Four years ago, we had a rather loud discussion about the importance of truth
and its effects on both public behavior and what people believe, whether or not
they actually think. This article from last Sunday's Times Magazine discusses
the importance of setting priorities that support or attack the social order.
Eric
[The police forced the crowd out of the Capitol building after facing off in
the Rotunda, Jan. 6, 3:40 p.m.]The police forced the crowd out of the Capitol
building after facing off in the Rotunda, Jan. 6, 3:40 p.m.Credit...Ashley
Gilbertson/VII, for The New York Times
ESSAY
The American Abyss
A historian of fascism and political atrocity on Trump, the mob and what comes
next.
The police forced the crowd out of the Capitol building after facing off in the
Rotunda, Jan. 6, 3:40 p.m.Credit...Ashley Gilbertson/VII, for The New York Times
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By Timothy Snyder
* Jan. 9, 2021
Lire en
français<https://www.nytimes.com/fr/2021/01/13/magazine/trump-capitole-fascisme-racisme.html>Leer
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When Donald Trump stood before his followers on Jan. 6 and urged them to march
on the United States
Capitol,<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/06/us/politics/trump-speech-capitol.html>
he was doing what he had always done. He never took electoral democracy
seriously nor accepted the legitimacy of its American version.
Even when he won, in 2016, he insisted that the election was
fraudulent<https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/23/us/politics/donald-trump-congress-democrats.html>
— that millions of false votes were cast for his opponent. In 2020, in the
knowledge that he was trailing Joseph R. Biden in the polls, he spent months
claiming<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/30/magazine/trump-voter-fraud.html>
that the presidential election would be rigged and signaling that he would not
accept the results if they did not favor him. He wrongly claimed on Election
Day that he had won and then steadily hardened his rhetoric: With time, his
victory became a historic landslide and the various conspiracies that denied it
ever more sophisticated and implausible.
People believed him, which is not at all surprising. It takes a tremendous
amount of work to educate citizens to resist the powerful pull of believing
what they already believe, or what others around them believe, or what would
make sense of their own previous choices. Plato noted a particular risk for
tyrants: that they would be surrounded in the end by yes-men and enablers.
Aristotle worried that, in a democracy, a wealthy and talented demagogue could
all too easily master the minds of the populace. Aware of these risks and
others, the framers of the Constitution instituted a system of checks and
balances. The point was not simply to ensure that no one branch of government
dominated the others but also to anchor in institutions different points of
view.
In this sense, the responsibility for Trump’s push to overturn an election must
be shared by a very large number of Republican members of Congress. Rather than
contradict Trump from the beginning, they allowed his electoral fiction to
flourish. They had different reasons for doing so. One group of Republicans is
concerned above all with gaming the system to maintain power, taking full
advantage of constitutional obscurities, gerrymandering and dark money to win
elections with a minority of motivated voters. They have no interest in the
collapse of the peculiar form of representation that allows their minority
party disproportionate control of government. The most important among them,
Mitch
McConnell<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/12/us/politics/mcconnell-backs-trump-impeachment.html>,
indulged Trump’s lie while making no comment on its consequences.
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Yet other Republicans saw the situation differently: They might actually break
the system and have power without democracy. The split between these two
groups, the gamers and the breakers, became sharply visible on Dec. 30, when
Senator Josh Hawley
announced<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/30/us/politics/josh-hawley-trump-election-challenge.html>
that he would support Trump’s challenge by questioning the validity of the
electoral votes on Jan. 6. Ted Cruz then promised his own
support,<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/03/us/politics/trump-cruz-election-fraud.html>
joined by about 10 other senators. More than a hundred Republican
representatives took the same position. For many, this seemed like nothing more
than a show: challenges to states’ electoral votes would force delays and floor
votes but would not affect the outcome.
[https://static01.nyt.com/images/2021/01/17/magazine/17mag-power-02/17mag-power-02-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale]
Image[Pro-Trump extremists tried to scale the walls of the Capitol building in
Washington to bypass barriers and get inside, 2:09 p.m.]
