There are two metrics for the success of the January 6th House committee. One is under the committee’s control: a fair and comprehensive account of how far Donald Trump and his inner circle have come in the effort to nullify the 2020 election — and how that effort has interacted with mob violence — can serve future generations of Americans. , regardless of how it is received today.
But the committee’s more immediate goal is to help prevent Trump’s return to power, further propagating his unfitness for the country’s highest office. To that end, success and failure are largely beyond the committee’s control, as even a perfect presentation will be at the mercy of partisan polarization, a balkanized media landscape, and the relentless pace of online life.
Among these general forces, however, the biggest obstacle to the committee’s effort to disqualify Trump is a specific spirit, a shrug of the shoulders, the implied sensitivity of all — a view of our politics that sees norm-breaking everywhere, both at home and abroad. right and left winking at riots and scare tactics, and Trump as a dubious actor among many others.
Some people who hold this view are conservatives: not dark-faced Trumpists, but Republicans who supported him with their noses in the air and might vote against him in the primaries, but who would likely support him again against Joe Biden or Kamala Harris. Others are undecided voters, especially the disaffected type who went from Barack Obama to Trump in 2016, gave Biden a chance in 2020 but is turning to the right now.
Together, these constituencies make a Trump resurgence imaginable. Together, they are the Americans whose minds the committee wants to change, convincing them that in the drama of our times, Trump is a uniquely evil figure, that his pursuit of a constitutional crisis has proven once and for all that “NeverTrumpism” was right.
I believe it myself. Unfortunately, I can also see how everyone’s implied sensitivity endures — because it is constantly reinforced by a liberal establishment that is officially committed to fighting it. In that sense, the powers that undermine the January 6 committee include not just its Republican critics but some of its most dedicated supporters — of Democratic politicians who demand that Conservatives vote for them to save democracy, even as they themselves lean toward left, moving away from the common ground, to media institutions whose sense of Trumpian emergence constantly undermines their claims of neutrality and justice.
Last week brought a depressing example of this pattern. As the media prepared to cover the January 6 committee hearings, a young man apparently motivated by liberal causes — the constitutional right to abortion and gun control — crossed the country with the alleged intent to assassinate Supreme Court Justice Brett. Kavanaugh at his home in Maryland.
He was an isolated figure, but not an isolated act: Since the leak of the Supreme Court’s draft opinion on abortion, judges have faced protests outside their homes and threats of violence, and anti-abortion organizations, especially pregnancy crisis centers. , were hit by arson and vandalism. (Downtown Washington, DC, where my family used to donate diapers, was one of the targets.)
However, coverage of this campaign in the main media has been limited, superficial. Kavanaugh’s alleged killer made the pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post. But neither this specific threat — constitutionally substantial, given that an assassination could actually tip the court’s balance — nor the general intimidation campaign was treated as really important news, something that deserved the intense coverage that equivalent right-wing tactics would no doubt have received.
It’s a similar pattern to what we saw in the George Floyd protests of 2020, when much of the ostensibly neutral press found it politically difficult – as Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine recently said – to use “clear language to describe the riots and looting that were erupting.” around some demonstrations, or the effects of depolicing that took place in some areas in response”. Time and again, the spirit of emergence converged with the preexisting ideological bias to tacitly minimize and encourage left-wing radicalization.
This has pernicious effects on how liberals understand the world. Just as many Fox News viewers don’t know what they should know about January 6, I found many highly informed liberals in late 2020 who literally had no idea the scale of the damage from the spring and summer riots.
More importantly, though, it has effects on Americans who see the fuller story, who are acutely aware that there is more to liberal media than just “disinformation” — and who are therefore drawn back into a general skepticism, the implied sensitivity of everyone, no matter what you tell them about Trump.
These voters will keep the former president politically viable until one of two things happens. He can be defeated within his own coalition in 2024. Otherwise, the liberal establishment somehow needs to transform itself into a power that stays out of the polarization spin, rather than just widening it further.
