“The former president and his allies,” Luttig continued, “are executing that blueprint for 2024 in open and plain view of the American public.”
This might seem like a narrow procedural prediction: If 2024 is super-close, they’ll attempt the same manipulation of our creaky electoral college machinery as last time. They might succeed. They’re putting those pieces in place right now.
That’s all true. But Luttig’s testimony, along with the shocking new revelations, point to something more fundamental at stake. These hearings are about what kind of long-term democratic future lies ahead: They represent an effort to minimize the possibility that we’re sliding headlong into a protracted era of chronic instability and rising political violence.
If you doubt this, please note: The foreboding expressed by Luttig and others is shared by experts who study democratic breakdown. When Luttig says we’re at a “perilous crossroads,” and says only Republicans can “bring an end” to the threat, he’s not alone.
Two of those experts, Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, professors of government and politics, recently argued that we’re heading into a “coming age of instability.” This is not a claim of pending “civil war.” It’s more subtle: a future of smoldering conflict akin to “the Troubles” in Ireland.
“Such a scenario would be marked by frequent constitutional crises, including contested or stolen elections,” they wrote, predicting our elections might devolve into periodic referendums on whether the United States will be “democratic or authoritarian.”
This portends “heightened political violence,” they suggested, including assassinations, bombings and violent confrontations in the streets, “often tolerated and even incited by politicians.”
How GOP leaders respond to the moment will help determine whether that happens, the scholars noted. It bodes badly that GOP leaders rejected a bipartisan Jan. 6 accounting and have “refused to unambiguously reject violence.”
Whether those scholars are right remains to be seen. But the most recent developments are not encouraging.
We’re now learning that Trump and his co-conspirators corruptly pressured many government actors to steal an election he knew he lost. That he knew the scheme was illegal. That he weaponized a mob to chase his vice president through the Capitol, resulting in horrifying political violence, destruction and death.
It’s easy to get seduced by the vivid, damning nature of these revelations. Now that they’re exploding in our faces, surely some sort of accountability awaits the coup plotters. Surely Republican elites will quietly reckon with the truth about Jan. 6 and renounce Trump as fundamentally unacceptable in a party leader, even if they don’t say so loudly.
Look at those headlines. Big changes must be coming, right?
Maybe. But in the background, scores and scores of GOP candidates across the country remain fully committed to the notion that the underlying mission of the coup plotters and Jan. 6 rioters was just. The revelations haven’t slowed their campaigns in the slightest.
The Jan. 6 committee will release a damning report this fall, and maybe we’ll see prosecutions. But here’s another possibility:…
Read More: Opinion | Trump revelations at Jan. 6 hearings raise fears of a dark, violent future
