Storming of the US Capitol (Jan, 2021)

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      What’s Happening on the Left Is No Excuse for What’s Happening on the Right

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      American democracy has often confronted hostile forces from outside the United States; rarely has it been under as much of a threat from forces within the nation. The danger arises from illiberalism on the left and the right. Both sides are chipping away at the foundations of the American Republic; each side seems oblivious to its own defects.Again and again, we have heard conservatives argue that even if you believe that Donald Trump is flawed and the MAGA movement is worrisome, the left is much more dangerous. We disagree. Fears about the left’s increasingly authoritarian, radical tendencies are well grounded; but they have blinded many conservatives to the greater danger posed by the right, which we believe is a threat to our constitutional order and therefore to conservatism itself.We come to our view after writing and warning about the illiberal left for much of our careers. One of us wrote a book nearly 30 years ago criticizing those who would limit free thought by restricting free speech; the other has been sounding alarms about left-wing ideology since his days as an official in the Department of Education during the Reagan years.Since then, the left has grown more radical, more aggressive and less tolerant. With the help of social media and influence in academia — and sometimes in newsrooms and corporate H.R. departments — a small number of die-hard progressives (they make up only about 8 percent of the public, according to one recent survey) exert a hugely disproportionate influence on the culture. Progressives are “often imposing illiberal speech norms on schools, companies and cultural institutions,” the liberal journalist Jonathan Chait writes. There have been many examples of squelching arguments that although controversial deserve full and frank airing in a free society. Universities have attempted to kick off their campuses Christian ministries that require their leaders to be Christian, and we have written in these pages about efforts to weaken protections for religious liberty.Structural racism — the perpetuation of de facto discrimination by ingrained social arrangements and assumptions — is a reality in American life. But the hodgepodge of ideas in the bucket that has come to be known as “critical race theory” includes radical claims that deny the enduring value of concepts like equality of opportunity and objectivity and reject “the traditions of liberalism and meritocracy” as “a vehicle for self-interest, power, and privilege.” The most extreme versions of these ideas might not be taught in high schools (yet), but their influence is undoubtedly being felt.The progressive movement, then, is increasingly under the sway of a totalistic, unfalsifiable and revolutionary ideology that rejects fundamental liberal values like pluralism and free inquiry. And conservatives aren’t hallucinating about its influence. Surveys show that 62 percent of Americans and 68 percent of college students are reluctant to share their true political views for fear of negative social consequences. A Cato Institute study found that nearly a third of Americans — across the political spectrum, not just on the right — say they’re worried about losing a job or job opportunities if they express their true political views. Another study suggested that the level of self-censorship in America may be three times what it was during the McCarthy era.The left is not solely responsible for creating these fears, but it has played the most significant role. Yet even granting all that, the threat from the illiberal right is more immediate and more dangerous. If that wasn’t clear before the last presidential election and the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, it should be clear now.Any account of the malignancy of the American right has to begin with Mr. Trump, whose twisted sensibilities continue to define the Republican Party. It was he who attempted what no president had ever tried: overturning an election. He based his effort on a huge campaign of disinformation. Mr. Trump pressured the vice president, governors, secretaries of state, election officials and appointees at the Department of Justice to join him in his efforts. One of his lawyers reportedly proposed a plan to nullify the election. Congress’s Jan. 6 committee will reveal more and possibly worse.The Republican Party, rather than spurning Mr. Trump and his efforts, has embraced them. Around the country, prospective Republican candidates, far from opposing #StopTheSteal lies and conspiracy theories, are running on them in 2022, according to a Washington Post tally. Any prominent Republican today who disputes #StopTheSteal can expect to be targeted by the base, booed at any large gathering of Republicans, censured by party apparatchiks and possibly threatened with physical violence.Dismayingly few Republican leaders stand foursquare against the base’s insistence that any election Mr. Trump and his followers might lose is rigged. The result is that Republicans are shattering faith in the integrity of our elections and abandoning their commitment to the peaceful transfer of power — the minimum commitment required for democracy to work. This is an unforgivable civic sin, but it hardly exhausts the lists of concerns.Many Republicans are now openly hostile to the processes Americans rely on to separate fact from fiction. There’s also the deepening cult of despair that has led some on the right to believe that all means of resistance are appropriate. In fact, catastrophism is quite fashionable on the American right these days. Every election is a “Flight 93” confrontation against an apocalyptic enemy; every effort, no matter how extreme, is justified. That attitude is not merely at odds with reality; it is incompatible with liberal democracy’s foundational requirement that Americans compromise and coexist civilly in order to share the country.Partly as a result, the MAGA movement is drifting toward authoritarianism. The most important media personality on the right, Tucker Carlson of Fox News, released a disingenuous three-part documentary in November suggesting that the Jan. 6 insurrection was a “false flag” operation. He and others in MAGA World, including Mr. Trump, also promote Hungary, which Freedom House said in its 2018 report is “sliding into authoritarian rule,” as a model for the United States. The Republican Party is also drifting ever closer to the open embrace of political violence and martyrdom, not merely excusing but defending actions like Ashli Babbitt’s effort to break into the House’s inner sanctum on Jan. 6 — actions that came within seconds of succeeding.In a recent survey, nearly 40 percent of Republicans said that “if elected leaders will not protect America, the people must do it themselves, even if it requires violent actions.” Around the country, Republican officials who defend the election and count votes honestly have been threatened and have needed to leave their homes or live under guard. Josh Mandel, a Republican running for the open Senate seat in Ohio and leading in the polls, said in the aftermath of President Biden’s vaccine mandate: “Do not comply with the tyranny. When the Gestapo show up at your front door, you know what to do.”Intimidating election officials, lying about elections and storming the Capitol are not actions promoted among mainstream Democrats. And while the progressive left undoubtedly has influence in the Democratic Party, if it exercised the near-total dominance that Republicans claim, Joe Biden would not have won the Democratic nomination. Conservatives certainly have their disagreements with President Biden, but he has not defunded the police, attempted to pack the Supreme Court or promoted the Green New Deal or Medicare for All.But assume that your threat assessment is different from ours; that as a conservative Republican you believe the danger to the nation is greater from the far left than from the MAGA right. You should still speak out against what is happening to your movement and your party for two reasons: The sins of the left do not excuse the sins of the right; and what is happening on the right is