Using the above words to describe Jan. 6th is not hyperbole.
I’m calling it “minimizing and downplaying” because that is literally what you are doing. And the neat thing is that by doing so, you get to pretend that reality is “hyperbole”.
I refer you back to your original description of the January 6 attack on the Capitol Building.
It is certainly a “fact” that one rioter died and a cop had a heart attack, but it is also a gross misrepresentation of the events of the day and their significance. Why did you do this?
And many of your “facts” are strawmen. Nobody here is claiming that the rioters were, on the day, going to successfully overturn democracy. What they were likely to do was murder several elected officials, including the Vice President. We are simply lucky that they did not succeed.
What is going to overturn democracy is the fact that the President of the United States, the rest of the Republican Party and multiple media outlets with the aid of a hostile foreign power spent months if not years inciting irrational fear and anger in half the population, attacking the legitimacy of elections and actively encouraging them to be violent, even directing and facilitating the events of January 6, and now are pretending that what happened was insignificant and are actively blocking any accountability for their actions, while continuing to inculcate that fear and anger and to continue to use violent rhetoric and to further undermine democratic processes.
That is what will bring about fascism in America - the destruction of democracy and the rule of law, as represented by what happened on that day and the reactions of nearly half the country to it. But you consider that a “nothingburger”.
You need to calm down, and dial it back to the genesis of the thread–the idea of splitting the country. My initial comments here were that it is overwhelmingly likely that the United States will continue on as it has, as a democratic country. The United States is not a perfect democracy, I have sometimes used the phrase “limited democracy” to describe the system the founders left us with. That system ought be improved, and it is certainly better than fascism, and it has created lots of wealth, high quality of life, and broad personal freedoms for a huge number of people. If you talk about the nexus of wealth, population size, quality of life and number of personal freedoms enjoy, we stand alone among all other nations on earth.
Anti-democratic currents are not unheard of in our system, in fact The Federalist Papers, considered one of our best windows into the thinking of the founders, would be considered in part anti-democratic by modern standards. The Capitol Rioters don’t represent anything dramatically new, and even a swathe of the Republican party drifting into anti-democratic beliefs itself isn’t entirely new. What does worry me is the party elites that used to keep things in the rails have either retired, died, or converted to a more dangerous form of conservatism. For that reason, I have never said we should just skip around rolling a hoop with a stick and pretend everything is fine and dandy.
But what I have said is we are likely to continue on and be just fine. The Capitol Riot, in assessing whether that is true or not, amounts to a nothing burger to me. It’s a foot note to history, little more. I’ll note that we lost far more freedoms through the actions of our elected leaders in the wake of 9/11 than we did the Capitol Riot.
To actually justify breaking up the country you’re simply going to need a far greater amount of evidence things are all that bad, because breaking up the country will be hell on earth, there should be a very high bar to pursue such an activity.
You need to explain why you deliberately minimized the events of the day.
In relation to the OP, the country isn’t going to split into separate entities for reason I and others have pointed out. But that doesn’t mean the country to going to be “fine”.
The Capitol Rioters do represent something dramatically new, no matter how many apples and oranges you continue to compare. And it isn’t a “swathe” of the GOP; it’s virtually all of it including its leaders and all of its media outlets.
Hmm.
Much like the Beer Hall Putsch. A total nothingburger… this time.
~ 1000 people tried to overthrow the government. 5 people died and 100’s injured. Congress people running for their lives. All incited because a moronic child of a president lost an election, and want’s to be a dictator and had his feelings hurt.
A nothing burger you say. Well I guess we know where you stand.
We once had something like 9 million try to overthrow the government, and they raised up an actual army to try to effect it. A thousand-person riot is a nothing burger.
You sound like you were totally NOT a cop on duty that day.
5 people died? Ok, but two were heart attacks, one stroke, and one drug overdose.
It isn’t about the (regrettable) loss of life, or the size of the crowd; it is that a group of non-marginalized citizens who didn’t like the outcome of the election did the bidding of a would-be demagogue in attacking security forces, invaded the Capitol Building, vandalized offices and pursued elected officials with threats of injury or death, and attempted to interfere (however ineffectually) with the certification of a presidential election, and did so not in the dark of night but with great pride and publication, and that millions of people are basically of the opinion of “Not that there is anything wrong with that,” @Martin_Hyde apparently included. It was a stupidly ill-conceived and ineffectual insurrection that looks like a mashup of National Lampoon’s Animal House with a zombie apocalypse student film someone made with $500 worth of gear from Army-Navy Surplus, but it was still an insurrection.
Stranger
“Yes, they blew up your house and killed your entire family, but compared to Hiroshima it’s a nothingburger.”
Is that the metric we’re going by now?
