisy about election fraud. They chased the ephemeral hints of Russian meddling in 2016 through various venues for the full four years. Since Nov. 3 however, they have pooh-pooed, dismissed and denied all the evidence of fraud at home in 2020 election. At first it was "no evidence", then it was "unproven claims", and now it is summarily "baseless" or outright "false" claims. One wonders how much "investigative journalism" was employed in coming to those conclusions. Did they examine - or even look at - every reported piece of evidence? Or did they merely echo each other's opinion pieces and call it truth?

    Sorry for such a long-winded response, but I am dismayed at how politics and the media have been playing out in recent years.

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