The Future of January 6

with John McWhorter

The riot at the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021 is an event we’re going to be talking about for a long time. Even as we’re learning more about who participated in it and why, what they did and how they should be punished, the most important questions remain unanswered. Were the anger and chaos unleashed that day produced by Trump’s awful post-election rhetoric? Or did he tap into a violent undercurrent in the participants that was just waiting for an outlet? Was this a freakish blip in a more-or-less continuous line of peaceful transitions of power in America? Or will January 6 have marked the beginning of a new era of contested elections, mob violence, and democratic decay?

I wish I could give confident answers to these questions, but it’s too soon to say. As John and I discuss in this excerpt from our latest conversation, both the right and the left are using courts and legislatures to reconfigure election laws and practices at both state and federal levels. With that many moving parts, I doubt we can predict what will happen in the midterms this November, never mind in 2024. But I can say that we have not seen this level of mistrust in our elections in a very, very long time, if ever. I think that’s reason enough to seriously worry that January 6 was more than just a blip. Though I hope it isn’t the case, we may look back on that day as the first glimmer of a new and perilous political reality.

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GLENN LOURY: Let's talk about January 6. That was also last week.

JOHN MCWHORTER: Oh God. Alright, yeah.

The anniversary of the so-called insurrection. Do you think it was an insurrection, John? You think it was a coup attempt?

No, and I guess I'm wrong about this. It was a hideous thing that happened. It was a bunch of hideous people. They ended up getting some people killed. And this thing happened, and because it happened and it was so horrific, that particular thing is highly unlikely to happen again.

But I know that the way I'm supposed to take it—and I'm really trying to read all these stories and think—is that that was an indication of a roiling discontent, which is going to make it all about impossible to have a sensible election next time. And that no matter what happens, people like that are gonna refuse to believe the results and are gonna rise up in greater numbers in spots all around the country and spark what could be called a civil war. And that that's something that we're supposed to really be afraid might happen.

Glenn, there's a part of me that lacks imagination. I am definitely one of those people who would be caught unawares when something drastic happened. My sense is that change happens slowly and that we tend to be bound by what happened before. And that if something horrible happens, then we're on guard, kind of like 9/11 didn't happen again. I'm aware that it's more than what would happen on the steps of the Capitol in Washington, D.C. This idea that we can never again have a sensible election, I see it as a kind of alarmism. But then again, a lot of people smarter than me clearly think that we need to be really afraid that the country has fallen apart and that we saw the first indications of it a year ago. Are you afraid, the way so many sensible people are, that we cannot have a decent election three years from now?

Yeah. I'm very concerned about—

Tell me why.

Well, this didn't start with Trump. Or in a way maybe it did start with Trump in 2016. This didn't start with Trump in 2020. This issue of our electoral outcomes ex post facto being severely criticized in a sustained manner as having been illegitimate. That was the case after the 2016 election. And the narrative—Trump was in league with Vladimir Putin to undermine America's democratic institutions and hence was an illegitimate president—was sustained by news organizations, members of Congress, elaborate investigative undertakings, and whatnot, and continues to echo even to this day. So I mean, who started it, you could ask.

Trump's behavior in 2020 was absolutely atrocious and I do think undermines the foundation— I mean, he was asked repeatedly before the election, “Would you accept the outcome?” And he wouldn't answer the question. He wouldn't simply say, “Yes, I would.” He could have added a codicil, “Unless there are circumstances that whatever, but in the main, yes, I'd be inclined to accept.” And then when the thing went down and he had the right to go to court and raise questions that he raised, the courts decided those or decided not to hear those cases. But he didn't get any traction. He persisted in saying that the election was stolen and incited in some way, or called to arms in such a manner that things got out of hand, and January 6 happened.

And January 6 was a terrifying event, even if it wasn't a coup. I don't think it was a coup. I mean, I think that's wild hyperbole. A coup is a coup. That's where you mobilize the military, you seize the television stations, you arrest the opponents, and you declare martial law. That's a coup. A coup is taking over the government. There wasn't anything close to that that happened. An insurrection? No, I think that also is hyperbole. Not quite as wildly hyperbolic as a coup, but that seems to have been the way that we have now decided to refer to it. And I'm not going to argue with people about words, although I don't think it was an insurrection.

But it was a mob attacking the capital in the way that we have all now come to be familiar with, energized by the outrage they felt that the election was unfair, which was stoked by the rhetoric of the guy who had lost the election. That is very, very bad.

And by the way, that guy is still out there. He's still having rallies. And just because CNN won't tell you that they're happening doesn't mean that people in Talladega, Alabama don't know that they're happening and don't attend those rallies. I mean, read some of the stuff that's at these right-wing websites. Those people have not gone away. So yeah, I worry about it.

I worry about the politicization now that has the Democrats saying Republicans' legislatures… Because we have a federal system, the Democrats are barely in control of the legislature at the federal level right now. That may not survive the next election. But they are definitely not in control of a lot of statehouses around the country where laws are made at the state level. And so they're trying to federalize the election process to override the decisions that state legislatures—duly elected and constitutionally empowered—have made about the details of administering elections.

They say this under the cover of, “[State legislatures are] trying to take the votes from minorities away from them.” Meaning, of course, that these are illegitimate. I remind you, Stacey Abrams, the poster child of this movement for minority voting rights not being infringed by state legislatures, never conceded her own defeat in the gubernatorial election in Georgia when she lost, et cetera.