wrecking authentic conservatism in ways the left never could.In his new book, “We the Fallen People: The Founders and the Future of American Democracy,” a Wheaton College historian, Robert Tracy McKenzie, shows that the founders took a deeply conservative view of human nature. They believed that humankind is flawed and fallen, distracted by passions and swayed by parochial interests. Americans, the founders believed, were no exception. Yet they also believed that what John Adams called a “well-ordered Constitution” could go a long way to compensate for human flaws.In classic conservative fashion, they designed the U.S. Constitution, and its attendant institutions and norms, both to constrain us and to help us be our better selves. The MAGA right has no love for those institutions and norms. It inflames ugly passions and warps reality. It is profoundly anticonservative, capable of twisting in any direction for the sake of raw power. It represents a profound break with the American conservative tradition.And so to regard the radical left as a reason to excuse, minimize or ignore the malign movement on the right is an abrogation of conservative duty and principle. If MAGA prevails, conservatism will be gravely injured — and American democracy will be, too.Jonathan Rauch (@jon_rauch) is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of “The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth.” Peter Wehner (@Peter_Wehner), a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center who served in the Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush administrations, is a contributing Opinion writer and the author of “The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      How Jan. 6 Gave the 14th Amendment New Life

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      Legal scholars say a long-forgotten provision of the Constitution could bar from office anyone who encouraged the Capitol riot.An obscure 19th-century provision of the U.S. Constitution that barred members of the Confederacy from holding political office is back in the national conversation — and some are hoping it can keep Donald J. Trump and his allies off the ballot.After the Civil War, Congress sought to remake the politics of the states they had just defeated on the battlefield. Fearing that the grandees of the Old South would slink back to power, they crafted Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, known as the Disqualification Clause.The provision applied to anyone who had previously taken an oath to support the Constitution and then either “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the United States or gave “aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”The clause, tucked into an amendment better known for extending citizenship to African Americans, was largely an object of academic curiosity until last week. That’s when lawyers representing a group of North Carolina voters filed a novel legal challenge seeking to keep Representative Madison Cawthorn off the ballot this year.Cawthorn is a close ally of Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff, and has made comments suggesting he supported the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol. The complaint alleged that his actions trigger the Disqualification Clause, making him ineligible to serve in Congress.Cawthorn has shrugged off the challenge.“Over 245,000 patriots from Western North Carolina elected Congressman Cawthorn to serve them in Washington,” said Luke Ball, a spokesman for Cawthorn. “A dozen activists who are comically misinterpreting and twisting the 14th Amendment for political gain will not distract him from that service.”For now, the challenge is on hold while redistricting litigation in the state plays out. But it’s likely to be just one of many similar actions to come.“Madison Cawthorn was the first, but it’s safe to say he won’t be the last,” Ron Fein, a lawyer for Free Speech for People, the group behind the complaint, said in an interview.An outside-in strategyWin or lose, the Cawthorn case could help investigators in Washington by unlocking new evidence about the North Carolina lawmaker’s activities related to Jan. 6. He might have to sit for a deposition and have to turn over, say, his phone and email records.As the litigation makes its way through the court system, it could also help clear up a few broader questions:Was Jan. 6 an “insurrection,” legally speaking?What does it mean to be “engaged” in insurrection, and what level of involvement triggers the Disqualification Clause?Does Congress need to pass a law or resolution to activate it?“Most people, me included, think it was an insurrection, but neither Congress nor the courts have made that official determination,” said Mark Graber, a legal historian at the University of Maryland.Laurence Tribe, an influential law professor at Harvard University, has held private conversations with several members of Congress on the topic as they puzzle through how statutes written in the 1860s might apply in an entirely new context. And while Tribe’s view is that Jan. 6 was indeed an insurrection, it is by no means obvious how courts will interpret the 14th Amendment without clearer signals from Congress.“You’re dealing with a very murky and open area of constitutional law,” Tribe said in an interview.Even one of the foremost experts on the Disqualification Clause, Gerard Magliocca of Indiana University, called it “vestigial” in a well-timed paper on the subject published in 2020 three weeks before Jan. 6. He has since become an advocate for applying it to disqualify Trump from running for president in 2024.“We have to dust it off,” said Representative Jamie Raskin, a Democrat of Maryland who has consulted with Tribe on the topic. “It hasn’t been used in more than a century.”In fact, it’s been used precisely once since the Reconstruction era — in the 1919 case of Victor L. Berger, a socialist from Wisconsin who was removed from Congress after being accused of harboring pro-German sympathies. Berger was later reinstated when the Supreme Court tossed out his conviction for espionage, on the grounds that the judge harbored an anti-German bias.Fox News weighs inFor now, the Disqualification Clause is getting more attention on Fox News than it is within Congress — driven almost entirely by a single tweet from Marc Elias, the Democratic Party’s top election lawyer, who had predicted the provision might soon arise in litigation.Tucker Carlson, the Fox News opinion host, held a nearly four-minute segment on Elias’s 38-word post.“So, if you don’t want to lose the Congress, just ban the other side from running,” Carlson said sarcastically, going on to compare the idea that Jan. 6 was an insurrection to a belief in U.F.O.s.“This would require establishing that such individuals supported an actual insurrection,” Laura Ingraham, Carlson’s Fox News colleague, said of the Elias tweet a day later. “Good luck with that.”Inside the committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot, however, the Disqualification Clause has not come up in any detail.Some Democratic lawmakers — including Raskin, Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia and a few others — did float the idea a year ago. At the time, they were searching for a way to hold Trump accountable that would require only a simple majority vote in the Senate.But when Democratic legal experts investigated the concept, they determined that the Disqualification Clause was not “self-executing” — that is, Congress would need to pass a law or resolution to use it and clarify how it applies today. One can’t just declare someone an insurrectionist, they decided; Congress has to create the legal infrastructure to try someone and give them due process before taking away their right to hold public office. That made it less attractive as an alternative to impeachment.Depending on what the Jan. 6 panel uncovers, it’s possible to imagine the committee will recommend punishing lawmakers who were somehow involved in the riot. It’s also possible Democrats will decide to take their case to voters instead.Key Figures in the Jan. 6 InquiryCard 1 of 16The House investigation. More

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      Why Millions Think It Is Trump Who Cannot Tell a Lie

