THE NEW "LOST CAUSE"

Are the events of our recent past prelude to the future?

In the six months since the January 6 insurrection, Trump and his allies have waged a scorched-earth campaign to rewrite the narrative of that day. Rather than a story of how a violent insurrectionary mob led by fascist paramilitaries attacked the Capitol, threatening to kill Vice President Mike Pence and beating police officers with baseball bats and flagpoles with the American flag attached, Trump and his followers describe the day as largely peaceful, a crowd of protesters seeking justice for the country they love, unfairly maligned and persecuted by prosecutors, Democrats and mainstream journalists.

Trump has complained that his supporters were treated far worse than Black Lives Matter protesters charged last summer, and that the Justice Department and others want to use prosecutions of January 6 crimes to damage him.

The former president talks constantly about the “good people” who traveled to Washington that day, and the crowd’s large size.

This is the new “Lost Cause” and it is every bit as dangerous, every bit as untruthful, as the original post-Civil War myth of righteous patriots standing up to a grasping government that wanted to destroy their way of life, as the traitors of the Confederacy were proclaimed far and wide for 100 years after, and are still revered by too many.

We now know for a fact that, while he was president, Donald Trump attempted to overthrow the election of 2020, first by fraud, then by violence. It can be called nothing other than an attempted coup d’etat.

The news of the past few days clearly demonstrate that the conspiracy to attempt the overthrow of the government of which he was the head was defeated due to the integrity and courage of a few state-level Republican officials in the crucial battleground states, and to the integrity of other individuals he had appointed to head the Department of Justice. Literally ten days before the insurrection at the capitol on January 6, an official at the DoJ was ready and prepared to send a letter to the governors and state legislators of those six states, providing them cover to call into question the election result in each state, which could have ended in the greatest constitutional crisis in the nation’s history.

Had Jeffrey Clark been installed .as Acting Attorney General in place of Jeffrey Rosen, it is entirely possible that the conspiracy of which Trump was the leader might have been successful. Only the threat on the part of Rosen and his deputy Donoghue and other senior DoJ officials to publicly resign and state their reasons for doing so if Trump fired Rosen and attempted to install Clark kept this plot from happening.

This was not all the work of committed Trumpers. Looking strictly at his background, Clark was no foaming-at-the-mouth Trumper when he came back to work in the DoJ after Trump’s election victory after having worked at the DoJ during the Bush Administration. Yet, by the end of Trump’s four years in office, he was ready to commit what can only be called treason.

He wasn’t the only one. An overwhelming majority of congressional Republicans were ready to call the election into question, which - had Clark’s plan worked - could have seen the legitimate electoral victory by Joe Biden and the Democrats called into “question” and the issue thrown into the House, where the election could have been reversed due to the Republicans control of a 27-state majority there - despite being a minority of the House of Representatives on a congress-member level.

Trump was impeached for the second time for his attempted coup, but a majority of Republicans in the House voted against the impeachment, and most in those in the Senate voted to acquit. Trump has otherwise to date escaped all consequences for his attempted destruction of the Constitution. He remains the Republican Party’s best fundraiser, and the clear front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. He sits atop a political “bank” of $100 million that provides the means to continue his subversive campaign against the country.

In the states where they control the state legislatures, Republicans are changing election laws to impose new difficulties on all those they see as having “voted wrong” last November. They are granting themselves the power to reverse the result of an election through spurious claims of irregularities that need not be proven in court, and extreme pro-Trump partisans are candidates for those state offices that control the administration of elections. They are working to create the conditions where a plot like Clark’s would not have to be instigated by letters to governors and legislatures from the Department of Justice.

The “audit” in Arizona and calls for similar actions in the other battleground states, which call into question the validity of voting at all, is part of this preparation, this laying the ground work for a successful coup in 2024.

Meanwhile, many in the MAGAverse are celebrating the January 6 insurrectionists as patriots, and claiming they are the victims of political persecution, if not as outright heroes. Ashli Babbit, the woman killed as she attempted to leap through a broken window into the antechambef of the House at the moment legislators were being evacuated from the floor of the House to safety, as others in the head of the charge sought to find and abduct Pence has been elevated as a martyr.