Pro-Trump extremists tried to scale the walls of the Capitol building in
Washington to bypass barriers and get inside, 2:09 p.m.Credit...Ashley
Gilbertson/VII, for The New York Times
Yet for Congress to traduce its basic functions had a price. An elected
institution that opposes elections is inviting its own overthrow. Members of
Congress who sustained the president’s lie, despite the available and
unambiguous evidence, betrayed their constitutional mission. Making his
fictions the basis of congressional action gave them flesh. Now Trump could
demand that senators and congressmen bow to his will. He could place personal
responsibility upon Mike Pence, in charge of the formal proceedings, to pervert
them. And on Jan. 6, he directed his followers to exert pressure on these
elected representatives, which they proceeded to do: storming the Capitol
building,<https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/01/06/us/trump-mob-capitol-building.html>
searching for people to punish, ransacking the place.
Of course this did make a kind of sense: If the election really had been
stolen, as senators and congressmen were themselves suggesting, then how could
Congress be allowed to move forward? For some Republicans, the invasion of the
Capitol must have been a shock, or even a lesson. For the breakers, however, it
may have been a taste of the future. Afterward, eight senators and more than
100 representatives voted for the lie that had forced them to flee their
chambers.
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Inside the C.I.A., She Became a Spy for Planet Earth
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Image
[Rioters threatened and chased Officer Eugene Goodman inside the Capitol, 2:13
p.m.]
Rioters threatened and chased Officer Eugene Goodman inside the Capitol, 2:13
p.m.Credit...Ashley Gilbertson/VII, for The New York Times
Post-truth is pre-fascism, and Trump has been our post-truth president. When we
give up on truth, we concede power to those with the wealth and charisma to
create spectacle in its place. Without agreement about some basic facts,
citizens cannot form the civil society that would allow them to defend
themselves. If we lose the institutions that produce facts that are pertinent
to us, then we tend to wallow in attractive abstractions and fictions. Truth
defends itself particularly poorly when there is not very much of it around,
and the era of Trump — like the era of Vladimir Putin in Russia — is one of the
decline of local news. Social media is no substitute: It supercharges the
mental habits by which we seek emotional stimulation and comfort, which means
losing the distinction between what feels true and what actually is true.
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Post-truth wears away the rule of law and invites a regime of myth. These last
four years, scholars have discussed the legitimacy and value of invoking
fascism in reference to Trumpian propaganda. One comfortable position has been
to label any such effort as a direct comparison and then to treat such
comparisons as taboo. More productively, the philosopher Jason Stanley has
treated fascism as a phenomenon, as a series of patterns that can be observed
not only in interwar Europe but beyond it.
My own view is that greater knowledge of the past, fascist or otherwise, allows
us to notice and conceptualize elements of the present that we might otherwise
disregard and to think more broadly about future possibilities. It was clear to
me in October that Trump’s behavior presaged a coup, and I said so in print;
this is not because the present repeats the past, but because the past
enlightens the present.
[https://static01.nyt.com/images/2021/01/17/magazine/17mag-power-13/17mag-power-13-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale]
Image
[An angry mob confronted the police as it tried to gain entry into the Capitol,
2 p.m.]
An angry mob confronted the police as it tried to gain entry into the Capitol,
2 p.m.Credit...Ashley Gilbertson/VII, for The New York Times
Like historical fascist leaders, Trump has presented himself as the single
source of truth. His use of the term “fake news” echoed the Nazi smear
Lügenpresse (“lying press”); like the Nazis, he referred to reporters as
“enemies of the people.” Like Adolf Hitler, he came to power at a moment when
the conventional press had taken a beating; the financial crisis of 2008 did to
American newspapers what the Great Depression did to German ones. The Nazis
thought that they could use radio to replace the old pluralism of the
newspaper; Trump tried to do the same with Twitter.
Thanks to technological capacity and personal talent, Donald Trump lied at a
pace perhaps unmatched by any other leader in history. For the most part these
were small lies, and their main effect was cumulative. To believe in all of
them was to accept the authority of a single man, because to believe in all of
them was to disbelieve everything else. Once such personal authority was
established, the president could treat everyone else as the liars; he even had
the power to turn someone from a trusted adviser into a dishonest scoundrel
with a single tweet. Yet so long as he was unable to enforce some truly big
lie, some fantasy that created an alternative reality where people could live
and die, his pre-fascism fell short of the thing itself.