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      Why is Donald Trump’s “big lie” so hard to discredit?This has been a live question for more than a year, but inside it lies another: Do Republican officials and voters actually believe Trump’s claim that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election by corrupting ballots — the same ballots that put so many Republicans in office — and if they do believe it what are their motives?A December 2021 University of Massachusetts-Amherst survey found striking linkages between attitudes on race and immigration on one hand and disbelief in the integrity of the 2020 election on the other.According to the poll, two-thirds of Republicans, 66 percent, agreed that “the growth of the number of immigrants to the U.S. means that America is in danger of losing its culture and identity” and the same percentage of Republicans are convinced that “the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate with voters from poorer countries around the world.”Following up on the UMass survey, four political scientists — Jesse Rhodes, Raymond La Raja, Tatishe Nteta and Alexander Theodoridis — wrote in an essay posted on The Washington Post’s Monkey Cage:Divisions over racial equality were closely related to perceptions of the 2020 presidential election and the Capitol attack. For example, among those who agreed that White people in the United States have advantages based on the color of their skin, 87 percent believed that Joe Biden’s victory was legitimate; among neutrals, 44 percent believed it was legitimate; and among those who disagreed, only 21 percent believed it was legitimate. Seventy percent of people who agreed that White people enjoy advantages considered the events of Jan. 6 to be an insurrection; 26 percent of neutrals described it that way; and only 10 percent who disagreed did so, while 80 percent of this last group called it a protest. And while 70 percent of those who agreed that White people enjoy advantages blamed Trump for the events of Jan. 6, only 34 percent of neutrals did, and a mere 9 percent of those who disagreed did.According to experts I asked, Republican elected officials who either affirm Donald Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was corrupt, or refuse to call Trump out, base their stance on a sequence of rationales.Mike McCurry, President Bill Clinton’s press secretary, sees the origin of one rationale in demographic trends:I believe much of the polarization and discord in national politics comes from changing demographics. Robert Jones of P.R.R.I. writes about this in “The End of White Christian America” and I think this is a source of many politico-cultural divisions and plays out in electoral politics. There is an America (“American dream”) that many whites were privileged to know growing up and it now seems to be evaporating or at least becoming subservient to other cultural ideals and norms. So that spurs anxiety and it is translated to the language and posture of politics.McCurry went on:I think otherwise well-meaning G.O.P. senators who flinch when it comes to common sense and serving the common good do so because they have no vocabulary or perspective which allows them to deal with the underlying changes in society. They feel the changes, they know constituents whom they otherwise like who feel the changes, but they cannot figure out how to lower the level of angst.Some maintain that another rationale underpinning submission to the lie is that it is signals loyalty to the larger conservative cause.Musa al-Gharbi, a sociologist at Columbia, pointed out in an email that acceptance of Trump’s false claims gives Republican politicians a way of bridging the gap between a powerful network of donors and elites who back free trade capitalism and the crucial bloc of white working-class voters seeking trade protectionism and continued government funding of Social Security and Medicare:Embracing the Big Lie is an empty approach to populism for a lot of these politicians. It allows them to cast their rivals, and the system itself, as corrupt — to cash in on that widespread sentiment — and to cast themselves as exceptions to the rule. It allows them to portray themselves as allies of “the people,” but without actually changing anything in terms of the policies they advocate for, in terms of how they do business.For those Republicans leaders, al-Gharbi continued, “who are the swamp, or could be reasonably construed as such, it is important to create an apparent distance from ‘the establishment.’ Flirting with the Big Lie is a good way of doing so.”Sarah Binder, a political scientist at George Washington University and a senior fellow at Brookings, noted in an email that “fear of electoral retribution from Trump — and from Republican voters — drives Senate G.O.P. reluctance to break with Trump.”The former president, she continued,has succeeded in reshaping the G.O.P. as “his” party. This electoral dynamic applies in spades to Republicans’ unwillingness to challenge Trump over the Jan. 6 insurrection — or like Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell to back down from their initial criticisms. It seems as if fealty to Trump’s alternative version of the events of Jan. 6 is the litmus test for Republicans.The underlying policy agreements between Republican incumbents and Trump reinforces these straightforward concerns over re-election, in Binder’s view:For all of Trump’s nativist immigration, trade, and “America First” views, he was lock step with Republicans on cutting taxes and regulations and stacking the courts with young conservatives. In that light, certainly while Trump was in office, Senate Republicans held their noses on any anti-democratic behavior and stuck with Trump to secure the policies they craved.Along similar lines, Bruce Cain, a political scientist at Stanford, observes that Republican elected officials make their calculations based on the goal of political survival:What perhaps looks like collective derangement to many outside the party ranks is really just raw political calculation. The best strategy for regaining Congressional control is to keep Trump and his supporters inside the party tent, and the only way to do that is to go along with his myths in order to get along with him.This approach, Cain continued, “is the path of least political resistance. Trump in 2016 demonstrated that he could win the presidency” while rejecting calls to reach out to minorities, by targeting a constituency that is “predominantly white and 80 percent conservative.” Because of its homogeneity, Cain continued, “the Republican Party is much more unified than the Democrats at the moment.”While there was considerable agreement among the scholars and strategists whom I contacted that Republican politicians consciously develop strategies to deal with what many privately recognize is a lie, there is less agreement on the thinking of Republican voters.Lane Cuthbert, along with his UMass colleague Alex Theodoridis, asked in an op-ed in The Washington Post:How could the “Big Lie” campaign convince so many Republicans that Trump won an election he so clearly lost? Some observers wonder whether these beliefs are genuine or just an example of “expressive responding,” a term social scientists use to mean respondents are using a survey item to register a feeling rather than express a real belief.In their own analysis of poll data, Cuthbert and Theodoridis concluded that most Republicans are true believers in Trump’s lie:Apparently, Republicans are reporting a genuine belief that Biden’s election was illegitimate. If anything, a few Republicans may, for social desirability reasons, be using the “I’m not sure” option to hide their true belief that the election was stolen.Al-Gharbi sharply disputes this conclusion:Most Republican voters likely don’t believe in the Big Lie. But many would nonetheless profess to believe it in polls and surveys, and would support politicians who make similar professions, because these professions serve as a sign of defiance against the prevailing elites, they serve as signs of group solidarity and commitment.Poll respondents, he continued,often give the factually wrong answer about empirical matters, not because they don’t know the empirically correct answer, but because they don’t want to give political fodder to their opponents with respect to their preferred policies. And when one takes down