Democrats and the Rhetoric of the January 6 Capitol Assault
Democrats Need to Toughen the Way in Which They Describe What Happened
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s recent decision to create a select committee to investigate the assault on our nation’s Capitol on January 6, 2021, proved a welcome development, but it should be accompanied by a change in how Democratic politicians and liberal commentators describe what occurred. The currently common language being applied to that treasonous, lethal gang violence is one of “insurrection” based on “The Big Lie.” While those descriptions are undoubtedly correct, they leave something to be desired. The label “insurrection” is somehow a bit too dry — a bit too academic — to reverberate in popular society. And as MSNBC host Brian Williams has suggested, “The Big Lie” — while convenient media shorthand that he himself uses — may not convey the gravity of what took place. Frankly, Democrats and liberals need to learn to be brutally frank.
What occurred on January 6 was nothing short of a terrorist attack, and while that description has emerged here and there, it has not been applied consistently by Democrats and liberals. Another MSNBC host, Joe Scarborough — a self-described conservative, erstwhile Republican, and former Republican congressman — is more on point by citing the Capitol rioters as “Trump terrorists.” For the rioters were indeed “terrorizing” members of Congress, engaging in violent and criminal behavior in an effort to intimidate America’s elected officials and force them to betray their constitutional duty. (They also, of course, terrorized the police officers who were seeking to safeguard the Capitol and the politicians inside.)
Sure, this terrorist attack took a different form from, say, that of September 11, 2001, or the Boston Marathon bombing of April 15, 2013. (Although one might note that the night before, a still-unidentified suspect planted pipe bombs near both the Democratic National Committee and Republican National Committee residences in Washington, DC, potentially as a diversion. https://www.npr.org/2021/04/14/986457987/what-we-know-about-the-suspect-who-planted-bombs-before-the-capitol-riot.) But it was a terrorist attack just the same — an “old school” terrorist assault, one might say. The violent marauders were looking to capture — and perhaps kill — elected officials. At a minimum, they sought to intimidate — to “terrorize” — them into refusing to certify the actual results of the 2020 presidential election. That intimidation — that “terrorization” — took manifestly violent forms, such as vandalism, the brutalizing (and in one case killing) of cops, breaking glass, busting down doors, illegal trespassing, the theft of private and confidential material, and threats of mayhem, all of which caused elected officials and their staff members — Democrat and Republican alike — to cower or flee. And had any of those politicians or staff members been directly spotted or captured by the terrorists, they might have been kidnapped, taken as hostages, and possibly brutalized, maimed, or butchered. In other words, yes, the Capitol rioters constituted terrorists in the vein of, say, the Symbionese Liberation Army back in the 1970s.
Donald Trump catalyzed a terrorist assault on the US Capitol and the constitutional validation of a presidential election. And now, aside from Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger (the only House GOP members to vote for the select committee), the Republican Party that Trump leads is sheltering and harboring those terrorists. By failing to support a complete and comprehensive investigation of the terrorist thuggery that marred American democracy on January 6, Republicans have engaged in acts of appeasement. Once again, Democrats and liberals have faltered by failing to use such rhetoric, to speak with brutal frankness about what took place and now what continues to occur. For by seeking to elude accountability, Republicans (again, except Cheney and Kinzinger) have proven to be “appeasers” and are participating in a “coverup,” either by willfully lying about what transpired (as in the case of Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson and Georgia representative Andrew Clyde) or willfully evading their responsibilities (as in the case of House minority leader Kevin McCarthy and Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell). Until Democratic officials and their progressive allies within the chattering class start to understand the power of rhetoric and how to harness it, they are failing to make these Republican appeasers pay, politically.
Similarly, the way that Democrats and liberals have discussed the new Republican voter laws in states such as Georgia is also insufficient. By shepherding the vote-counting process into the hands of elected Republican politicians in state legislatures, the GOP is “rigging” the system and engaged in nothing less than “corruption.” And a convenient analogy would be to remove the referees or umpires from a sports game and let the players of just one team make the calls.
These sorts of terms and analogies are not only accurate; they also resonate in ways that most Americans, including those who do not follow politics closely, can easily grasp. And they can reverberate more readily with the less partisan swing voters who may determine control of the US Congress in 2022. Too often, Democrats are at once too formal and too milquetoast in the way that they talk. On this Fourth of July weekend, let us remember that rhetoric — if properly channeled — can have dramatic effects, as it did with the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. Language matters, and Democrats need to become much sharper, tougher, and unyielding in the rhetoric that they use to describe the terrorist assault of January 6, the current Republican appeasement of that terrorism, and the GOP’s attempt to rig elections in various states.