[https://static01.nyt.com/images/2021/01/17/magazine/17mag-power-07/17mag-power-07-articleLarge-v2.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale]
Image
[A bust of George Washington had a Trump hat placed on it, as intruders charged
through the building, 2:34 p.m.]
A bust of George Washington had a Trump hat placed on it, as intruders charged
through the building, 2:34 p.m.Credit...Ashley Gilbertson for The New York Times
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Some of his lies were, admittedly, medium-size: that he was a successful
businessman; that Russia did not support him in 2016; that Barack Obama was
born in Kenya. Such medium-size lies were the standard fare of aspiring
authoritarians in the 21st century. In Poland the right-wing party built a
martyrdom cult around assigning blame to political rivals for an airplane crash
that killed the nation’s president. Hungary’s Viktor Orban blames a vanishingly
small number of Muslim refugees for his country’s
problems<https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/04/world/europe/hungarian-leader-rebuked-for-saying-muslim-migrants-must-be-blocked-to-keep-europe-christian.html>.
But such claims were not quite big lies; they stretched but did not rend what
Hannah Arendt called “the fabric of factuality.”
One historical big lie discussed by Arendt is Joseph Stalin’s explanation of
starvation in Soviet Ukraine in 1932-33. The state had collectivized
agriculture, then applied a series of punitive measures to Ukraine that ensured
millions would die. Yet the official line was that the starving were
provocateurs, agents of Western powers who hated socialism so much they were
killing themselves. A still grander fiction, in Arendt’s account, is Hitlerian
anti-Semitism: the claims that Jews ran the world, Jews were responsible for
ideas that poisoned German minds, Jews stabbed Germany in the back during the
First World War. Intriguingly, Arendt thought big lies work only in lonely
minds; their coherence substitutes for experience and companionship.
In November 2020, reaching millions of lonely minds through social media, Trump
told a lie that was dangerously ambitious: that he had won an
election<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/14/us/trump-voters-stolen-election.html>
that in fact he had
lost.<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/14/us/politics/biden-electoral-college.html>
This lie was big in every pertinent respect: not as big as “Jews run the
world,” but big enough. The significance of the matter at hand was great: the
right to rule the most powerful country in the world and the efficacy and
trustworthiness of its succession procedures. The level of mendacity was
profound. The claim was not only wrong, but it was also made in bad faith, amid
unreliable sources. It challenged not just evidence but logic: Just how could
(and why would) an election have been rigged against a Republican president but
not against Republican senators and representatives? Trump had to speak,
absurdly, of a “Rigged (for President) Election.”
[https://static01.nyt.com/images/2021/01/17/magazine/17mag-power-03/17mag-power-03-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale]
Image
[Outside the Capitol, the crowd cheered as rioters stampeded into the building,
2:10 p.m.]
Outside the Capitol, the crowd cheered as rioters stampeded into the building,
2:10 p.m.Credit...Ashley Gilbertson/VII, for The New York Times
The force of a big lie resides in its demand that many other things must be
believed or disbelieved. To make sense of a world in which the 2020
presidential election was stolen requires distrust not only of reporters and of
experts but also of local, state and federal government institutions, from poll
workers to elected officials, Homeland Security and all the way to the Supreme
Court. It brings with it, of necessity, a conspiracy theory: Imagine all the
people who must have been in on such a plot and all the people who would have
had to work on the cover-up.
Trump’s electoral fiction floats free of verifiable reality. It is defended not
so much by facts as by claims that someone else has made some claims. The
sensibility is that something must be wrong because I feel it to be wrong, and
I know others feel the same way. When political leaders such as Ted Cruz or Jim
Jordan spoke like this, what they meant was: You believe my lies, which compels
me to repeat them. Social media provides an infinity of apparent evidence for
any conviction, especially one seemingly held by a president.
On the surface, a conspiracy theory makes its victim look strong: It sees Trump
as resisting the Democrats, the Republicans, the Deep State, the pedophiles,
the Satanists. More profoundly, however, it inverts the position of the strong
and the weak. Trump’s focus on alleged “irregularities” and “contested states”
comes down to cities where Black people live and vote. At bottom, the fantasy
of fraud is that of a crime committed by Black people against white people.
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It’s not just that electoral fraud by African-Americans against Donald Trump
never happened. It is that it is the very opposite of what happened, in 2020
and in every American election. As always, Black people waited
longer<https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/01/04/upshot/voting-wait-times.html>
than others to vote and were more likely to have their votes challenged. They
were more likely to be suffering or dying from
Covid-19,<https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/05/us/coronavirus-latinos-african-americans-cdc-data.html>
and less likely to be able to take time away from work. The historical
protection of their right to vote has been removed by the Supreme Court’s 2013
ruling in Shelby County v.
Holder,<https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/29/magazine/voting-rights-act-dream-undone.html>
and states have rushed to pass measures of a kind that historically reduce
voting by the poor and communities of color.
The claim that Trump was denied a win by fraud is a big lie not just because it
mauls logic, misdescribes the present and demands belief in a conspiracy. It is
a big lie, fundamentally, because it reverses the moral field of American
politics and the basic structure of American history.
When Senator Ted Cruz announced his intention to challenge the Electoral
College vote, he invoked the Compromise of 1877, which resolved the
presidential election of 1876. Commentators pointed out that this was no
relevant precedent, since back then there really were serious voter
irregularities and there really was a stalemate in Congress. For
African-Americans, however, the seemingly gratuitous reference led somewhere
else. The Compromise of 1877 — in which Rutherford B. Hayes would have the
presidency, provided that he withdrew federal power from the South — was the
very arrangement whereby African-Americans were driven from voting booths for
the better part of a century. It was effectively the end of Reconstruction, the
beginning of segregation, legal discrimination and Jim Crow. It is the original
sin of American history in the post-slavery era, our closest brush with fascism
so far.
If the reference seemed distant when Ted Cruz and 10 senatorial colleagues
released their statement on Jan. 2, it was brought very close four days later,
when Confederate flags were paraded through the Capitol.
[https://static01.nyt.com/images/2021/01/17/magazine/17mag-power-11/17mag-power-11-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale]
Image
[A videographer for The Daily Caller, a right-wing website, after being
pepper-sprayed during the mayhem at the Capitol, 3:45 p.m.]
A videographer for The Daily Caller, a right-wing website, after being
pepper-sprayed during the mayhem at the Capitol, 3:45 p.m.Credit...Ashley
Gilbertson/VII, for The New York Times
Some things have changed since 1877, of course. Back then, it was the
Republicans, or many of them, who supported racial equality; it was the
Democrats, the party of the South, who wanted apartheid. It was the Democrats,
back then, who called African-Americans’ votes fraudulent, and the Republicans
who wanted them counted. This is now reversed. In the past half century, since
the Civil Rights Act, Republicans have become a predominantly white party
interested — as Trump openly declared — in keeping the number of voters, and
particularly the number of Black voters, as low as possible. Yet the common
thread remains. Watching white supremacists among the people storming the
Capitol, it was easy to yield to the feeling that something pure had been
violated. It might be better to see the episode as part of a long American
argument about who deserves representation.
The Democrats, today, have become a coalition, one that does better than
Republicans with female and nonwhite voters and collects votes from both labor
unions and the college-educated. Yet it’s not quite right to contrast this
coalition with a monolithic Republican Party. Right now, the Republican Party
is a coalition of two types of people: those who would game the system (most of
the politicians, some of the voters) and those who dream of breaking it (a few
of the politicians, many of the voters). In January 2021, this was visible as
the difference between those Republicans who defended the present system on the
grounds that it favored them and those who tried to upend it.
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In the four decades since the election of Ronald Reagan, Republicans have
overcome the tension between the gamers and the breakers by governing in
opposition to government, or by calling elections a revolution (the Tea Party),
or by claiming to oppose elites. The breakers, in this arrangement, provide
cover for the gamers, putting forth an ideology that distracts from the basic
reality that government under Republicans is not made smaller but simply
diverted to serve a handful of interests.
Capitol Riot Fallout
From Riot to Impeachment
The riot inside the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, Jan.