Described thus, what happened sounds as bad , as dangerous to our constitutional republic, as it actually was. That’s why Conservatism Inc. is putting as much effort as is being invested in never “describing it like that.”

Just as the Confederate traitors were turned into valiant patriots attempting to defend their way of life from an overweening government, and their treason turned into the myth of the Lost Cause which dominated American social and political discourse for a century, so this campaign wants you tp believe that Trump’s failed putsch was a shambles and a farce, an “altercation,” a protest gone wrong, a coup that was obviously not a coup. They want you to disbelieve your eyes and ears and forget what you saw on television that day as they amiably suggest nobody need worry about the events of January 6 overmuch.

To support believe this, the insurrectionist’s attack on Congress must be kept separate from the rest of the history of the 2020 presidential election and the events leading up to it. Trump’s first impeachment in 2020 was for extorting Ukraine to deliver disinformation to help him against Joe Biden. His second impeachment in 2021 was for inciting an attack on Congress to stop Biden from taking office. They may have been separate events and separate crimes, but they both part of the same conspiracy to steal an election. A conspiracy aided and abetted by the Republican Party at all levels - local, state, and national. A conspiracy that has continued since January 6 and looks like it could be successful next time. The conspirators learned from their failure this time and now they want to “prepare the battlefield” for the next time.

It is not Donald Trump who is systematically ending the political careers of every Republican who has stood up for democracy since the election. It is a broad effort that is almost universally supported in what is now the Trump Party.

In its aftermath, a failed coup often looks ludicrous. When the Secret Army Organization inside the French military attempted to overthrow President Charles de Gaulle and the then-new Fifth Republic in 1961, De Gaulle mocked the coup-plotters as “un quarteron de généraux en retraite”—“a handful of retired generals” - A phrase even more dismissive in French than in English. That came, however, after the fact, after DeGaulle knew the outcome. By all accounts of that time, he took the SAO with deadly seriousness during the attempt. Most of the plotters went to jail for a very long time, and a clean-out of the French Army was carried out with great diligence.

We should look to DeGaulle’s example in deciding how we should take the events of January 6 and all the actions taken by Trump and his toadies after the election. The conspirators were hunted down, charged with treason, found guilty and imprisoned. All the “whatabouts” and finger-pointing at the Puerto Rican terrorists who wounded five Representatives when they opened fire on Congress in 1954, or the planting of a bomb in a Senate washroom in 1971, which damaged the building, or the bomb detonated in the Senate in 1983 to protest the U.S. invasion of Grenada deliberately misses the relevant point: the January 6 insurrection was unique in our national history in one fateful and terrible way: It came from the inside.

This attack was not the work of radicals outside the system, avowed adversaries of the American government. This insurrection was incited by the elected head of the U.S. government, who had sworn to protect and defend the constitution that founded that government. It was the thing the authors of the Constitution feared the most: betrayal of the highest office by the holder of that office.

It’s no mystery why pro-Trump partisans would excuse January 6: Trump incited the putsch; he continues to justify it. Of course those loyal to Trump would condone this latest outrage as they have previously condoned so many others. You sign with the Mafia, you don’t get squeamish about the crimes.

It is vitally important to realize that the single most dangerous part of this attempted coup was not a long time Trump supporter. Until his activities in this came to light, most who knew of him would describe him as a standard “Conservative Republican.” It’s important to keep that in mind.

Clark can be taken as evidence that “typical” Republican conservatives have concluded that Trump is not going away. His grip on the Republican Party is even tighter now than it was. Unless he is debarred by events or health concerns from running in 2024, he is the likely 2024 GOP nominee, to the point of certainty that there will be no Republican primary campaign unless he is dead, in jail, or the subject of prosecution. Regardless, noisy loyalty to him would be required as a precondition for any possible alternative, or any candidate for any other office from local to national. A strong defense of Trump and a willingness to downplay the Insurrection, to act as though it is the new “Lost Cause,” is now the one and only meaningful test of loyalty in today’s Republican Party.