the temperature on these political stakes, again, often the differences on ‘the facts’ also disappear.One way to test how much people actually believe something, al-Gharbi wrote, “is to look out for yawning gaps between rhetoric and behaviors.” The fact that roughly 2,500 people participated in the Jan. 6 insurrection suggests that the overwhelming majority of Republicans do not believe the election was stolen no matter what they tell pollsters, in al-Gharbi’s view:If huge shares of the country, 68 percent of G.O.P. voters, plus fair numbers of Independents and nonvoters, literally believed that we were in a moment of existential crisis, and the election had been stolen, and the future was at stake — why is it that only a couple thousand could muster the enthusiasm to show up and protest at the Capitol? In a world where 74 million voted for Trump, and more than two-thirds of these (i.e. more than 50 million people, roughly 1 out of every 5 adults in the U.S.) actually believed that the other party had illegally seized power and plan to use that power to harm people like themselves, the events of Jan. 6 would likely have played out much, much differently.Whatever the motivation, Isabel V. Sawhill, a Brookings senior fellow, warned that Republican leaders and voters could be caught in a vicious cycle:There may be a dynamic at work here in which an opportunistic strategy to please the Trump base has solidified that base, making it all the more difficult to take a stance in opposition to “whatever-Trump-wants.” It’s a Catch-22. To change the direction of the country requires staying in power but staying in power requires satisfying a public, a large share of whom has lost faith in our institutions, including the mainstream media and the democratic process.Jake Grumbach, a political scientist at the University of Washington, noted in an email that the “big lie” fits into a larger Republican strategy: “In an economically unequal society, it is important for the conservative economic party to use culture war politics to win elections because they are unlikely to win based on their economic agenda.”“There are a number of reasons why some Republican elites who were once anti-Trump became loyal to Trump,” Grumbach continued:First is the threat of being primaried for failing to sufficiently oppose immigration or the Democratic Party, a process that ramped up first in the Gingrich era and then more so during the Tea Party era of the early 2010s. Second is that Republican elites who were once anti-Trump learned that the Republican-aligned network of interest groups and donors — Fox News, titans of extractive and low wage industry, the NRA, evangelical organizations, etc. — would mostly remain intact despite sometimes initially signaling that they would withhold campaign contributions or leave the coalition in opposition to Trump.Frances Lee, a political scientist at Princeton, took a different tack, arguing that Republican members of Congress, especially those in the Senate, would like nothing better that to have the “big lie” excised from the contemporary political landscape:I disagree with the premise that many senators buy into the “big lie.” Congressional Republicans’ stance toward the events of Jan. 6 is to move on beyond them. They do not spend time rebuking activists who question the 2020 outcome, but they also do not endorse such views, either. With rare exception, congressional Republicans do not give floor speeches questioning the 2020 elections. They do not demand hearings to investigate election fraud.Instead, Lee argued, “Many Republican voters still support and love Donald Trump, and Republican elected officials want to be able to continue to represent these voters in Washington.” The bottom line, she continued, is thatRepublican elected officials want and need to hold the Republican Party together. In the U.S. two-party system, they see the Republican Party as the only realistic vehicle for contesting Democrats’ control of political offices and for opposing the Biden agenda. They see a focus on the 2020 elections as a distraction from the most important issues of the present: fighting Democrats’ “tax and spend” initiatives and winning back Republican control of Congress in the 2022 midterms.Paul Begala, a Democratic strategist, argues thatTrump lives by Machiavelli’s famous maxim that fear is a better foundation for loyalty than love. G.O.P. senators don’t fear Trump personally; they fear his followers. Republican politicians are so cowed by Trump’s supporters you can almost hear them moo.Trumpism, Begala wrote in an email, “is more of a cult of personality, which makes fealty to the Dear Leader even more important. How else do you explain 16 G.O.P. senators who voted to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act in 2006, all refusing to even allow it to be debated in 2022?”Begala compares Senator Mitch McConnell’s views of the Voting Rights Act in 2006 — “America’s history is a story of ever-increasing freedom, hope and opportunity for all. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 represents one of this country’s greatest steps forward in that story. Today I am pleased the Senate reaffirmed that our country must continue its progress towards becoming a society in which every person, of every background, can realize the American dream” — to McConnell’s stance now: “This is not a federal issue; it ought to be left to the states.”Republican politicians, in Begala’s assessment,have deluded themselves into thinking that Trump and the Big Lie can work for them. The reality is the opposite: Republican politicians work for Trump and the Big Lie. And they may be powerless to stop it if and when Trump uses it to undermine the 2024 presidential results.It is at this point, Begala continued, “where leadership matters. Trump stokes bigotry, he sows division, his promotes racism, and when other G.O.P. politicians fail to disavow Trump’s divisiveness, they abet it. What a contrast to other Republican leaders in my lifetime.”Like Begala, Charles Stewart III, a political scientist at M.I.T., was blunt in his analysis:There’s generally a lack of nuance in considering why Republican senators fail to abandon Trump. Whereas Reagan spoke of the 11th Commandment, Trump destroyed it, along with many of the first 10. He is mean and vindictive and speaks to a set of supporters who are willing to take their energy and animus to the polling place in the primaries — or at least, that’s the worry. They are also motivated by racial animus and by Christian millennialism.These voters, according to Stewart,are not a majority of the Republican Party, but they are motivated by fear, and fear is the greatest motivator. Even if a senator doesn’t share those views — and I don’t think most do — they feel they can’t alienate these folks without stoking a fight. Why stoke a fight? Few politicians enter politics looking to be a martyr. Mainstream Republican senators may be overestimating their ability to keep the extremist genie in the bottle, but they have no choice right now, if they intend to continue in office.Philip Bobbitt, a professor of law at Columbia and the University of Texas, argued in an email that Republican acceptance of Trump’s falsehoods is a reflection of the power Trump has over members of the party:It’s the very fact that they know Trump’s claims are ludicrous — that is the point: like other bullies, he amuses himself and solidifies his authority by humiliating people and what can be more humiliating than compelling people to publicly announce their endorsements of something they know and everyone else knows to be false?Thomas Mann, a Brookings senior fellow, made the case in an email that Trump has transformed the Republican Party so that membership now precludes having “a moral sense: honesty, empathy, respect for one’s colleagues, wisdom, institutional loyalty, a willingness to put country ahead of party on existential matters, an openness to changing conditions.”Instead, Mann wrote:The current, Trump-led Republican Party allows no room for such considerations. Representative Liz Cheney’s honest patriotism would be no more welcome among Senate Republicans than House Republicans. Even those current Republican senators whose earlier careers indicated a moral sense — Mitt Romney, Susan Collins, Richard Burr, Roy Blunt, Lisa Murkowski, Robert