6,<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/09/us/capitol-rioters.html?action=click&pgtype=Article&state=default&module=styln-capitol-mob-inline®ion=MAIN_CONTENT_3&context=styln-freeform>
followed a rally at which President Trump made an inflammatory
speech<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/10/us/trump-speech-riot.html?action=click&pgtype=Article&state=default&module=styln-capitol-mob-inline®ion=MAIN_CONTENT_3&context=styln-freeform>
to his supporters, questioning the results of the election. Here’s a look at
what happened and the ongoing fallout:
*
* As this video
shows<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/10/us/politics/capitol-siege-security.html?action=click&pgtype=Article&state=default&module=styln-capitol-mob-inline®ion=MAIN_CONTENT_3&context=styln-freeform>,
poor planning and a restive crowd encouraged by President Trump set the stage
for the riot.
* A two hour
period<https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/01/12/us/capitol-mob-timeline.html?action=click&pgtype=Article&state=default&module=styln-capitol-mob-inline®ion=MAIN_CONTENT_3&context=styln-freeform>
was crucial to turning the rally into the riot.
* Several Trump administration officials, including cabinet members
Betsy DeVos and Elaine Chao, announced that they were stepping
down<https://www.nytimes.com/article/trump-resignations.html?action=click&pgtype=Article&state=default&module=styln-capitol-mob-inline®ion=MAIN_CONTENT_3&context=styln-freeform>
as a result of the riot.
* Federal prosecutors have charged more than 70
people<https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/01/12/us/capitol-riot-trump/as-they-weigh-sedition-and-conspiracy-charges-prosecutors-expect-to-arrest-hundreds-tied-to-capitol-riot?action=click&pgtype=Article&state=default&module=styln-capitol-mob-inline®ion=MAIN_CONTENT_3&context=styln-freeform>,
including some who appeared in viral photos and videos of the
riot<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/10/us/politics/capitol-arrests.html?action=click&pgtype=Article&state=default&module=styln-capitol-mob-inline®ion=MAIN_CONTENT_3&context=styln-freeform>.
Officials expect to eventually charge hundreds of others.
* The House voted to impeach the
president<https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/01/13/us/politics/trump-second-impeachment-vote.html?action=click&action=click&pgtype=Article&state=default&module=styln-capitol-mob-inline®ion=MAIN_CONTENT_3&context=styln-freeform&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage>
on charges of “inciting an insurrection” that led to the rampage by his
supporters.
At first, Trump seemed like a threat to this balance. His lack of experience in
politics and his open racism made him a very uncomfortable figure for the
party; his habit of continually telling lies was initially found by prominent
Republicans to be uncouth. Yet after he won the presidency, his particular
skills as a breaker seemed to create a tremendous opportunity for the gamers.
Led by the gamer in chief, McConnell, they secured hundreds of federal judges
and tax cuts for the rich.
<https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/22/magazine/mcconnell-senate-trump.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article>
Mitch McConnell Got Everything He Wanted. But at What Cost?
Jan. 22, 2019
[https://static01.nyt.com/images/2019/01/27/magazine/27mag-mcconnell-image7/27mag-mcconnell-image7-threeByTwoSmallAt2X-v6.jpg]
Trump was unlike other breakers in that he seemed to have no ideology. His
objection to institutions was that they might constrain him personally. He
intended to break the system to serve himself — and this is partly why he has
failed. Trump is a charismatic politician and inspires devotion not only among
voters but among a surprising number of lawmakers, but he has no vision that is
greater than himself or what his admirers project upon him. In this respect his
pre-fascism fell short of fascism: His vision never went further than a mirror.
He arrived at a truly big lie not from any view of the world but from the
reality that he might lose something.
Yet Trump never prepared a decisive blow. He lacked the support of the
military, some of whose leaders he had alienated. (No true fascist would have
made the mistake he did there, which was to openly love foreign dictators;
supporters convinced that the enemy was at home might not mind, but those sworn
to protect from enemies abroad did.) Trump’s secret police force, the men
carrying out snatch operations in
Portland,<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/20/opinion/portland-protests-trump.html>
was violent but also small and ludicrous. Social media proved to be a blunt
weapon: Trump could announce his intentions on Twitter, and white supremacists
could plan their invasion of the Capitol on Facebook or Gab. But the president,
for all his lawsuits and entreaties and threats to public officials, could not
engineer a situation that ended with the right people doing the wrong thing.
Trump could make some voters believe that he had won the 2020 election, but he
was unable to bring institutions along with his big lie. And he could bring his
supporters to Washington and send them on a rampage in the Capitol, but none
appeared to have any very clear idea of how this was to work or what their
presence would accomplish. It is hard to think of a comparable insurrectionary
moment, when a building of great significance was seized, that involved so much
milling around.
