Jennifer Rubin, who writes opinion columns for The Washington Post, wrote a column back in July which explained "Why we should care about the 187 minutes." I absolutely agree with Rubin that we should "care" what the President of the United States did during 187 minutes on January 6, 2021, a period during which an inflamed crowd invaded the United States Capitol Building, trying to hunt down Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House, and Vice President Mike Pence.
Disrupting the official counting of the electoral votes in the 2020 election, which was lost by the president, was the ultimate objective of the January 6th insurrection. "Killing" Nancy Pelosi and "hanging" Mike Pence were possible avenues to that end, which at least some in the crowd seemed to contemplate as something worth doing. We definitely need to "care" about who did what, and when, during that 187 minutes - and we particularly need to understand the exact role played by the president. I am in complete agreement with Rubin on that.
There is, however, something Rubin said in her column that I think should be challenged. I have highlighted the concern I have, below:
If Trump, as president, failed to activate the armed services during a foreign attack on our homeland — or worse, put out tweets praising the attackers — it would be tantamount to treason. In the face of domestic terrorism, his obligation to act was no less clear.
The GOP’s refusal to prevent him from seeking office again (first by failing to convict him at his impeachment trial and now by declining to oppose his participation in the primaries) amounts to ratification of Trump’s treachery. It is also an indication of the depths of the party’s depravity (emphasis added).
I have been reading about the French Revolution, as I have revealed before. I am getting near the end of Jeremy Popkin's book, A New World Begins, and I am currently being reminded about the "Reign of Terror," the next to final stage of the French Revolution, in which individual guilt - leading to a summary death on the guillotine - was legally and officially based on a person's organizational affiliations.
I do not think it is wise (and in fact I think it is illegitimate) to accuse a "party" of bad conduct, thus implicitly attributing to all those who are members of the "party" the alleged "depravity" that is charged against the party collectively. In other words, in the excerpt from the Rubin column that I have included above, the first paragraph talks about the individual responsibility of President Trump. That seems to me to be a completely proper inquiry, as I have said. What did the president do during those 187 minutes? He should be answerable for his individual action (or non-action) during that critical time period.
The second paragraph of Rubin's article, however, appears to accuse the Republican Party, collectively, of "depravity," and that is a charge that necessarily includes all those who are members of the party. I think that goes too far. I think we need to challenge ourselves not to think collectively. Labeling as "depraved," or "deplorable," those who have a different political affiliation from our own is neither prudent nor just. That goes, of course, for both of our major political parties. Such attributions of collective responsibility are made from both sides.
Individuals do bad things. Individuals, in fact, might be "depraved," but once we start saying that members of a party are "depraved," simply because they are party members, we are on the way to a modern version of the kind of social, political, and economic division that brought France's experiment with democracy to an end.
Can our own democracy be brought to an end if we start assigning collective guilt to a "party" (and thus, implicitly, to all of its members)? Both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party seem to be aimed in that direction, and Rubin's reference to the "depravity" of the Republican Party is just one (and a rather minor) example.
With or without any reference to the French Revolution, here's my plea: Let's not go there.
Image Credit:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/19/jan-6-committee-final-hearing-what-trump-inaction-means/
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