Portman, Ben Sasse, Richard Shelby — have felt obliged to pull their punches in the face of the Big Lie and attempted coup.Bart Bonikowski, a sociologist at N.Y.U., describes the danger of this political dynamic:In capturing the party, Trump perfectly embodied its ethnonationalist and authoritarian tendencies and delivered it concrete results — even if his policy stances were not always perfectly aligned with party orthodoxy. As a result, the Republican Party and Trumpism have become fused into a single entity — one that poses serious threats to the stability of the United States.The unwillingness of Republican leaders to challenge Trump’s relentless lies, for whatever reason — for political survival, for mobilization of whites opposed to minorities, to curry favor, to feign populist sympathies — is as or more consequential than actually believing the lie.If Republican officials and their voters are willing to swallow an enormous and highly consequential untruth for political gain, they have taken a first step toward becoming willing allies in the corrupt manipulation of future elections.In that sense, the “big lie” is a precursor to more dangerous threats — threats that are plausible in ways that less than a decade ago seemed inconceivable. The capitulation to and appeasement of Trump by Republican leaders is actually setting up even worse possibilities than what we’ve lived through so far.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Rudy Giuliani and 3 Others Subpoenaed by Jan. 6 Committee

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      The House committee investigating the Capitol riot called for documents and testimony from Rudolph W. Giuliani and other members of President Donald J. Trump’s legal team.WASHINGTON — The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol on Tuesday subpoenaed Rudolph W. Giuliani and other members of the legal team that pursued a set of conspiracy-filled lawsuits on behalf of former President Donald J. Trump in which they made unsubstantiated claims of fraud in the 2020 presidential election.In addition to Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer and a ringleader of the group, the panel subpoenaed three others who played central roles in his effort to use the courts, state legislatures and Congress to try to overturn his defeat.Jenna Ellis drafted a memo on how Mr. Trump could invalidate the election results by exploiting an obscure law. Sidney Powell, a lawyer who worked on many of the lawsuits with Mr. Giuliani, ran an organization that raised millions of dollars based on false claims that election machines were rigged. Boris Epshteyn pursued allegations of election fraud in Nevada and Arizona and is said to have participated in a call with Mr. Trump on the morning of Jan. 6, “during which options were discussed to delay the certification of election results,” the committee said.“The four individuals we’ve subpoenaed today advanced unsupported theories about election fraud, pushed efforts to overturn the election results or were in direct contact with the former president about attempts to stop the counting of electoral votes,” Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the chairman of the committee, said in a statement.The subpoena to Mr. Giuliani, obtained by The New York Times, seeks all documents he has detailing the pressure campaign he and other Trump allies initiated targeting state officials; the seizure of voting machines; contact with members of Congress; any evidence to support the bizarre conspiracy theories pushed; and any arrangements for his attorney’s fees.The panel instructed the four witnesses to turn over documents and submit to an interview in February.The latest subpoenas came as the committee, which has interviewed nearly 400 witnesses, has issued a wide range of demands for records, including to banks and phone companies. On Tuesday, CNN reported that the committee had also obtained logs of phone calls and text messages belonging to the former president’s son Eric Trump and to Kimberly Guilfoyle, the girlfriend of another son, Donald Trump Jr. The logs do not reveal the content of the messages.A committee spokesman declined to comment on that report.For weeks after the election, Mr. Giuliani and his team — which Ms. Ellis described as an “elite strike force” — promoted baseless claims of voter fraud through failed lawsuits, news conferences, media appearances and meetings with lawmakers.The committee said in a letter to Mr. Giuliani that its investigation had revealed “credible evidence” that he participated in attempts to “disrupt or delay the certification of the election results,” persuade state legislators to “take steps to overturn the election results” and urge Mr. Trump to order the seizure of voting machines.Mr. Giuliani claimed fraud at a series of unofficial state legislative hearings, and even argued one election fraud case himself, in federal court in Philadelphia, where he suffered a decisive defeat.“Voters, not lawyers, choose the president,” the court declared at one point.On Jan. 6, speaking to a crowd of Trump supporters before the attack on the Capitol, Mr. Giuliani called for “trial by combat.” Later, as the building was under siege, he called lawmakers in an attempt to delay the certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory.“Senator Tuberville, or I should say Coach Tuberville, this is Rudy Giuliani, the president’s lawyer,” Mr. Giuliani said in a voice mail message intended for Senator Tommy Tuberville, Republican of Alabama, but mistakenly left on the phone of Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah. “I’m calling you because I want to discuss with you how they’re trying to rush this hearing and how we need you, our Republican friends, to try to just slow it down.”Ms. Ellis, the committee said, “prepared and circulated” two memos analyzing the constitutional authority for former Vice President Mike Pence to reject or delay counting electoral votes from states where Mr. Trump’s allies had attempted to arrange for the submission of an alternate slate of electors. In the memos, obtained by Politico, Ms. Ellis advised that Mr. Pence had the authority to not count electoral votes from six states in which the Trump campaign falsely alleged there was widespread fraud.Ms. Powell was among the leading promoters of some of the most far-fetched and fantastical claims of widespread voter fraud, including a bizarre conspiracy theory alleging a vast plot by China, Venezuela and the financier George Soros to hack into Dominion Voting Systems machines to flip votes away from Mr. Trump to Mr. Biden.She, too, urged Mr. Trump to seize voting machines, according to the committee.In December, Mr. Trump considered naming Ms. Powell to be a special counsel overseeing an investigation of voter fraud, even after his campaign had sought to distance itself from her as she aired wild and baseless claims about Dominion voting machines.Her organization, Defending the Republic, raised $14.9 million between December 2020 and July. Ms. Powell’s group has more than $9.3 million in funds on hand, according to an independent audit filed with Florida, which investigated the organization and alleged multiple violations of state law.Mr. Epshteyn reportedly attended planning meetings at the Willard Hotel in the days leading up to Jan. 6, the committee said. The panel, citing reporting from The Guardian, said he also participated in a call with Mr. Trump the morning of Jan. 6 that included a discussion of Mr. Pence’s “unwillingness to deny or delay the certification.”Key Figures in the Jan. 6 InquiryCard 1 of 14The House investigation. More

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      Jan. 6 Committee Subpoenas Twitter, Meta, Alphabet and Reddit