So you can look right and find people who don't want to accept the outcomes of elections. You can look left and find people who don't want to accept the outcome of elections. Everybody's trying to jigger the details. Should election day be a holiday? I mean, I don't know. Is it an apodictic certainty that democracy is advanced by declaring a national holiday for election day? Should people be able to submit mail ballots that are postmarked on the day of the election, even if they're not received and counted until after? I don't know. How many weeks of early voting should there be? Should it be a month? Should it be two months? Should people be able to cast a ballot for an election two months before, or a month, or a week? I mean, it seems to me that legitimate people could differ about these things. The answers to these questions are not etched in stone.

The more liberal the rules about voting, the more democratic the process? That is a a falsehood, in my view. There are prudent reasons for asking for integrity of the ballot. They're not all efforts to disenfranchise minority populations. It's gotten to the point now where even to mention the issue of the integrity of the ballot, even to mention the possibility that there could be some shenanigans with the harvesting of ballots from nursing homes by political operatives, et cetera, et cetera, is to define oneself as being against the minority voting rights.

The Supreme Court has decided some cases, like that Shelby County vs. Holder case or that Citizens United case about campaign finance, which legislation that Democrats want to pass in the House now in the name of voting integrity and democracy would override. The Supreme Court is against democracy now because it has a liberal interpretation of who should be able to finance political action committees or because it thinks that a state like Mississippi shouldn't have a federal court deciding whether or not they can move the location of a polling place or whatever? That’s the definition of democracy?

So it seems to me there's enough blame to go around, left and right. But the bottom line is it has been relativized. What used to be, when I was coming along, taken for granted—you had an election, they counted the ballots, you woke up the next morning, and you knew who won—has now become a political football. And that is not good.

I think David Brooks really hit one out of the park this week.

I didn't see it.

It's one of his better ones, where he makes the point that the idea that attempts at voter suppression, as repulsive as they are, actually have a significant effect has been pretty much disproven. It's clear that as nefarious as those attempts are on the ground, they really don't make that much difference. They don't suppress the vote. And I can tell that for a lot of people who call themselves “speaking for black people,” that news is disappointing.

It's woke racism, in a way, that people don't want to hear that what the Republicans are trying to do actually doesn't work that well, because what they want to do is crusade against an injustice. When it turns out that the injustice actually is not happening to nearly the extent that we're being told, these people view it as an inconvenience, because it means they don't have something to have their fist up in the air about. When really David Brooks was making the point that we need to really concentrate on the people who are responsible for registering these votes and counting these votes and giving us what we're supposed to accept or not accept. That end of election, that end of the voting process is what's really in trouble, and we need to focus on that. Everything should be about spending these three years making sure that there's more clarity about that and that a certain kind of person cannot shut it all down.

I don't know if that can be. And I'm not trying to knock Stacey Abrams, and it's not that none of these things happen at all. But the idea that our main concern must be that we're back to pre-Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the poll tax. Great drama, great theater. It has nothing to do with actually what's going on on the ground, which I am relieved by, but I guess we're not supposed to feel that way. We're not good black people to be relieved by what many studies have now shown.

But you're making me think what we're supposed to really be afraid of. That it's at the point where what happened a year ago has to happen again. There's no reason why it wouldn't happen again. There are people who are sitting, stewing, and insisting that how they viewed it then is the way it was. And there would be nothing anyone could say to convince them otherwise, nothing anyone could say to convince them that Democrats had won the election next time.

What would they do? What are they going to do? So every capitol is going to be under major guard. Mobbing of state capitol buildings is not going to work. What else are they going to do? I guess we're supposed to be afraid that they're going to start blowing up bridges or ... What is it? I mean, people are coming up with these interesting apocalyptic scenarios, all of which strike me as very creative and very intelligent but somewhat unlikely. If you can't mob a building, what else are you going to do? And if they do it, how is it a civil war?

So let's say that a bunch of Republican partisans and skinheads are very, very upset for a month. What are they going to do to shut the country down? That's a genuine question. I'm not sure what we're imagining at this point. They'll say some terrible things. Are they going to get out guns and start killing people? Is that what people are afraid of? Because that would be something quite unprecedented in terms of how people adjudicate their feelings about the vote at this point. I lack the imagination. I guess I don't read enough.

Let me just invite you to reflect on the summer of 2020 after the killing of George Floyd and the question of police brutality arose. And spontaneously, in dozens of cities across the country, large numbers of people did, in fact, take to the streets. Mostly peaceful protests? Okay. I mean, we could do the counting exercise.

They're gonna break some windows. Right, yeah.

They're going to set some cars on fire. They're going to mob around certain government centers, and they're gonna remonstrate. But I mean, who's in control of events? What about a political assassination? Suppose somebody were to shoot—God help me, God help us—one of these candidates. Donald J. Trump, for example. What do you think actually would happen? I could imagine spontaneous violent demonstrations breaking out in which opposing camps met each other in the street with clubs and knives and pickaxes and whatnot and battled it out. You know, chaos, anarchy.

Because Donald Trump was assassinated.

He was our tribune and, whatever, they didn't want him to have another chance to run in 2024. Heaven forbid. God help us.

I’m so unsuitable on this, because my feeling is if something like that were going to happen, it would have happened already. And I know that's full of holes, but somebody would have shot him already. What's different now? If people were going to take to the streets for reasons like these, there would have been more Charlottesvilles already. And if it happens next time, okay, some some right-wing people are going to take to the streets. They're going to break some windows. Frankly, some people would die, which would be a horrible thing. And then they're going to go home, and they're going to feed their kids, and they're going to go back about their business, and we'll have had a really nasty week.