One Year In

 Yesterday was the one-year anniversary of the events of last January 6, events that even a full year later feel difficult to assign the past and reference as something firmly put behind us. Just the opposite is the truth, actually: in some profound ways, it feels like the “real” work of dealing with the events of that day still lies almost wholly in front of us. Nor would it be hard to explain why it feels that way. It took almost six months for the House of Representatives to vote to create a select committee dedicated to investigating the insurrection, if that’s what it was, of last January, and even then the decision to proceed just barely squeaked through. So that was almost half a year wasted and a lot of our nation’s leaders openly opposed to the nation undertaking the kind of thoughtful reckoning that possibly could put the events of January 6 firmly in the past. And then, once the panel finally began working, the sheer volume of material its members had to wade through was beyond daunting: they have to date heard reports from more than three hundred witnesses of various sorts, including members of the Capitol Police force, and issued more than forty subpoenas requesting testimony and documents from a wide variety to souls connected, or believed possibly to be connected, to the events of that day. Nor do they appear to be anywhere near the end of their work as they go public, so to speak, with hearing that we will all be able to follow if we wish. Eventually, of course, they will issue a report. Possibly by November. But I don’t see that report bringing the incident and its aftermath to a close. Far more likely, I think, is that the events of January 6 will become a permanent part of our national self-conception, something in the way that Pearl Harbor or the fall of Saigon or 9/11 theoretically slid into the past but somehow remained nonetheless etched in the national consciousness as a permanent feature of our national present. (The past and the present are only theoretically contiguous, after all; as any student of Jewish history knows, it is perfectly possible for events that occurred in the past also to exist, and to exist fully and palpably, in the present.)

There are, however, deeper issues afoot here, issues related more to philosophy than to history.

Our nation has a deeply ambiguous attitude towards rebelliousness, insurrection, and revolution. The founders of our nation, after all, were insurrectionists who made the conscious decision to turn their backs on the law of the land and to rise up in armed insurrection against the legitimate king of their own country. The British did what they could to put down the revolt, but were in the end unsuccessful in preventing the birth of our nation. And so was set the stage for an American people destined (or do I mean doomed?) both endlessly to admire the nation’s founders for their daring, their bravery, and their righteous iconoclasm, and, at the same time, to think nothing of punishing violent insurrectionists who take up arms against the state or its duly elected government officials as though such was not the very kettle in which our nation was cooked up less than two and a half centuries ago.

The leaders of the Confederacy felt they were following the Founders’ lead in seceding from the mother country and going to war to secure their own future independence. This was hardly a secret: President Lincoln addressed that specific assertion in his address to Congress on Independence Day in 1861. As my contribution to the discussion regarding January 6 as the first-year anniversary passes and we await the report of the House Select Committee, I would like to review his words with you and explain what they mean to me personally.

It was a fraught time in our nation’s history. Just the previous February, the six states that had seceded from the Union (South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana) formed the Confederate States of America. Five more (Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee) would soon follow. The bombardment of Fort Sumter had just taken place in April, making a peaceful solution to the crisis more or less impossible to imagine. And, indeed, President Lincoln, who responded to the fall of Fort Sumter by calling for 75,000 volunteers to defeat the Confederacy, soon added a request for an additional 43,000. Some skirmishes and smaller battles had already been fought. The question on the table was whether a nation conceived in armed, seditious rebellion was going to use the full force of its military to put down an armed, seditious rebellion on the part of eleven of its states. It was that specific question that President Lincoln came to Congress that July 4 to address.

It was, to say the very least, a pivotal moment in the history of the republic. And, indeed, things were to get bloody very quickly: the first major battle of the Civil War,  the First Battle of Bull Run, was not three weeks in the future when Lincoln came to the rostrum. But first, before sending our troops into battle, Lincoln needed to explain why insurrection could not be tolerated.

Some of his arguments were arguably weak. The argument, for example, that the states cannot secede because they have no other legal existence other than as states of the Union does not impress: could not the same have been said about the thirteen colonies in the 1780s? Similarly, the argument that states may not secede because there exists, or should exist, not enmity but friendship between the states seems unconvincing. (Do we expect unhappy couples to stay together because they were once happily married to each other?)

But the argument that Lincoln stressed the most passionately and at the greatest length had to do with the role destiny assigned to the United States at the time of its inception by making of it the only functioning democracy in the world. (The only other national experiment with democracy—the one triggered by the French Revolution—had failed by then and led directly to the efforts of Napoleon to conquer the world and create, not a French republic but a French empire.) And so he laid out his argument against the backdrop of history itself.

The question of the legitimacy of insurrection, the President declared, “embraces more than the fate of these United States. It presents to the whole family of man the question of whether a constitutional republic or democracy—a government of the people, by the same people—can or cannot maintain its territorial integrity against its own domestic foes. It presents the question whether the discontented individuals…can always—upon the pretenses made in this case or on any other pretenses, or arbitrarily without any pretense— break up the government and thus practically put an end to free government upon the earth. It forces us to ask: ‘Is there, in all republics, this inherent and fatal weakness? Must a government, of necessity, be too strong for the liberties of its own people or too weak to maintain its own existence?’”

Lincoln clearly took the long view when it came to history. The evolution of systems of human governance had led to absolute monarchies and the excesses and cruelty that such absolutism almost invariably brings in its wake: as Lord Acton would write in 1887 but as Lincoln clearly already knew years earlier, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Six months later, Lincoln would return to this theme in his annual Message to Congress on December 1, 1862, a speech delivered just a few days before the largest battle of the Civil War, the Battle of Fredericksburg, was to get underway. The stakes couldn’t have been higher. And the President couldn’t have been more eloquent:

Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history…The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We—even we here—hold the power, and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.

And that is why the argument that the insurrectionists of January 6 were merely citizens exercising their First Amendment right to speak freely and freely to gather fails to convince. By entering the Capitol illegally, by unambiguously threatening to murder lawmakers (including the Vice President of the United States acting that day in his role as President of the Senate), by seeking to intimidate the Congress into falsifying the results of the 2020 election, and by showing contempt for the peace officers in place to maintain order in our nation’s most sacred space, the insurrectionists were revolting against the core values of Americanism not all that differently than did the leaders of the Confederacy in their day.

President Lincoln was right to refuse the leaders of the Confederacy the right to dismember the nation and frustrate its national destiny. People who revere Lincoln’s memory, myself certainly included, have no choice but to support the current administration in its decision to pursue the insurrectionists of last January to the fullest extent that the law allows.