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      The panel investigating the attack on the Capitol is demanding information from Alphabet, Meta, Reddit and Twitter.WASHINGTON — The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol issued subpoenas on Thursday to four major social media companies — Alphabet, Meta, Reddit and Twitter — criticizing them for allowing extremism to spread on their platforms and saying they have failed to cooperate adequately with the inquiry.In letters accompanying the subpoenas, the panel named Facebook, a unit of Meta, and YouTube, which is owned by Alphabet’s Google subsidiary, as among the worst offenders that contributed to the spread of misinformation and violent extremism. The committee said it had been investigating how the companies “contributed to the violent attack on our democracy, and what steps — if any — social media companies took to prevent their platforms from being breeding grounds for radicalizing people to violence.”“It’s disappointing that after months of engagement, we still do not have the documents and information necessary to answer those basic questions,” said the panel’s chairman, Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi.The committee sent letters in August to 15 social media companies — including sites where misinformation about election fraud spread, such as the pro-Trump website TheDonald.win — seeking documents pertaining to efforts to overturn the election and any domestic violent extremists associated with the Jan. 6 rally and attack.After months of discussions with the companies, only the four large corporations were issued subpoenas on Thursday, because the committee said the firms were “unwilling to commit to voluntarily and expeditiously” cooperating with its work. A committee aide said investigators were in various stages of negotiations with the other companies.In the year since the events of Jan. 6, social media companies have been heavily scrutinized for whether their sites played an instrumental role in organizing the attack.In the months surrounding the 2020 election, employees inside Meta raised warning signs that Facebook posts and comments containing “combustible election misinformation” were spreading quickly across the social network, according to a cache of documents and photos reviewed by The New York Times. Many of those employees criticized Facebook leadership’s inaction when it came to the spread of the QAnon conspiracy group, which they said also contributed to the attack.Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee turned whistle-blower, said the company relaxed its safeguards too quickly after the election, which then led it to be used in the storming of the Capitol.Critics say that other platforms also played an instrumental role in the spread of misinformation while contributing to the events of Jan. 6.In the days after the attack, Reddit banned a discussion forum dedicated to former President Donald J. Trump, where tens of thousands of Mr. Trump’s supporters regularly convened to express solidarity with him.On Twitter, many of Mr. Trump’s followers used the site to amplify and spread false allegations of election fraud, while connecting with other Trump supporters and conspiracy theorists using the site. And on YouTube, some users broadcast the events of Jan. 6 using the platform’s video streaming technology.Representatives for the tech companies have been in discussions with the investigating committee, though how much in the way of evidence or user records the firms have handed over remains unclear.The committee said letters to the four firms accompanied the subpoenas.The panel said YouTube served as a platform for “significant communications by its users that were relevant to the planning and execution of Jan. 6 attack on the United States Capitol,” including livestreams of the attack as it was taking place.“To this day, YouTube is a platform on which user video spread misinformation about the election,” Mr. Thompson wrote.The panel said Facebook and other Metaplatforms were used to share messages of “hate, violence and incitement; to spread misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theories around the election; and to coordinate or attempt to coordinate the Stop the Steal movement.”Public accounts about Facebook’s civic integrity team indicate that Facebook has documents that are critical to the select committee’s investigation, the panel said.“Meta has declined to commit to a deadline for producing or even identifying these materials,” Mr. Thompson wrote to Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive.Key Figures in the Jan. 6 InquiryCard 1 of 12The House investigation. More

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      We Need to Think the Unthinkable About Our Country

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      A year after the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol, the United States seems perhaps even more alarmingly fractious and divided. Regrettably, the right has sustained its support for Donald Trump and continued its assault on American democratic norms.The next national election will almost inevitably be viciously (perhaps violently) contested. It is fair to say that the right-wing threat to the United States — and its apparent goal of laying the groundwork for a power grab, if necessary, in 2024 — is politically existential.Yet many Americans seem to be whistling past the graveyard of American democracy. In particular, there seems to have been little effort so far at think tanks, professional military institutions and universities to build and contemplate the dire scenarios that have become increasingly plausible. And the worst-case scenario is this: The United States as we know it could come apart at the seams.The worst case isn’t necessarily the most likely, but there’s a natural tendency to assign a vanishingly low probability to events that appear to pose insoluble problems and catastrophic outcomes and thus to dismiss them as fanciful.In the 20th century, constructive doomsaying helped prevent the Cold War from becoming a shooting war. It was ultimately worst-case thinking that stabilized nuclear deterrence and staved off nuclear Armageddon. Herman Kahn’s clinical projections of nuclear devastation dazzled and horrified a growing audience — his warnings began with a series of Princeton lectures and eventually became the basis of his best seller “Thinking About the Unthinkable.” The eventual Nobel Prize-winning economist Thomas C. Schelling used game theory to explore the risk that conventional conflict could escalate to the use of nuclear weapons; his work demonstrated the value of arms control and helped establish nuclear deterrence based, however perversely, on mutual assured destruction.In the 1980s, Jonathan Schell’s series of New Yorker essays (and subsequent book), “The Fate of the Earth,” reinvigorated popular alarm about nuclear war and stimulated calls for nuclear disarmament on both sides of the Atlantic. In line with dystopic novels like “On the Beach” by Nevil Shute and movies like “Fail-Safe,” “Dr. Strangelove,” “The Bedford Incident” and “The Day After,” worst-case thinking kept the prospect of nuclear holocaust real and the need to avoid it urgent. Clearly it influenced Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, who seriously contemplated nuclear disarmament in 1986.This urgent brand of collective cultural alertness receded after the Cold War. On the left, worst-casing thinking was blamed for the expansive growth of nuclear arsenals and the ill-fated U.S. war in Vietnam. Now the Republican Party’s embrace of “alternative facts,” aided by the growth of conservative media, has effectively created a separate domestic reality for millions of Americans. Since Jan. 6, 2021, comedians, partisan journalists and public intellectuals have recognized, ridiculed and lamented the state of our democracy and raised the possibility of a “slow-moving coup” (Bill Maher) or a “worst-case scenario” for our politics (Robert Crawford in The Nation). Other columnists and historians (Chauncey DeVega and Max Hastings, for example) have casually mooted the possibility of secession or large-scale political violence in the wake of the 2024 presidential election. A few recent books, like the political scientist Barbara F. Walter’s “How Civil Wars Start” and the journalist Stephen Marche’s “The Next Civil War,” have been discussed.But systematic and dispassionate analysis of such possibilities has not widely emerged. In June 2020, the bipartisan Transition Integrity Project — comprising over 100 former and serving government officials, academics, research analysts, journalists and other experts — held tabletop exercises on four different 2020 election crisis scenarios. Selected teams hypothesized moves and countermoves, responses and counter-responses, and in August 2020 published a broadly prescient report — which