[https://static01.nyt.com/images/2021/01/17/magazine/17mag-power-12-02/17mag-power-12-02-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale]
Image
[A woman who had been pepper-sprayed leaned on the eastern door to the
Capitol’s rotunda, 3:47 p.m.]
A woman who had been pepper-sprayed leaned on the eastern door to the Capitol’s
rotunda, 3:47 p.m.Credit...Ashley Gilbertson/VII, for The New York Times
The lie outlasts the liar. The idea that Germany lost the First World War in
1918 because of a Jewish “stab in the back” was 15 years old when Hitler came
to power. How will Trump’s myth of victimhood function in American life 15
years from now? And to whose benefit?
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On Jan. 7, Trump called for a peaceful transition of power, implicitly
conceding that his putsch had failed. Even then, though, he repeated and even
amplified his electoral fiction: It was now a sacred cause for which people had
sacrificed. Trump’s imagined stab in the back will live on chiefly thanks to
its endorsement by members of Congress. In November and December 2020,
Republicans repeated it, giving it a life it would not otherwise have had. In
retrospect, it now seems as though the last shaky compromise between the gamers
and the breakers was the idea that Trump should have every chance to prove that
wrong had been done to him. That position implicitly endorsed the big lie for
Trump supporters who were inclined to believe it. It failed to restrain Trump,
whose big lie only grew bigger.
The breakers and the gamers then saw a different world ahead, where the big lie
was either a treasure to be had or a danger to be avoided. The breakers had no
choice but to rush to be first to claim to believe in it. Because the breakers
Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz must compete to claim the brimstone and bile, the
gamers were forced to reveal their own hand, and the division within the
Republican coalition became visible on Jan. 6. The invasion of the Capitol only
reinforced this division. To be sure, a few senators withdrew their objections,
but Cruz and Hawley moved forward anyway, along with six other senators. More
than 100 representatives doubled down on the big lie. Some, like Matt Gaetz,
even added their own flourishes, such as the claim that the mob was led not by
Trump’s supporters but by his opponents.
Trump is, for now, the martyr in chief, the high priest of the big lie. He is
the leader of the breakers, at least in the minds of his supporters. By now,
the gamers do not want Trump around. Discredited in his last weeks, he is
useless; shorn of the obligations of the presidency, he will become
embarrassing again, much as he was in 2015. Unable to provide cover for their
gamesmanship, he will be irrelevant to their daily purposes. But the breakers
have an even stronger reason to see Trump disappear: It is impossible to
inherit from someone who is still around. Seizing Trump’s big lie might appear
to be a gesture of support. In fact it expresses a wish for his political
death. Transforming the myth from one about Trump to one about the nation will
be easier when he is out of the way.
As Cruz and Hawley may learn, to tell the big lie is to be owned by it. Just
because you have sold your soul does not mean that you have driven a hard
bargain. Hawley shies from no level of hypocrisy; the son of a banker, educated
at Stanford University and Yale Law School, he denounces elites. Insofar as
Cruz was thought to have a principle, it was that of states’ rights, which
Trump’s calls to action brazenly violated. A joint statement Cruz issued about
the senators’ challenge to the vote nicely captured the post-truth aspect of
the whole: It never alleged that there was fraud, only that there were
allegations of fraud. Allegations of allegations, allegations all the way down.
[https://static01.nyt.com/images/2021/01/17/magazine/17mag-power-08/17mag-power-08-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale]
Image
[A mixture of tear gas discharged by police and fire-extinguisher residue
discharged by pro-Trump extremists hung in the air of the Rotunda as the crowd
milled about, 2:38 p.m.]
A mixture of tear gas discharged by police and fire-extinguisher residue
discharged by pro-Trump extremists hung in the air of the Rotunda as the crowd
milled about, 2:38 p.m.Credit...Ashley Gilbertson/VII, for The New York Times
The big lie requires commitment. When Republican gamers do not exhibit enough
of that, Republican breakers call them “RINOs”: Republicans in name only. This
term once suggested a lack of ideological commitment. It now means an
unwillingness to throw away an election. The gamers, in response, close ranks
around the Constitution and speak of principles and traditions. The breakers
must all know (with the possible exception of the Alabama senator Tommy
Tuberville) that they are participating in a sham, but they will have an
audience of tens of millions who do not.
