Fools, cowards and the Trump coup

Like many people, I expected the worst from the January 6 committee: long, monotonous speeches, braggart from haughty politicians, so much he said, he said.

What we have instead was fascinating and terrifying.

The usual suspects, of course, pay attention to the details, but never to the crucial points, such as the desire to do so Donald Trump of having participated in an armed assault on Capitol Hill, and never, revealingly, under oath – and some media outrage the game.

But realistically, there is no longer any doubt that Trump tried to overturn the results of a legal election and, when all else failed, he encouraged and attempted to instigate a violent attack against Congress.

I leave it to the legal experts to find out whether the evidence should lead to a formal criminal case and, in particular, whether Trump himself should be accused of seditious conspiracy.

But no reasonable person can deny that what happened after the 2020 election was a coup attempt, a betrayal of all that America stands for.

I still see some people comparing this scandal to Watergate.

It’s like comparing assault and beatings with a Traffic violation.

Trump’s actions have been far and awayworse an American president has ever done.

But here’s the thing:

Dozens of people in or around the Trump administration must have known what was going on; many of them certainly have firsthand knowledge of at least some aspects of the coup attempt.

However, only a handful have come forward with what they know.

And what about the Republicans in Congress?

Almost certainly many, if not most, realize the enormity of what has happened; after all, the assault on the Capitol has put their very lives in danger.

However, 175 House Republicans they voted against the creation of a national commission on the January 6 insurrection, with only 35 in favor.

How to explain this abdication of duty?

Even now, full-fledged MAGA cultists are likely a minority among Republican politicians.

For every Lauren Boebert or Marjorie Taylor Greene, there are most likely several Kevin McCarthys:

careerists, not crazy, apparatchik instead of fans.

However, the non-mad wing of the Republican Party, with only a handful of exceptions, did its best to avoid any showdown on the attempted coup.

Which makes me think about the nature of courage and how that courage, or cowardiceit is mediated by the institutions.

Human beings can be incredibly brave.

As we see every day in the news from Ukraine, many soldiers are willing to resist under the deadly barrages of artillery.

Firefighters rush towards the burning buildings.

Indeed, the Capitol police were heroic in their defense of Congress on January 6, 2021.

Such manifestations of physical courage are not common:

most of us will never know how we would behave under such circumstances.

However, if physical courage is rare, the moral couragethe will to stand up for what you deem right, even in the face of social pressure to comply, is firm rarer.

And moral courage is what Trump members and Republican members of Congress so conspicuously lack.

Is it a biased thing?

We can’t really know how members of the other party would respond if a Democratic president attempted such a coup, but this is partly due to the fact that such an attempt is more or less inconceivable.

As political scientists have long pointed out, the two parties they are very different, not only in its policies, but also in its institutional structures.

The Democratic Party, despite being more unitary than in the past, remains a dissolved coalition of interest groups.

Some of these interest groups are laudable, others less so, but in both cases the laxity gives Democrats room to criticize their leaders and, if they wish, take a principled stand.

The Republican Party is a lot more monolithic, in which politicians compete over who adheres most faithfully to the party line.

That line was defined by economic ideology, but nowadays it’s more about positioning in culture wars and personal loyalty to Trump.

It takes great moral courage for Republicans to challenge the dictates of the party, and those who do are excommunicated immediately.

There is an exception that proves the rule:

the surprising pro-democracy stance of the neocons, the people who gave us the war in Iraq.

That was a terrible sin, which will never be forgotten.

But during the Trump years, when most of the GOP knelt before a man whose horror they fully understood, nearly all prominent neocons, from William Kristol and Max Boot to, yes, Liz Cheney, remained steadfast on the side of the rule of law.

Where does this come from?

I do not think it is an insult to the courage of these people to point out that the neocons have always been a distinct group, never fully assimilated to the republican monolith, with careers built in part on reputations outside the party.

Arguably, this leaves them freer than the Republican garden variety to act according to their own conscience.

Unfortunately, this still leaves the rest.

If the Democrats are a coalition of interest groups, the Republicans are now a coalition of fools and cowards.

And it’s hard to say which Republicans pose the greatest danger.

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