Liberty Expose: Insurrection At The U.S. Capitol: Lessons In Irony
Jon Cherry / Stringer
On January 6, 2021, a riot of Trump supporters, at his encouragement, stormed the Capitol Building in an insurrectionary attempt to disrupt the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s electoral win for president. Instigated by Trump’s unsubstantiated claims that the presidential election was rigged against him, these rioters sought to “take their country back” through violent usurpation of the legislative process, precipitating five deaths. In doing so, they threatened our representatives’ lives, unsettled our democracy, and desecrated our highest monument of representative government.
At the outset of a new administration, our national response to this cataclysmic event calls on all of us to attend to the work that keeps the fabric of society strong. For a few, this work is clearly demarcated. Law enforcement must hold those accountable by impartially seeking out evidence of criminal activity or complicity, even by congressional lawmakers. The Senate should, at a more propitious moment, adjudicate the House’s second impeachment of Trump. And lawmakers at all levels should commit themselves to passing legislation that proactively addresses the long-standing issues that mark these catastrophic times.
It remains for the rest of us to keep our heads high and our hearts open, even to those whose reactions to the event differ greatly from our own. During moments like these, it is important to remember that even the most disparate reactions often share a common moral meaning. Sympathizers with the cause of the rioters (if not their violent actions, which should be condemned outright) may be reacting to standing political problems that also concern those with opposing feelings—from anger, fear, and incredulity, to disappointment, despair, and righteous indignation.
Moreover, the perception of a clear good-bad dichotomy, wherein the in-group is considered unqualifiedly good, and the out-group unqualifiedly bad, often limits our grasp of the full meaning of a situation by obscuring our unconscious blind spots. These are essential to identify in order to avoid repetition of the same mistakes. If we focus solely on the ostensible wrongheadedness of those who disagree with us, we risk losing sight of our common moral situation and the hidden causes that brought the situation about.
Reinhold Niebuhr’s treatment of the “ironic situation” in The Irony of American History provides a useful category for getting leverage on this essential, but often difficult moral practice. For Niebuhr, irony characterizes a situation in which “apparently fortuitous incongruities in life” are “discovered, upon closer examination, to be not merely fortuitous”:
“If virtue becomes vice through some hidden defect in the virtue; if strength becomes weakness because of the vanity to which strength may prompt the mighty man or nation; if security is transmuted into insecurity because too much reliance is placed upon it; if wisdom becomes folly because it does not know its own limits—in all such cases the situation is ironic...While a pathetic or tragic situation is not dissolved when a person becomes conscious of his involvement in it, an ironic situation must dissolve, if men or nations are made aware of their complicity in it.”
Dissolving irony during trying national moments is important because the cause of the Union implies more than our coming together in a spirit of charitable compromise—it implies our spiritual development into a more humane, democratic, and liberated people. But in order to become such a people, it is not enough that we achieve only economic prosperity and a modicum of political efficiency. We must also become more self-possessed through the recognition of those unconscious blinders that hinder our relations with one another and stifle the mastery of our capabilities.
While indeed a precondition for practical politics and a tolerable standard of community, the call to “set aside our differences” tends to raise eyebrows because many unconsciously know that, by itself, this strategy alone provides a superficial basis for meaningful reconciliation. In order to achieve the kind of redemptive reconciliation that elevates the democratic maturity of a people, charity must be accompanied by a mutual recognition of our true collective situation, and this requires the dissolving of those hidden pretensions that obscure our understanding of ourselves and others. Without this clarity of vision, efforts at compromise will be continually hindered by unconscious resistances, which suspect that a decisive trial of national life has been punted out of view.
Three Ironies
The first and most obvious irony has to do with the actions of the rioters themselves, who used violent force in an attempt to subvert due legislative process. Many of these rioters saw themselves as patriotic defenders of the President and the democratic integrity of the country (which, they believe, was subverted by a fraudulent election).
The irony here is that in proclaiming a defense of democracy, anti-democratic means were used. Unable to see past the lies expounded by Trump, their blatant arrogance and mean-spirited defiance betrayed a radical incongruity between their proclaimed objective and the actual meaning of their actions, which was the infusion of terror into our democratic culture. That they directed these energies at our highest symbol of representative government, and threatened the very lives of those who were democratically elected to represent us, only serves to deepen the irony.
The situation becomes clearer if we contrast it with the largely peaceful Black Lives Matter protests from the previous year. In keeping with the practice of nonviolent protest, BLM protestors channeled their indignation with a discipline grounded in solemn self-possession and commitment to moral principles that transcend factional interest. This discipline is democratic in two ways. First, by avoiding the use of force and terror, it affirms its faith in the power of truth-telling speech to activate the humanity of one’s fellows and initiate change through the democratic process (for all its current limitations). Second, in accepting the punitive consequences of such disobedience (should they arise), it avoids self-righteous assurance of one’s unqualified purity or superiority.
There is a second irony that relates to the self-understanding of the rioters, only this one includes supporters of the effort who may not have been directly involved. This irony has to do with the unperceived congruity between the object of their defiance (a rigged, unresponsive system of representative government) and the frustrations of the very people they have alienated. Theirs is not the only story of abandonment by a polarized government run by powerful oligarchic interests: such is the woe of working and middle-class people across the country of all backgrounds, including those in the BLM movement. Yet the false consciousness woven by Trump’s rhetoric (and his Republican predecessors going back to Reagan) has made it difficult for them to perceive this common, transracial interest. In consequence, many remain unable to recognize how their actions will only alienate them from the coalitions that would lead to real political empowerment.
It is essential to parse this irony out because it contains a potential thread for reconciliation. Though misguided, those who align with Trump’s antidemocratic rhetoric are in large part responding to the unresponsive gridlock that has more and more come to define politics as usual. They sense that the system is indeed rigged against them, that their government is no longer their own, and that the will for energetic government agency in the name of meaningful economic reform has long been absent.
They are not wrong in these feelings. To channel them appropriately, we must forward a nationalist program that actually addresses the economic hardships of all working and middle-class Americans, and makes democracy reform one of its foundational pillars. We must recognize our collective situation and take ownership of it through bold programmatic action.
This point brings us to the third irony, which concerns a typical reaction found among more established political leaders. This is the familiar contention that Trump’s presidency and the anti-democratic forces he has unleashed constitute a mere blip in American progress—an unexpected deviation off the proper track.
The ironic situation arises from the unperceived relationship between business as usual (which characterized the pre-Trump era) and the creation of those social conditions that made his populist movement possible. To view the profile of Trump sympathizers as anomalous, and suggest that we “set aside our differences” and return to the pre-Trump status quo, is to fail to recognize that this status quo proved so unresponsive to peoples’ needs that Trump’s faux populism seemed to millions of Americans their best bet. Thus, this reaction by itself does not permit us to properly recognize the full moral meaning of our situation, and in turn, the proper political actions which would redeem it.