If Trump remains present in American political life, he will surely repeat his
big lie incessantly. Hawley and Cruz and the other breakers share
responsibility for where this leads. Cruz and Hawley seem to be running for
president. Yet what does it mean to be a candidate for office and denounce
voting? If you claim that the other side has cheated, and your supporters
believe you, they will expect you to cheat yourself. By defending Trump’s big
lie on Jan. 6, they set a precedent: A Republican presidential candidate who
loses an election should be appointed anyway by Congress. Republicans in the
future, at least breaker candidates for president, will presumably have a Plan
A, to win and win, and a Plan B, to lose and win. No fraud is necessary; only
allegations that there are allegations of fraud. Truth is to be replaced by
spectacle, facts by faith.
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Trump’s coup attempt of 2020-21, like other failed coup attempts, is a warning
for those who care about the rule of law and a lesson for those who do not. His
pre-fascism revealed a possibility for American politics. For a coup to work in
2024, the breakers will require something that Trump never quite had: an angry
minority, organized for nationwide violence, ready to add intimidation to an
election. Four years of amplifying a big lie just might get them this. To claim
that the other side stole an election is to promise to steal one yourself. It
is also to claim that the other side deserves to be punished.
Informed observers inside and outside government agree that right-wing white
supremacism is the greatest terrorist threat to the United States. Gun sales in
2020 hit an astonishing high. History shows that political violence follows
when prominent leaders of major political parties openly embrace paranoia.
Our big lie is typically American, wrapped in our odd electoral system,
depending upon our particular traditions of racism. Yet our big lie is also
structurally fascist, with its extreme mendacity, its conspiratorial thinking,
its reversal of perpetrators and victims and its implication that the world is
divided into us and them. To keep it going for four years courts terrorism and
assassination.
When that violence comes, the breakers will have to react. If they embrace it,
they become the fascist faction. The Republican Party will be divided, at least
for a time. One can of course imagine a dismal reunification: A breaker
candidate loses a narrow presidential election in November 2024 and cries
fraud, the Republicans win both houses of Congress and rioters in the street,
educated by four years of the big lie, demand what they see as justice. Would
the gamers stand on principle if those were the circumstances of Jan. 6, 2025?
To be sure, this moment is also a chance. It is possible that a divided
Republican Party might better serve American democracy; that the gamers,
separated from the breakers, might start to think of policy as a way to win
elections. It is very likely that the Biden-Harris administration will have an
easier first few months than expected; perhaps obstructionism will give way, at
least among a few Republicans and for a short time, to a moment of
self-questioning. Politicians who want Trumpism to end have a simple way
forward: Tell the truth about the election.
America will not survive the big lie just because a liar is separated from
power. It will need a thoughtful repluralization of media and a commitment to
facts as a public good. The racism structured into every aspect of the coup
attempt is a call to heed our own history. Serious attention to the past helps
us to see risks but also suggests future possibility. We cannot be a democratic
republic if we tell lies about race, big or small. Democracy is not about
minimizing the vote nor ignoring it, neither a matter of gaming nor of breaking
a system, but of accepting the equality of others, heeding their voices and
counting their votes.
________________________________
Timothy Snyder is the Levin professor of history at Yale University and the
author of histories of political atrocity including “Bloodlands” and “Black
Earth,” as well as the book “On Tyranny,” on America’s turn toward
authoritarianism. His most recent book is “Our Malady,” a memoir of his own
near-fatal illness reflecting on the relationship between health and freedom.
Ashley Gilbertson is an Australian photojournalist with the VII Photo Agency
living in New York. Gilbertson has covered migration and conflict
internationally for over 20 years.
Correction: Jan. 13, 2021
A picture caption with an earlier version of this essay misidentified as a
rioter a shirtless man shown outside a broken door at the Capitol. He was a
videographer who removed his shirt after being pepper-sprayed while covering
the event for The Daily Caller, a right-wing website, not one of the Trump
supporters who stormed the Capitol. The original caption stated that he had
punched the door; in fact, he said he was attempting to retrieve his phone,
with which he had been documenting the event.
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