It’s funny how the ‘Back the Blue’ crowd suddenly either went very quiet about the attacked police on January 6 (140 injured, remember) or have actively engaged in a smear campaign against them.
( cough ) Shay’s Rebellion (cough )
It’s just a shame we didn’t have General Lincoln’s cannon to pepper that crowd with grape shot the way we did with Shay’s.
It’s like you’ve never even heard of the Eastman Memo. Have you?
The puzzle pieces of the election theft were: the Eastman memo, a mob to intimidate Congress into adopting it, a pliant Supreme Court, and VP Mike Pence to sign off on the whole deal.
The only thing standing between democracy and a fascist coup was Mike Fucking Pence inexplicably growing a backbone and standing up to Trump.
You can be assured that when Trump wins in 2024, the #1 qualifier for a VP pick will be a willingness to stand on stage and shamelessly proclaim that, come Jan 6 2025, unlike traitor Mike Pence, he will stand in front of the country and reject whatever voter slates Trump doesn’t like. Put that in the bank.
Not quite. Pence didn’t grow a spine; he simply didn’t have any way to actually do what Trump was asking him to do. And Trump sent a mob to kill him. Even as the rioters were looking for Pence and his family and were chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” (as a gallows was being constructed outside), Trump was denigrating Pence on Twitter for not doing what he wanted.
You don’t think Pence could have made the Eastman Memo work? The roadmap clearly was there. Granted, electoral-vote theft would have been blatantly illegal and wouldn’t have survived a court challenge. But it only had to survive until noon on January 20th, not nearly enough time to litigate it in the Federalist-infested court system.
I can’t explain why Pence didn’t execute it. Maybe he thought it was too much of a longshot. Perhaps his spine was stiffened by being fed up taking Trump’s shit. Maybe while he was under attack, he became angry and grew a temporary partial testicle. Perhaps he feared consequences for stealing the election. (A wildly misguided fear, it turns out, but not negligible.)
We’ll never know why Pence didn’t execute, but you can be guaranteed that this will be a litmus test of every Republican VP going forward: are you willing to aggressively reject whatever electoral slates the boss says? And there will be more takers than you can possibly imagine.
And if parts of that memo had actually been effected, we’d have had a serious constitutional crisis. But the Eastman Memo is not remotely the first time a President has tried to find ways around constitutional rules he dislikes. Nothing came of it, and key figures in government took no material actions in regards to interfering with the election.
No, I don’t think Pence could have made it work. I think a lot of you believe our constitution was intended to work only with norms, that isn’t true. The Founders had a lot of core distrust of people being able to function appropriately in government, there’s more than just norms that insure the law is followed. There are courts for one, and a lot of the biggest scaremongering things liberals cry about in terms of ‘democracy is ending’, have never stood one moment before any court in the land, and the assumption that they would pass court scrutiny is a false one.
Also FWIW the big issue with the Eastman Memo and the simple minds that assume it’s some magical blueprint to victory, is it massively overstates the power of the Vice President in the Senate. Given the actual stances of the Republican Senators, Pence would have been removed from the proceedings and Grassley would have taken over and adhered to the law. Now it is worth noting that if you had a majority in the Senate willing to go along with it, we would then get to a serious constitutional crisis, that I do think the courts would review. But even with court review it would be a serious constitutional crisis. But there were maybe 15ish Senators that would’ve been willing to go along with the plan, nothing like 51.
But on Jan. 6, 2025, Kamala Harris will still be VP.
IMHO that would be a winning coalition if it was stable. The problem is that it isn’t stable, and for the same reason that splitting into a Blue and Red country wouldn’t work. Minorities might be predominantly Democratic, but they aren’t predominantly liberal. A lot of the conservative minorities end up voting Democratic because the Republicans actively push them away. The less pressure there is from the (current) Republican side pushing away conservative minorities, the less likely those conservative minorities are to stick with the coalition. In a split country, the Blue country would immediately have a split, as the conservative minorities would proceed to rebuild a version of the Republican Party (with the only difference being that it would be led by racial minorities rather than whites) since they would no longer have to contend with being second fiddle to conservative white people in that situation.
I could live with that. One-party dominance isn’t healthy in the long term, and Blue America would IMO need a genuine conservative minority to keep progressivism in check.
Of course, we haven’t had a genuine, non-insane conservative party in this country for decades, so I’m pretty vague on what one actually looks like.
My guess is it would look like our current Republican Party, with the only difference being that the faces in the crowd would be mostly Black and Brown rather than white.
On the other side, Redistan is also likely to split. That split would be into the Business Party and the Populist Party. Ironically, the split would be for the same reasons. The poor white people would no longer have a huge block of minorities to blame their problems on, so the populists would finally turn on the business people they currently talk big about not liking but refuse to actually do anything about (i.e. raising taxes).