When the Rioters Came for Us on January 6 – The New Republic

As a professor of constitutional law for three decades, an observer of the separation of powers and civil liberties, and someone who reveres liberal democracy and hates fascism and racism, I have the motivation to fight. I have taken big bipartisan groups of incoming House members to the U.S. Holocaust Museum for a tour before their first session begins, to emphasize the essential stakes of liberal democracy. I send everyone to the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the National Museum of the American Indian to learn about the centrality of slavery, racism, and white supremacy in shaping American politics and defining the American experience.

But, now, I am driven by the memory and spirit of my lost son, who wanted far more from our democracy, not far less. He expressed dread of fascism and what it had done to humanity in the last century and horror for Nietzschean politics based only on force and fraud and the will to power, as he used to mutter every time he read the newspaper. He wanted government as the active instrument for promoting the general welfare of not just all human beings but all living beings, and he wanted morality to replace violence as the essence of government power.

I wonder where all this chaos is taking us; whether Tabitha, Hank, and Julie are safe and will be rescued soon; whether I should try to turn back and find officers; whether these insurrectionists have firearms; whether Donald Trumps allies plan to escalate the violence; whether Sarah, Hannah, and Tabithas boyfriend, Ryan, are all right; whether we are facing an insurrection, a coup, or even a civil war; whether we will finally impeach the traitor for setting loose the dogs of war upon us or perhaps invoke, at last, the unsung Twenty-Fifth Amendment; whether dear America will survive this appalling head-first descent into political madness.

I feel curiosity, anger, resolve; but there is one thing I do not feel as we travel down, down, downFaster, please hurry, an officer exhorts usinto the dark complex basement passageways of the Capitol, one thing I dont sense as we are jostled this way and shepherded that. There is one emotion I have not experienced at all on this persistently gloomy and objectively terrifying day and that I will not experience all through the night: fear.

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When the Rioters Came for Us on January 6 - The New Republic