Commentators opine on the 1/6 hearings to be televised today

A ponderous gasbag

Two op-ed essays in the New York Times are not optimistic that the hearings will amount to much. They maybe be justified in their pessimism, or maybe cold realism for the pragmatists in the crowd. In his essay, The Jan. 6 Committee Has Already Blown It, David Brooks writes:

My Times colleagues Annie Karni and Luke Broadwater wrote an article with the headline, “Jan. 6 Hearings Give Democrats a Chance to Recast Midterm Message.” Democrats, they reported, are hoping to use the hearings to show midterm voters how thoroughly Republicans are to blame for what happened that day.

Other reports have suggested other goals. The committee members are trying to show how much Donald Trump was involved with efforts to overturn the election, so he is forever discredited. They are expected to use witnesses like the former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson to show exactly what went on inside the administration that day and in the lead-up to it. One lawmaker told The Washington Post that voters have shifted their attention to issues like inflation and the pandemic, so it is key to tell a gripping story that “actually breaks through.”

No offense, but these goals are pathetic.

Using the events of Jan. 6 as campaign fodder is small-minded and likely to be ineffective. If you think you can find the magic moment that will finally discredit Donald Trump in the eyes of the electorate, you haven’t been paying attention over the last six years.

We don’t need a committee to simply regurgitate what happened on Jan. 6, 2021. We need a committee that will preserve democracy on Jan. 6, 2025, and Jan. 6, 2029. We need a committee to locate the weaknesses in our democratic system and society and find ways to address them.

The core problem here is not the minutiae of who texted what to chief of staff Mark Meadows on Jan. 6 last year. The core problem is that there are millions of Americans who have three convictions: that the election was stolen, that violence is justified in order to rectify it and that the rules and norms that hold our society together don’t matter.

Brooks has a point. Actually, at least two points. First T**** cannot be further discredited by anything that has happened so far. Second, too many Americans now reject restraining norms. That was the glue that held us together, even if some of it was the now vilified and discredited PC. The glue is gone and with it, so is respect for democracy, the rule of law, civility and respect for inconvenient fact, truth and sound reasoning. The wreckage is gigantic.

Maybe worse from what I can tell, the same anti-democratic poison appears to be slowly seeping into America's political left.

In his essay, The Anticlimax of the Jan. 6 Hearings, commentator Jacob Bacharach focuses on the loss of respect for facts. Bacharach writes:

Even if [the televised hearings] manage to drag a few million American eyeballs away from the streaming platforms for a few evenings with some measure of spectacle and the promise of comeuppance for some of the minor and expendable figures from Trumpworld, their scope and impact are likely to be minor. The modern Democratic Party has not often shown itself to be capable of transcendent political showmanship, and the televised congressional hearing, as a genre, has likewise been in decline for a long time.

Democrats, liberals generally and a few anti-Trump Republicans who have become pariahs in their party have been burned before in their efforts to hold Donald Trump and his allies accountable — by the breathlessly anticipated report from Robert Mueller, by two impeachments that led only to acquittals in the Senate, by the steady drip-drip of petty crimes and gross corruptions out of Mr. Trump’s circle, none of which brought about the cinematic courtroom conclusion that many seemed to hope for: an unambiguous and final guilty verdict.

What’s more, there is little evidence to suggest that something as analog and old-fashioned as sworn witness testimony is going to change anyone’s mind. Frustrated Democratic voters have watched for years as the G.O.P. has wielded congressional hearings to great media effect while their own party clung to forms and procedures, unable and unwilling to do what was necessary to break through the noise.

As with so much else in America’s increasingly gerontocratic political culture, the desire for decisive congressional hearings feels trapped in amber, pure nostalgia for a now-lost and lamented era of consensus reality, when, as it has become fashionable to observe, people disagreed about politics and policies but agreed on the facts.  

What Democratic leaders fail to appreciate is that our society seems to be reverting to the factional, regional and violent version of America that existed before television — during a long 19th century from which we awoke only briefly and imperfectly. .... A terrifying historical counterfactual is that the only thing that might have gotten enough of the G.O.P. on board to matter would have been if the rioters had actually gone through with it [murdering Pence on 1/6], and even then, it’s hard to be sure.

Bacharach then turns to American history and points out that the brief period after WWII was an exceptional time when Americans generally agreed on facts. The rest of the time, there was no agreement of facts. Just political propaganda warfare. Maybe the horrors of war scared the fantasy right out of people and that got replaced with the horrors of a somewhat less fantasized reality. Some commonly agreed on facts really did exist.

But it is now clear that Americans as a whole never had the moral courage to face complete, unspun reality. All the inconvenient fact and truth that accompanies it is more than most people could take.

Bacharach cites Gerald Ford's pardon of Nixon and the nothingburger the Iran-contra hearings amounted to as examples of the erosion of respect for facts and the weakening of democracy and rule of law. Bacharach described the disappointment of Iran-contra like this: “The hearings themselves were compelling; the tenor and quality of questioning can feel like a transmission from a lost world of verbal dexterity and mental acumen compared with today’s ponderous gasbagging, and one of the underlings went to prison, but many of those most responsible escaped any serious penalties.” In terms of criminal penalties, both Nixon and the high level Iran-contra criminals got off mostly or completely unscathed. The rule of law was rotting away.

Does any of that sound familiar?

Although Bacharach does not say it, it necessarily follows in logic that if facts are not agreed on, then there will be times, maybe usually, when one or bother tribes at war adopt some or many false facts as their reality. If false facts are in the mix, then what about truth and reasoning? Both of those can be fatally flawed too.

And that is why the stubborn cuss Germaine keeps referring to attacks on and disrespect for actual facts, true truths and sound reasoning as central targets for demagogues, tyrants, kleptocrats, radical extremists and the like. Those are the people who have no choice but to stand in opposition to facts or face failure. Once respect for facts are undermined and discredited, all the rest will necessarily fall. True truth and sound reasoning will bite the dust. The rule, garbage in, garbage out, applies.

In my opinion, respect for actual facts is what significantly characterized that brief period of social and political harmony after WWII.[1] Another was that the rest of the world is in ruins or the dark ages. America could compete far better than anyone else, so it was good times.

Footnote: 

1. American social and political harmony after WWII was partial, not complete. It did not generally apply to racial minorities, the LGBQT community, women and other out-groups, e.g., atheists. Americans and probably all societies cannot take undiluted blasts of reality. Reality has to dribble out to be socially absorbed over time (usually decades) in something the average non-conservative might call social progress. Presumably most conservatives would generally see social progress as social rot, but occasionally come along on the ride after a few extra decades.