suggested that the election could be contested into 2021 and the transition process disrupted. It also included several preventive measures with an eye to 2024-25. Perhaps understandably, given the political climate, most participants were reluctant to identify themselves publicly and only a few talked to the media about the exercise. Two conservative outfits, the Texas Public Policy Foundation and the Claremont Institute, jointly gamed out similar scenarios, concluding that the constitutional order would hold. But these projects were short term and situationally limited and have not generated sustained open-source consideration of the more dire possibilities that have surfaced since Jan. 6.Predictably, far-right groups mobilized to dismiss the Transition Integrity Project’s activities as leftist “psychological warfare,” and some branded it a blueprint for a left-wing coup. That should not stop a reprise of the project’s efforts with respect to the 2024 election. In light of the lack of contingency planning for major violence on Jan. 6 by the Capitol Police and the Department of Homeland Security, such planning is presumably underway at federal law-enforcement agencies and the Pentagon. But that’s not enough.A right-wing minority — including many elected politicians — is now practicing a form of brinkmanship by threatening to unilaterally destroy American democracy, daring what they hope is a timid and somnolent majority to resist them. But that majority has the benefit of warning ahead of 2024.It behooves us to prepare our defenses for the worst. Understandably, the policy focus is now on pre-empting a right-wing steal in the next national election. But success will depend crucially on factors that are beyond control — the midterm elections this year and the identity of the Republican candidate in 2024 — which suggest that focus is misplaced. And even if a steal is thwarted, success might not preclude a coercive challenge of the election results; quite to the contrary, it would provoke one.War games, tabletop exercises, operations research, campaign analyses, conferences and seminars on the prospect of American political conflagration — including insurrection, secession, insurgency and civil war — should be proceeding at a higher tempo and intensity. Scholars of American politics need to pick up the torch from experts on the democratic decline in Europe, who first raised the alarm about growing dangers to American politics. The very process of intellectual interaction and collaboration among influential analysts of different political stripes could reconcile many of them to the undesirability of political upheaval, and thus decrease its likelihood.The overarching idea is, publicly and thoroughly, to probe just how bad things could get precisely to ensure that they never do, and that America’s abject political decay is averted.Jonathan Stevenson, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies and managing editor of Survival, served on the National Security Council staff in the Obama administration and is the author of “Thinking Beyond the Unthinkable.” Steven Simon is a fellow at M.I.T. and a senior analyst at the Quincy Institute. He served in the State Department and on the National Security Council staff in the Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Clinton and Obama administrations.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Trump Ends NPR Interview After Challenges to False Fraud Claim

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      Former President Donald J. Trump abruptly ended the interview after a lengthy back-and-forth over his claims of widespread election fraud.Former President Donald J. Trump abruptly ended an interview with NPR on Tuesday after he was pressed on his false claim of a stolen election in 2020 and how he was using that assertion to put pressure on Republicans before the 2022 midterm elections.In the interview with Steve Inskeep, a co-host of NPR’s Morning Edition, Mr. Trump discussed the coronavirus pandemic and his campaign to discredit results of the 2020 election, according to a transcript of the interview NPR posted on its website on Wednesday morning. At several points in the interview, Mr. Inskeep pushed back against false claims about the 2020 election, in one instance noting the failed lawsuits by Mr. Trump’s campaign and its allies. “Your own lawyers had no evidence of fraud, they said in court they had no evidence of fraud, and the judges ruled against you every time on the merits,” Mr. Inskeep said.After a lengthy back-and-forth over the election results, Mr. Trump asked how he could have lost the presidential election to Joe Biden, who he falsely claimed did not attract crowds during the campaign.Mr. Inskeep said: “If you’ll forgive me, maybe because the election was about you. If I can just move on to ask, are you telling Republicans in 2022 that they must press your case on the past election in order to get your endorsement? Is that an absolute?”Understand the Jan. 6 InvestigationBoth the Justice Department and a House select committee are investigating the events of the Capitol riot. Here’s where they stand:Inside the House Inquiry: From a nondescript office building, the panel has been quietly ramping up its sprawling and elaborate investigation.Criminal Referrals, Explained: Can the House inquiry end in criminal charges? These are some of the issues confronting the committee.Garland’s Remarks: Facing pressure from Democrats, Attorney General Merrick Garland vowed that the D.O.J. would pursue its inquiry into the riot “at any level.”A Big Question Remains: Will the Justice Department move beyond charging the rioters themselves?Mr. Trump responded: “They are going to do whatever they want to do — whatever they have to do, they’re going to do.”He continued to speak about his false claim that the 2020 election was “rigged” while Mr. Inskeep tried to interject.Mr. Trump then abruptly ended the interview.“So Steve, thank you very much,” he said. “I appreciate it.”“Whoa, whoa, whoa, I have one more question,” said Mr. Inskeep, who began to ask about a court hearing on Monday related to the Capitol riot by a pro-Trump mob last year. He then stopped himself, saying, “He’s gone. OK.”At the Monday hearing in the U.S. District Court for Washington, lawyers argued that Mr. Trump, by inspiring the riot, was liable for major financial damages.It was not clear how much of the question Mr. Trump heard before ending the interview. Early in the interview, Mr. Inskeep asked Mr. Trump about the coronavirus pandemic and what the former president would tell people who have not been vaccinated. Mr. Trump, who said in December that he had received a Covid-19 vaccine booster shot, told Mr. Inskeep that he recommended that people take the vaccine but that he did not support vaccine mandates.Key Figures in the Jan. 6 InquiryCard 1 of 12The House investigation. More

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      Let’s Not Invent a Civil War

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      “How Civil Wars Start,” a new book by the political scientist Barbara F. Walter, was cited all over the place in the days around the anniversary of last winter’s riot at the Capitol. The New Yorker’s David Remnick, Vox’s Zack Beauchamp and my colleague Michelle Goldberg all invoked Walter’s work in essays discussing the possibility that the United States stands on the edge of an abyss, with years of civil strife ahead.The book begins with a story from the fall of 2020: the kidnapping plot against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, hatched by a group of right-wing militiamen who opposed Whitmer’s pandemic restrictions. Fortunately “the F.B.I. was on to them” and foiled the plot — but the alleged kidnapping conspiracy, Walter argues, is a harbinger of worse to come. Periods of civil war often “start with vigilantes just like these — armed militants who take violence directly to the people.”Here’s a skeptical question, though: When we say the F.B.I. was “on to” to the plotters, what exactly does that mean? Because at the moment the government’s case against them is a remarkable tangle. Fourteen men have been charged with crimes, based in part on evidence reportedly supplied by at least 12 confidential informants — meaning that the F.B.I. had almost one informant involved