Francine Prose: ‘We narrowly escaped a far worse disaster’

There’s a very particular, very specific chill we feel when our worst suspicions have been confirmed, when our darkest fears and imaginings turn out to be mere shadows of reality. I – and many others, I assume – felt that chill while watching the first installment of the report on the hearings of the House Select Committee on the January 6 insurrection.

All the horror of that day came flooding back, augmented by the evidence of Donald Trump’s responsibility for those catastrophic events; the fact that he suggested that Mike Pence “deserved” the homicidal rage of the crowd; that he resisted every plea to call off his supporters; that Jared Kushner dismissed legitimate concerns about his father-in-law’s behavior as “whining”; that the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers planned and prepared for the rioting, believing that Donald Trump had summoned them to Washington to fight for him.

What disturbed me most was a sense of how narrowly we escaped a disaster far worse than the one that occurred – not only the possibility of greater harm to our lawmakers and the Capitol police, but to our Constitutional protections. We were that close to a coup, that close to the overturning of our democracy. The evidence presented in this initial hearing was so clear, so convincing, I cannot imagine anyone not being persuaded unless they have totally lost touch with reason and reality, in which case I truly cannot imagine the future of this country: what will happen to us next.

• Francine Prose is the author, most recently, of The Vixen. She was also the president of PEN America

Lloyd Green: ‘The US careens through a cold Civil War’

The select committee’s prime time hearing informed but likely failed to persuade. Video and testimony reinforced what we already knew: that Donald Trump sought to violently overturn and avenge his election loss.

The insurrection stands as a gaping rupture of America’s constitutional order. “Our democracy remains in danger”, said Bennie Thompson, the committee’s chairman.

Trump’s minions overran the Capitol, the Proud Boys the tip of the spear. “Stand back and stand by” became a deadly mantra.

A conservative elite that included John Eastman, former clerk to supreme court justice Clarence Thomas, helped lay the legal infrastructure. Ginni Thomas, the judge’s wife, threw fuel on the fire.

In the preceding months, Trump and his supporters branded the then-upcoming election as “rigged”. Nothing short of re-election would be deemed acceptable.

On 11 January 2021, Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, pointed a finger at the 45th president. “He bears responsibility for his words and actions”, McCarthy intoned. “No if, ands or buts.”

Now, 17 months later, Republican congressional leadership lies prostrate and complicit. McCarthy burns for the Speaker’s gavel. Gladiator remains the movie for our times.

Earlier on Thursday, Ryan Kelley, a Republican candidate for Michigan governor, appeared in federal court for his role in the breach of the Capitol. Hours later, we heard Ivanka Trump admit that her father lost. Meanwhile, her reedy-voiced husband derided Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel, as “whining”.

The US careens through a cold civil war, its feet on the gas pedal, both hands clutching the accelerator.

• Lloyd Green is an attorney in New York. He was opposition research counsel to George HW Bush’s 1988 campaign and served in the Department of Justice from 1990 to 1992

Simon Balto: ‘What happened at the Capitol was no anomaly’

There’s much to be said about Thursday’s January 6 committee hearings, and there will be more to be said following the hearings’ full sequence. But speaking as a historian, let me for now say this: Americans need to understand that what the terrorists at the Capitol did that day wasn’t the anomaly people think it was within the long history of the United States. The almost entirely white mob storming the halls of Congress operated squarely within a tradition of white mob terrorism that has deeply shaped specific parts of the country, and the whole of the nation itself.

The clearest analogue to me is Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898, where a mob of white racists violently overthrew the duly-elected, interracial government of that city, citing the need to be free from “Negro domination” – by which they meant political power that was equitably distributed between Black and white residents. They murdered at least dozens – likely hundreds – of people in pursuit of power. They deployed murderous violence to illegitimately usurp political control of that city and destroy democracy there, prioritizing white rule over interracial democracy when faced with the prospect of having to legitimately compete for power.

Americans talk about coup d’états as the province of so-called “third-world” nations, but it happened here. And it happened in spectacularly successful fashion. Those terrorists destroyed Wilmington’s “Fusion” Black and white government, replacing it with a white, racist, autocratic, Jim Crow government.

There are endless relevant historical comparisons to draw from here, but that one speaks to me the most. Many of the January 6 terrorists are nakedly white nationalists. They were inspired and driven by a white nationalist former president who’d failed as a reelection candidate in large part because he, too, is a racist, and thus couldn’t coerce people of color in an increasingly non-white America to vote for him. And so, when they couldn’t win legitimately, they collectively sought to overthrow the government and destroy democracy.

Albeit on a different scale, there is precedent for their approach succeeding, as it did in Wilmington. We must ensure that these terrorists don’t win.

• Simon Balto is an assistant professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

Geoffrey Kabaservice: ‘If we don’t take action, American democracy may be nearing its end of its run’

History may be determined largely by the tectonic grinding of vast impersonal forces, but individual actions can still make a difference. Last summer, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy pulled Republican members from the House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection, hoping thereby to cast the whole investigation as a partisan witch hunt. But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi appointed two Trump-critical Republicans to the committee, thereby ensuring that it would mount a serious bipartisan inquiry into the former president’s attempted coup. And the most memorable moments of the committee’s first public hearing came when one of those Republicans, Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney, issued a searing indictment of both Trump and his enablers.

Cheney forthrightly declared that “President Trump summoned the mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack.” She reminded her fellow Republican members of Congress that they swore to defend the US Constitution, not an individual or a political party. And she warned “my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible” that “there will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.”

Will her statement – or the committee’s subsequent hearings – change many voters’ minds or shame any Republican legislators into honor? Unlikely given the extent to which Americans have retreated into tribal partisan identities. The revelation that many of Trump’s closest associates (and even some of his family) acknowledged the falsehood of his stolen-election claim isn’t terribly surprising given the bottomless hypocrisy that was the reigning ethos of his administration.

But video of the desecration of the Capitol presented in these hearings is as shocking and nausea-inducing as ever, while Cheney’s statement reminds us anew that Trump’s ultimate goal on January 6 was the overthrow of America’s constitutional order. If that’s not enough to move at least some Republicans to condemn Trump’s coup attempt, and take action to prevent a recurrence, then American democracy may be nearing the end of its run.

• Geoffrey Kabaservice is the director of political studies at the Niskanen Center in Washington, DC as well as the author of Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican party