The Fire This Time: First Thoughts on the Capitol Riot

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

William Butler Yeats (1919) The Second Coming

The attack on the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021 was an unspeakable tragedy. The last four years have seen an unprecedented assault on American democracy and its institutions by President Donald Trump and his supporters. The main question is “What does the future hold?” Has out country been so damaged by the divisiveness we are seeing that there is little hope to put it back together?  Are these lines from Yeats what we can expect in the future:

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.”

To my mind there are three issues that need to be addressed if we are going to heal our country.  These are “truth,” “norms,” and “tolerance.” I will address each of these in turn.

Truth.  There are many problems we face, but it seems to me the core problem is the death of “truth,” murdered by Donald Trump.  How do we know that something is true?  This turns out to be a deep philosophical question, debated extensively in the field of epistemology. Do railroad tracks converge, as our eyes show us, or is the convergence a trick our mind plays on us?  And if the latter is the case, how do we know which of our perceptions are correct and which are “tricks?” If “knowing” whether our perceptions are telling us the truth is more complicated than we thought at first blush, how do we “know” the truth of things we don’t perceive directly, for example, something that happened in another town or another century?

Knowing things we don’t directly observe makes us dependent on the authority of others. American history books declare that the United States fought a Civil War between 1861 and 1865. The authority that that war occurred is seldom challenged. But authorities differ on the causes of that war. To use another example, all authorities today say that the earth is a globe, but in the fifteenth century that was a disputed view.

I would argue that most of what we believe is dependent on the authorities we trust. It used to be the case that we trusted scientific authority, because science was celebrated for the rigor of its method of pursuing truth. That didn’t mean that today’s scientific truth would be believed for all time, because a central part of the scientific method is continually testing the truth and changing it in the face of new research. (Early in the pandemic the CDC did not believe there was evidence that masks reduced the spread of the coronavirus; months of research led them to a new understanding of how masks worked, but the lack of evidence on the efficacy of mask in the early days of the pandemic continues to confuse the American people). 

Science has been under attack in America since at least 1925, when the State of Tennessee decided to try John Scopes over his teaching of evolution. Since then, some Americans have doubted the science behind evolution, climate change and vaccinations. Of particular note, is the ongoing belief that Covid-19 is a hoax along with its security measures such as quarantines, mask wearing and social distancing. 

Decades before Donald Trump, philosophers and artists were celebrating the dawn of the Post-Modern Era, an era characterized by “by broad skepticism, subjectivism, or relativism; a general suspicion of reason; and an acute sensitivity to the role of ideology in asserting and maintaining political and economic power.” This dismissal of “modern” thinking (i.e., rational thinking), particularly as put forward in the Enlightenment, led to intellectual anarchy, especially in politics. As Michiko Kakutani, writes in her book, The Death of Truth, “”Without commonly agreed-upon facts — not Republican facts and Democratic facts; not the alternative facts of today’s silo-world — there can be no rational debate over policies, no substantive means of evaluating candidates for political office, and no way to hold elected officials accountable to the people. Without truth, democracy is hobbled. The founders recognized this, and those seeking democracy’s survival must recognize it today.”

Without truth as an anchor, people will believe the most outlandish things, such as the QAnon belief that the Democratic Party is filled with pedophiles, or Donald Trump’s lie that the 2020 Presidential Election was marked by such significant fraud that the result reported by almost all public and private institutions, a significant Biden victory, was untrue. To believe the lie of a Trump victory, one would have to believe that there was an all-encompassing conspiracy involving the courts (many of which had Republican judges), the states (many of whom had Republican governors or secretaries of state), and the Republican Attorney General of the United States. This broad conspiracy seems to have affected only the presidential election, as Republicans scored significant victories down-ballot.  A modicum of common sense would lead one to reject a broad, complex conspiracy with so many players and so little truth.  But common sense is in short supply these days.

For example, the following appeared in The Washington Post:

“Clinton Lynn, a retired fire captain, firmly believes the widespread conspiracy theory that the election was stolen from President Trump, and he says that those who share his views are finding an ever-narrowing path to express their outrage, losing at the ballot box, the jury box and now the soapbox. If you take away those things, he says, what is left?

‘I’m so mad, I see red about the [expletive] steal,” said Lynn, 64, sitting in his Kansas farmhouse over the weekend. “I believe with all my heart that the Democratic Party stole the election, and I will never believe otherwise as long as I draw breath. Liberals, you’re driving us to civil war.’”

This big lie, that the Democrats stole the election from Donald Trump, was the root cause of the assault on the Capitol on January 6. The major question the American polity has going forward is how to restore a common, broadly accepted “truth,” when the lie that the election was stolen is believed by perhaps 70% of Republicans.  More importantly, at least 139 Republican members of the House supported objections to the electoral ballots sent to the Congress by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and 121 members objected to the Arizona results, despite Arizona having a Republican Governor.

Norms.  Society is held together by beliefs, not laws. The dictionary defines norms as “a principle of right action binding upon the members of a group and serving to guide, control, or regulate proper and acceptable behavior.”  The broad acceptance of social norms, such as one can’t walk naked in a public street or cheating is unacceptable, is necessary for society to function. It would be impossible to enforce good behavior through laws because of the burden that would place on the legal system. So, while there are laws against indecency and laws against most forms of cheating, people are expected to behave well because they accept norms as a guide to their behavior, not because they are afraid of being punished.

President Trump shattered the norms of presidential behavior before he even assumed the Presidency.  Among other things, he has:

• Refused to make public his tax returns
• Refused to divest himself of his business interests
• Refused oversight by departmental inspector generals
• Interfered in investigations by the Department of Justice
• Insulted allies and cozied up to adversaries
• Repeatedly lied to such an extent that he threatens the idea of truth
• Coarsened presidential discourse
• Continuously insulted people gratuitously (No president ever made up nicknames to demean his rivals)
• Espoused racism and antisemitism
• Interfered in the judicial process and attacking judges he doesn’t like
• Ignored Congress and its appropriations role by moving money around as he wished
• Undermined the national security apparatus of the U.S. Government
• Contradicted science
• Ignored the nation’s business while concentrating on his re-election (the most egregious example is his lack of concern about the Covid-19 pandemic)
• Undermined faith in the 2020 election
• Refused to promise a peaceful transfer of power to Joe Biden
• Refused to show even a modicum of decency in appearing with Biden at the inauguration

The question that faces us is whether Trump’s behavior was an aberration or the beginning of a trend. Will we face the same kind of destructive behavior in 2024 or not? It doesn’t feel like we’ve been inoculated against this type of norm-breaking.

Tolerance.  In my last post I discussed why “tolerance” was the hallmark of liberal democracy (in its classic sense). Sadly, tolerance is in short supply today. Is there any way to make tolerance more the norm than intolerance? This is especially difficult when truth is relative and the norm of behavior is incivility.

There are a number of places where one can find advice on how to become more tolerant, but the question here is how can tolerance become a stronger social value in the wake of the increasing division of American society? How can we become less tribal?

It is easy enough to analyze the social disease we are suffering from, but what cures are available?  I will discuss this in my next post.