Four years too late…
That was my thought seeing the huge fence go up around the Capitol. The seat of our democracy is now surrounded by rings of fencing, scores of police vehicles and hundreds of officers. And that’s just what I saw as I traversed the vast perimeter on a bike.
No longer are there just velvet ropes and officers in windbreakers to protect the counting and certification of Electoral Votes.
January 6th is now a National Special Security Event, with the powers of the vast American government now mobilized to protect democracy from American citizens.
I hope this is the end of naïveté. As Americans we possess a kind of shared delusion. We’re the indispensable nation. The city on a hill. The good guys.
But if you read American history, and read it carefully, you can see the truth behind the soaring rhetoric: we were a nation founded in blood, born out of a civil war that pitted neighbor against neighbor.
Not that Civil War – but the one we fought in 1776 to escape the rule of a king. The losers got tarred, feathered and shipped off to Canada.
While the Constitution said that all men were created equal, slavery was written in our founding document and Southern slaveholders were our first leaders.
Mobocracy was the rule. Books were banned in the South (like Uncle Tom’s Cabin), slavery could not be mentioned in Congress and publishing an editorial about abolition would get you and your printing press thrown into the river.
Force was used against anyone who stood in the way of white men making a dollar. Native Americans were exterminated by armies, militias and vigilante mobs.
Later, we would develop this fiction that we are different than our violent, lawless ancestors.
January 6th should teach us that we’re not. Hopefully, the Democrats have caught on that we’re not living in an episode of the West Wing.
The best speech doesn’t win. The most powerful force does, whether that’s a shrewd political operator like Bill Clinton or a ruthless general like Sherman (who should’ve razed more of the South).
There is no need for the fence around the Capitol. The rioters won.
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