As an aspirational statement,
this is presumably true. As
a factual statement, however,
it is obviously false.
If we wish to move beyond an era of
alternative facts, it is necessary that
Americans acknowledge that this is
indeed “who we, as Americans, are”
at this moment in time.
What should we make of this unpleasant
fact? To begin to put into
perspective the mob’s attack on the
Capitol and the tasks now facing the
Biden administration, let’s start with
three basic points.
Historical perspective
The first is that, in a historical perspective,
the mob’s invasion of the
Capitol was unusual only in the choice
of target, and that the difference in
choice of target is explicable simply
in terms of changes in technology that
reduce the significance of geographic
distance and that facilitate the national,
rather than local, organization
of protests and the assembly of large
groups at distant locations.
Insurrectionary mob attacks on
the institutions of government have
historically been a regular form of
political action in America. It was an
angry mob in March 1770 that assaulted
British troops guarding the
Customs House in Boston, precipitating
the “Boston Massacre.” In 1794, it
took President George Washington at
the head of an army of 13,000 to reimpose
federal law when, in the socalled
“Whiskey Rebellion,” mobs of
ordinary Americans attacked federal
marshals. In October 1859 at Harpers
Ferry, Virginia, John Brown and
his ordinary, common-folk followers,
seized the federal arsenal and -- however
laudable their cause -- sought
to start an armed revolt against the
Republic. Two years later, an angry
Baltimore mob took it upon itself to
assault federalized Pennsylvania and
Massachusetts militia, spilling the
first blood in what would turn into
the American Civil War. The list could
go on and on.
It would be easy to attribute this
long history of mob violence to the
nation’s frontier mentality or to some
sort of inherent American thuggishness.
This, however, would miss a
far deeper truth. The acceptance of
violent insurrection as “normal” (if
unusual) political behavior is rooted
in American political theory.
From nearly the very beginning of
colonial settlement, Americans assumed
that any government – even
one they elected themselves and even
one operating under a Constitution
they themselves wrote – would eventually
become tyrannical. The protection
of individual “natural rights”
(including what many Americans in
1861 believed to be their natural right
to own slaves) was assumed to require
a willingness to take up arms against
the government. In the face of sustained
tyranny, armed insurrection
was not simply a political option: it
was a political duty. Indeed, this is
precisely why Americans insisted on
the Second Amendment to their Constitution,
which guaranteed that the
government could never deny ordinary
Americans “the right to bear arms.”
Facts and beliefs
The second important observation is
that a substantial number of Americans
do in fact believe that the American
government has become tyrannical.
It is easy to dismiss such beliefs
as completely delusional, part of the
same unhinged mindset that credulously
accepts QAnon’s claims that the
government is composed of Satanist,
cannibalistic pedophiles. And certainly,
some of the Americans who believe
the U.S. government is tyrannical are
delusional: the claim that the 2020
election was “stolen,” for example,
is both completely implausible and
apparently completely impervious to
evidence or rational argument.
This said – and in no way minimizing
the criminal culpability of
demagogues, including former President
Donald Trump, in popularizing
and giving credibility to outrageously
false claims – what ultimately separates
Americans who see the American
government as tyrannical from those
who do not is not their ability to think
rationally but their definition of what
constitutes tyranny. It is always risky
to try to explain the thinking of individuals
when those individuals are
themselves not conscious of the roots
of their thinking. In this case, however,
a careful dissection of rhetoric and
arguments is very revealing.
© ISTOCK BY GETTYIMAGES
The acceptance of violent
insurrection as “normal”
(if unusual) political
behavior is rooted in
American political theory.
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