This situation exists because even before Trump came down his escalator, a significant section of the American Right had become “post-democratic.” Trump’s takeover was so easy because they were already yearning for a Caesar to repress the lib’ruls. This anti-democratic stance has only become more explicit. That’s why the highest-toned conservative intellectuals are now fans of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, of Poland’s Law and Justice party, of Vladimir Putin. There are some wjp even have favorable words for Portugal’s fascist dictator, António Salazar.

The post-Trump right is now fully authoritarian and anti-democratic.

Veteran GOP political consultant Stuart Stevens says Republicans are seeking to recast the narrative of January 6 because the Commander-in-chief “inspired domestic terrorists to besiege the Capitol in an effort to overturn the election.”

He goes on to say, “That’s not a very good picture, so you have to create an alternative reality — that Trump won and these were good Americans.” Stevens grew up in Mississippi; he knows the tale of the Lost Cause well. “It’s the same instinct, but this is more dangerous,” because the Lost Cause was only embraced by some elements of the Democratic Party, not the hole party. “It’s now the Republicans’ official position that Joe Biden was not legally elected.”

Michael Edison Hayden, a spokesperson for the Southern Poverty Law Center, echoes was Stevens says, pointing out that the new narrative allows Trump and his allies to “flip what happened and present the attackers as victims. The only word that comes to mind is the amplification of a fringe narrative. It’s not as though the narrative has changed. It’s spread and taken hold in larger portions of Trump’s base.”

This past May, “scholar in residence” Michael Anton set aside nearly two hours on his Claremont Institute podcast, "The Stakes," for a wide-ranging discussion with self-described monarchist Curtis Yarvin about why the United States needs an "American Caesar" to seize control of the federal government, and precisely how such a would-be dictator could accomplish the task.

For those who don’t know, the Claremont Institute has long advocated for a return to the principles of the American founding, including the Declaration of Independence's denunciations of monarchical tyranny, which makes the conversation of interest, since Anton doesn’t oppose Yarvin's arguments and assertions.

The trick, for Yarvin, is for the would-be American Caesar to exercise emergency powers from day one. How? Caesar should run for president promising to do precisely this, and then announce the national emergency in his inaugural address, encouraging every state government to do the same. Taking advantages of "ambiguities" in the Constitution, he will immediately act to federalize the national guard around the country and welcome backup from sympathetic members of the police, who will wear armbands to signal their support for Caesar.

Going on, Yarvin explains that "when Caesar crosses the Rubicon, he doesn't sit around getting his feet wet, fishing. He marches straight across the Rubicon" and uses "all force available." Once that happens, the whole world can be "remade."

Anton ends by quoting Claremont writer Angelo Codevilla on how Trump dropped "the leadership of the deplorables," which is waiting to be picked up by someone "who will make Trump seem moderate."

Trump can’t be ignored, because he is trying to destroy democracy in order to return himself to power, and if he’s back in power, who is to say that he will ever leave?

In a recent CBS News poll, “narrow majorities of Trump voters” are describing the January 6th insurrection and attempted coup as examples of “patriotism” and “defending freedom.” Keep in mind these Trump voters witnessed the same treasonous attack on the Capitol as Republicans in Congress who feared for their lives during the uprising.

In another poll, nearly half of Republican voters firmly believe there will come a time in the not-so-distant future when “patriotic Americans (i.e., Trump supporters) will have to take the law into their own hands.”

These are the same voters who believe the Trump-directed attack on the Capitol was the work of “patriots defending freedom,” and not insurrectionists working on behalf of a candidate who lost a free and fair election.

Democrats can’t keep playing by old rules because Republicans have burned the rule book. There are no rules anymore. So pulling punches and using language that’s polite isn’t going to get us where we need to be.

Yesterday, as he signed legislation awarding the Congressional Gold Medal to police who defended the Capitol on January 6, President Biden said: “It wasn’t dissent. It wasn’t debate. It wasn’t democracy. It was insurrection. It was riot and mayhem. It was radical and chaotic, and it was unconstitutional. Maybe most important, it was fundamentally un-American.”

That is the truth we can never let them change.

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