At least on Jan. 6, 2021, the insurrectionists on Capitol Hill had to push aside some flimsy metal barricades before they could carry out their assault on the seat of U.S. governance.
“Among the 20 Republicans who blocked Rep. Kevin McCarthy (right) from becoming House speaker this week – and, consequently, blocked the launch of the 118th Congress – 14 of the 15 who were in office in January 2021 voted against certifying Joe Biden’s victory (as did every Republican who received votes for speaker this week, including McCarthy),” Will Bunch writes. Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images/TNS
Nearly two years later, the 20 or so Republican heirs to the toxic legacy of their patron saint, Donald Trump, didn’t even have to pass through metal detectors to bring the U.S. House of Representatives to a longer and probably more damaging shutdown than Trump’s failed coup.
We don’t yet have the technology to detect what paralyzed Washington this past week: toxic narcissism.
In an alternate timeline, the news in this foggy first week of the new year might be dominated by anniversary journalism, about what we’ve learned since the shock of Jan. 6, 2021, to prevent something like that from ever happening again. Instead, America is again transfixed by utter chaos echoing across those exact same marble corridors of the U.S. Capitol. The only difference is that in this new national horror show, the calls are coming from inside the House. We can’t move on, let alone learn from 2021’s insurrection when that uprising – crippling our government in the name of celebrity fascism – never ended.
It’s hardly a shock that among the 20 Republicans who blocked Rep. Kevin McCarthy from becoming House speaker – and, consequently, blocked the launch of the 118th Congress – 14 of the 15 who were in office in January 2021 voted against certifying Biden’s victory (as did every Republican who received votes for speaker this week, including McCarthy).
The New York Times reports that 12 of the 20 were hard-core deniers of the 2020 result; some 17 of the 20 were endorsed by Trump in the midterms. Thus, it’s even less surprising that the values of the Jan. 6 coup – ego, nihilism, minority rule and contempt for the democratic ideals of governance – are identical to the themes of the anti-McCarthy insurrection.
Today’s insurrectionists are the spoiled children of Trumpism – stars of their own soiled reality shows, lacking in a single idea beyond “owning the libs” and booking their next cable TV hit. Their pre-Congress resumés are larded not with public service but, as noted by The New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg, with highlights like “Shark Tank” contestant or swimsuit-model turned right-wing firebrand, “creating brands as much as political careers.” And like most ungrateful brats, now they’ve stopped listening to their befuddled old “dad.”
This ragged posse’s objections to McCarthy were not tied to any grand ambitions – not even today’s warped conservative priorities, such as stopping anti-racism education – beyond power and attention and a love of narcissism. The supposed concessions sought by the anti-McCarthy voters have little meaning beyond granting these insurrectionists the power to shut down Congress, Jan. 6-style, again and again and again. But why even accept concessions, when this nihilistic stalemate can get wackadoodles like Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert on TV every night?
One of the ironies in this remarkable week – and there have been many – is that McCarthy has proved to be both an enabler of Jan. 6 and its ongoing zeitgeist, yet also its victim. If the spineless Californian had followed his basic instincts in the hours following the insurrection – when he blamed the violence on POTUS 45 and claimed to colleagues he would ask Trump to resign, stating “I’ve had it with this guy” – he might have become a leader.
Instead, McCarthy flew to Mar-a-Lago just weeks later to lick the boots of the failed coup leader and then empowered the most extreme members of his caucus. Instead of cutting out the cancer that was revealed two years ago this week, he allowed it to metastasize and strangle the chamber he wished so pathetically to lead.
But McCarthy is also just the avatar of a much broader national failure to come to terms with what actually happened on Jan. 6, 2021. So far, dozens of the “little fish” of the Capitol Hill insurrection have been charged with obstructing an official proceeding of the U.S. government, but not Trump or his fellow plotters. No wonder the 20 worst members of Congress are obstructing the official proceedings of government. Until the leaders of an honest-to-goodness coup – and a deadly one at that – against the American system are brought to justice, D.C. will be observing Groundhog Day on Jan. 6 instead of Feb. 2.
I’m getting too numb from the last eight years to remember if it was Groucho or Karl Marx who said that history begins as tragedy and repeats as farce. Over these two years, we’ve watched the violent tragedy of one January morph into this January’s farce, yet it’s the current farce that has brought the nation to a standstill and elevated the power of the extreme right. Until there is actual accountability for what really happened on Jan. 6, 2021, America’s calendar will remain stuck on that date, which will live in infamy.
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