What the Jan. 6 hearings have revealed about the state of democracy in America so far

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The five hearings into the Jan. 6, 2021, insurgency have thus far revealed an enormous amount about the Trump White House and its various scheming, rioting and fantasizing adherents. Historians may conclude that it told us even more about the contemporary United States.

The hearings have laid bare the efforts of Donald Trump to hold onto power in defiance of the country’s voters, courts and state officials.

They have also exposed the fragility of the tendons of nationhood that are being strained in the country today. The first threat to U.S. democracy ended with the confirmation of Joe Biden’s election. The second threat persists.

After more than two weeks, two major themes emerged from the sessions.

The intended consequence is the portrayal – largely a Democratic effort, aided by two Republican apostates horrified by the former president’s comportment – of Mr. Trump as a despot-in-the-making, not so much clinging to power as attempting to grasp power after all the institutions and conventions of American civic life made it clear that his time as president, like that of his 43 predecessors, was finite. It was, as Republican Representative Adam Kinzinger put it in Thursday’s hearing, an offensive to “sacrifice our republic to prolong his presidency.”

But the unintended consequence may be even more significant. This crisis of political succession comes at a time of racial reckoning and reconsideration and amid fresh appraisals of slavery and the near eradication of Indigenous peoples. As a result, it recasts all of U.S. history, transforming it from a march of national purpose and progress to an arena of constant national contention and conflict.

And at the same time the visage of national unity has been shattered.

This occurred, of course, during the period leading up to the Civil War and continuing through Reconstruction. And it occurred during the Vietnam/Watergate era, from about 1966 to 1975. Those were periods when Americans took different sides in debates that were both political and moral.

“We were divided along party lines in Watergate,” William Cohen, a first-term Republican congressman from Maine who in 1974 sat on the judiciary committee that voted to impeach GOP president Richard Nixon, said in an interview. “Many Republicans thought the Democrats were trying to overturn the election. But there was a group of Republicans who were reasonable people who believed Nixon had to go. There were people in Congress open to persuasion on what the truth was.”

This time it’s different. It includes, to be sure, different points of view – whether, for example, a wall is needed at the southern border or whether guns should be controlled or whether abortion is tantamount to murder. Americans disagree on those things, just as they disagree on myriad other issues.

But this period involves something absent from the two earlier eras: clashing perceptions of what occurred at a discrete moment of time, both in the 2020 election and in the 2021 insurrection that followed.

The other issues are subject to compromise, though finding common ground on immigration, guns and abortion is exceedingly difficult. Those are issues – the purview of the political world. It is impossible to find common ground – to reach a compromise – on whether the rampage at the Capitol was simply the fanciful action of a handful of misguided tourists or whether the rioters were really leftists hoping to cast Mr. Trump’s supporters in a harsh light or whether it was a grave threat to democratic rule and the peaceful transfer of power.

One view is neatly summarized by former Democratic senator Gary Hart of Colorado, twice a presidential candidate. “The country is going through some things that I could have sworn could never happen, and I am seeing people saying things I could have sworn I never thought I would hear,” he said in an interview. “I see people almost glorying in the destruction of the symbols of our democracy.”

Today Mr. Hart – who when he left politics often reflected on how much he, even as an insurgent who rebelled against the conventions of U.S. politics, revered the Senate – could be regarded as a hopeless romantic.

A conflicting view is represented by Ron Kaufman, a veteran GOP activist and operative. “The country knows pretty much what happened on Jan. 6, and that it was a bad thing for the country,” he said. “As bad as it was, it wasn’t the Civil War or the divisions on Vietnam.”

In recent years Mr. Kaufman, a member of the Republican National Committee from Massachusetts, has been castigated for being too much of an establishment figure. The views of some Trump supporters are even stronger.

In the recent past – say, a dozen years ago – the Civil War and the Vietnam/Watergate period stood out and apart as dangerous crises in the American passage. Today those two episodes seem to be part of a national continuum of crisis – threat after threat to unity and national survival. In the recent past, the movement of Loyalists to Canada during the years of the American Revolution was regarded as a colourful side show of a more powerful, more glorious narrative. Today, that flood of migrants appears as an early indicator of persistent dissent.

In 1832, three years before his death, chief justice John Marshall – writing just after the era known, ironically, as the Early National Period – worried: “The Union has been preserved thus far by miracles. I fear they cannot continue.” That was not an isolated view. In his 2021 American Republics, University of Virginia historian Alan Taylor identified significant tensions in the American Revolution period. “A Revolution in the name of liberty demanded unity, sacrifice and discipline,” he wrote, “but most citizens defined liberty as the pursuit of individual gains.”

That tension is at the heart of much of the Trump upheaval. It is visible in mask mandates, struggles over whether businesses should be shuttered during the pandemic and fights over whether vaccine passports are required. Were the restrictions during the early months of the pandemic a responsible response to a deadly health crisis? Or were they yet another restriction on the personal liberty of Americans by a permanent governmental class?

There is not a giant leap from that conflict to this one: Was the Trump insurrection – mounted by what committee chairman Bennie Thompson, a Democratic congressman from Mississippi, Thursday called “the mob and their vile threats” – an un-American threat to democratic values? Or was it precisely the sort of rebellion that took its form in the rebellion against the tyranny of George III and that Thomas Jefferson himself endorsed when he wrote in 1787 that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants.”

All American schoolchildren encounter that quote in Grade 5. What they do not encounter is what appears four sentences earlier in Jefferson’s letter to William Smith, when he asks, “What country can preserve it’s [sic] liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?”

The question the United States must face today is whether the contemporary equivalent of the warning Jefferson spoke of was the Capitol rebellion or whether the warning was the hearing that portrayed that rebellion as a crime against democratic rule? On the answer to that question the future of the country depends.

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