for every defendant.And according to reporting from BuzzFeed’s Jessica Garrison and Ken Bensinger, one of these informants, an extremely colorful convicted felon named Stephen Robeson, appears to have been a crucial instigator of the plot. He is alleged to have used government funds to pay for meals and hotel rooms, encouraged people “to vent their anger about governors who enacted Covid-19 restrictions” and “to plan violent actions against elected officials and to acquire weapons and bomb-making materials,” and followed up aggressively, calling potential plotters “nearly every day.”Robeson’s role has become enough of a headache for the prosecution, in fact, that they recently disowned him, declaring that he was actually a “double agent” (meaning triple agent, I think) who betrayed his obligations as an informant by trying to destroy evidence and seeking to warn one of the accused conspirators ahead of his arrest. Prosecutors had already ruled out testimony from an agent who ran one of their key informants, probably because he spent much of 2019 trying to drum up business for his private security firm by touting his F.B.I. casework.Presumably we’ll find out more about all this when the case comes to trial, but for now it’s reasonable to wonder whether Whitmer’s would-be kidnappers would have been prepared to go all the way with their vigilante fantasies, absent some prodding from the feds.And those doubts, in turn, might be reasonably extended to the entire theory of looming American civil war, which assumes something not yet entirely in evidence — a large number of Americans willing to actually put their lives, not just their Twitter rhetoric, on the line for the causes that currently divide our country.Overall, the academic and journalistic literature on America’s divisions offers a reasonably accurate description of increasing American division. The country is definitely more ideologically polarized than it was 20 or 40 years ago; indeed, with organized Christianity’s decline, you could say that it’s more metaphysically polarized as well. We are more likely to hate and fear members of the rival party, more likely to sort ourselves into ideologically homogeneous communities, more likely to be deeply skeptical about public institutions and more likely to hold conspiratorial beliefs — like the belief that Joe Biden and the Democrats stole the 2020 election — that undercut the basic legitimacy of the opposition party’s governance.At the same time, the literature suffers from a serious liberal-bias problem, a consistent naïveté about the left and center’s roles in deepening polarization. For instance, in the Bush and Obama eras there were a lot of takes on the dangers of “asymmetric polarization” — the supposed ideological radicalization of the Republicans relative to the Democrats. Across most of the 2010s, though, it was clearly liberals who moved leftward much more rapidly, while Republicans basically stayed put — and yet somehow the perils of that kind of asymmetry get much less expert attention.Likewise the drama of protest politics in 2020 is often analyzed in a way that minimizes the revolutionary symbolism of the left’s protests — the iconoclasm and the toppled statues, the mayhem around federal buildings and the White House, the zeal to rename and rewrite — and focuses intensely on the right’s response, treating conservative backlash as though it emerges from the reactionary ether rather than as a cyclical response.The other bias in the civil-war literature is toward two related forms of exaggeration. First, an exaggerated emphasis on what Americans say they believe, rather than what (so far, at least) they actually do. It’s absolutely true that if you just look at polling data, you see a lot of beliefs that would seem to license not just occasional protest but some sort of continuing insurrection. This includes not only the Trumpist stolen-election theories but also popular beliefs about recent Republican presidents — that George W. Bush had foreknowledge and allowed Sept. 11 to happen or that the Russians manipulated vote tallies in order to place Donald Trump, their cat’s-paw, in the White House.However, an overwhelming majority of people who hold those kinds of beliefs show no signs of being radicalized into actual violence. For all the talk of liberal “resistance” under Trump, the characteristic left-wing response to the Trump administration was not to join Antifa but to mobilize to elect Democrats; it took the weird conditions of the pandemic and the lockdowns, and the spark of the George Floyd killing, to transmute anti-Trumpism into national protests that actually turned violent.Likewise, despite fears that Jan. 6 was going to birth a “Hezbollah wing” of the Republican Party, there has been no major far-right follow-up to the event, no dramatic surge in Proud Boys or Oath Keepers visibility, no campaign of anti-Biden terrorism. Instead, Republicans who believe in the stolen-election thesis seem mostly excited by the prospect of thumping Democrats in the midterms, and the truest believers are doing the extremely characteristic American thing of running for local office.This has prompted a different liberal fear — that these new officeholders could help precipitate a constitutional crisis by refusing to do their duty in a close election in 2024. But that fear is an example of the other problem of exaggeration in the imminent-civil-war literature, the way the goal posts seem to shift when you question the evocations of Fort Sumter or 1930s Europe.Thus we are told that some kind of major democratic breakdown is likely “absent some radical development” (as Beauchamp puts it); that we are already “suspended between democracy and autocracy” (as Remnick writes); that “the United States is coming to an end” and the only question “is how,” to quote the beginning of Stephen Marche’s new book, “The Next Civil War.” But then it turns out that the most obvious danger is an extremely contingent one, involving a cascade of events in 2024 — a very specific sort of election outcome, followed by a series of very high-risk, unusual radical choices by state legislators and Republican senators and the Supreme Court — that are worth worrying about but not at all the likeliest scenario, let alone one that’s somehow structurally inevitable.Similarly, we are first told that “civil war” is coming, but then it turns out that the term is being used to mean something other than an actual war, that the relevant analogies are periods of political violence like the Irish Troubles or Italy’s “Years of Lead.” And then if you question whether we’re destined to reach even that point, you may be informed that actually the civil war is practically here already — because, Marche writes, “the definition of civil strife starts at twenty-five deaths within a year,” and acts of anti-government violence killed more people than that annually in the later 2010s.That kind of claim strikes me as a ridiculous abuse of language. The United States is a vast empire of more than 330 million people in which at any given time some handful of unhinged people will be committing deadly crimes. And we are also a country with a long history of sporadic armed conflict — mob violence, labor violence, terrorism and riots — interwoven with the normal operation of our politics. If your definition of civil war implies that we are always just a few mass shootings or violent protests away from the brink, then you don’t have a definition at all: You just have a license for perpetual alarmism.I am very aware that I’m always the columnist making some version of this calm-down argument, sometimes to a fault. So I want to stress that the problems that undergird the civil-war hypothesis are serious problems, the divisions in our country are considerable and dangerous, the specific perils associated with a Trump resurgence in 2024 entirely real.But there are also lots of countervailing and complicating forces, and the overall picture is genuinely complex — at least as complex, let’s say, as the informant-riddled plot against Gretchen Whitmer. And as with that conspiracy, it’s worth asking whether the people who see potential insurrection lurking everywhere are seeing a danger rising entirely on its own — or in their alarm are helping to invent it.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram. More