In the wake of the insurrection, Republicans must confront the racism that besets their party [editorial] – LancasterOnline

THE ISSUE

The nation continues to deal with the consequences of the Jan. 6 siege of the U.S. Capitol, in which pro-Trump domestic terrorists ransacked congressional offices, occupied the Senate and House chambers, killed a Capitol Police officer, and threatened to do bodily harm to Vice President Mike Pence and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The insurrection was instigated by President Donald Trump, who was impeached for a second time Wednesday for that incitement.

The inauguration of the 46th president of the United States, Joe Biden, and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris on Wednesday will be at once a turning of the page and a stark reminder of the horrific events of Jan. 6.

More than 20,000 National Guard troops will be in the nations capital. The National Mall will be closed to the general public. The perimeter of the Capitol grounds has been sealed with a tall fence.

This is what the pro-Trump domestic terrorists who mounted a deadly insurrection in the citadel of American democracy have wrought.

Meanwhile, state capitals around the nation are on high alert, in case pro-Trump extremists gather near statehouses and cause mayhem.

In the state Capitol in Harrisburg, Republican lawmakers face an internal conflict: Will their party recover from the events of Jan. 6?

In our view, the leaders of the Republican Party have some serious soul-searching to do.

They would much rather change the subject. They would like us all to move on in the cause of unity.

But as Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, pointed out on Twitter last week, investigation and accountability must precede unity and healing.

And as Bernice King, daughter of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., noted, We cant skip justice and get to peace. She quoted her late father: True peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice.

For there to be justice, we need to address the entitlement that led the mostly white protesters to take over the U.S. Capitol, and the entitlement that led them to insist, in the first place, that this country is theirs and theirs alone and that an election that suggested otherwise couldnt possibly have been legitimate.

We also need to face the reality that the lawmakers who provided fodder for the insurrection belong to a party that clings in large part to an interpretation of the Constitution as written by the founders when only white male landowners could vote.

Some Republicans, of course, have rejected racism and Trump himself.

But as Franklin & Marshall College professor Van Gosse writes in todays Perspective, The belief in white superiority and domination goes back to this nations founding, and lingers over our history like a cloud of shame, polluting everything it touches.

He writes of Lancasters own Thaddeus Stevens, who, as a leader of the Radical Republicans, sought to properly suppress racial supremacists after the Civil War by sending federal troops to the South to oversee the establishment of civil rights and more democratic governments in the former Confederacy.

Tragically, Radical Reconstruction did not endure. Had it lasted, Gosse writes, there would have been no opening for Goldwater and Reagan Republicans to pick up their banner via Richard Nixons Machiavellian Southern strategy, which kept a barely veiled white nationalism alive as a political option into the present.

Writes Gosse: As anyone active in national politics knows, the pretense that President Donald Trumps overt racism is a newfangled aberration is absurd. It is merely the culmination of the standard Republican playbook since the 1970s.

Consider the language that Trump used in addressing the crowd at the rally that preceded the Capitol siege. It echoes the language of the losers of the Civil War and of Jim Crow mayors and governors. (The added italics are ours.)

We will never give up, we will never concede, he said.

Those who voted against him were stupid people.

Youre stronger, youre smarter, youve got more going than anybody, he told his supporters, stressing their superiority. And they try and demean everybody having to do with us. And youre the real people, youre the people that built this nation. Youre not the people that tore down our nation.

He invoked the names of Stacey Abrams, Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey powerful Black women and referred to Barack Hussein Obama.

He said they he didnt need to specify for the crowd want to indoctrinate your children in school. ... Its all part of a comprehensive assault on our democracy.

He talked of restoring the vital civic tradition of in-person voting on Election Day which would restrict voting to those who have the luxury of voting on a single day, and would make it easier for voter suppression methods to persist.

He said, We fight like hell. And if you dont fight like hell, youre not going to have a country anymore.

This is the language of white supremacy and exclusion.

This is the president for whom Congressman Lloyd Smucker was fighting on the floor of the U.S. House, when he argued that Congress should reject Pennsylvanias certified electoral votes.

Smucker said he was just representing his constituents.

But he wasnt representing the voters of the 11th Congressional District who cast legal ballots for Biden and Harris.

He wasnt representing the dozens of letter writers who have lambasted him on these pages for seeking to nullify their votes.

Smucker wasnt the only Pennsylvania Republican who fought for only one portion of the electorate, thereby providing fodder to the insurrectionists. He was joined by seven other GOP congressmen from this state in voting to reject Pennsylvanias 20 electoral votes.

Lawmakers in Harrisburg also added kindling that led to the conflagration on Jan. 6.

As Mike Wereschagin of The Caucus, an LNP Media Group watchdog publication, pointed out last week, state Sen. Doug Mastriano, R-Franklin, spent much of the last two months helping the president spread falsehoods about the election and seeking to reverse its outcome.

Mastriano also organized a bus trip to the Jan. 6 D.C. rally that preceded the Capitol siege.

And just two days before the joint session of Congress in which electoral votes were to be counted, Republican state senators from Pennsylvania including Lancaster County Sens. Scott Martin and Ryan Aument sent a letter to GOP leaders of the U.S. House and Senate calling on them to delay certification of the electoral votes from Pennsylvania.

In whose interests were they acting?

As Dennis B. Downey, Millersville University professor emeritus of history, writes in todays Perspective section, the terrible and resilient forces of conspiracy theories, extremist social ideology and a culture of grievance were at work in the insurrection.

Among its players, he notes, were QAnon, the Proud Boys, other apostles of hate and an opportunistic paramilitary vanguard.

The iconography of radical anti-government and hate culture was on full display on Jan. 6, Downey notes. The Confederate battle flag was proudly paraded through the Capitols hallways; anti-Semitic and racist chants echoed through the chambers; and a gallows reserved for Vice President Mike Pence was erected on the grounds.

President Trump and his allies may have lit the match that sparked the larger conflagration on Jan. 6, Downey writes, but it was the apocalyptic vision of The Turner Diaries, a 1978 novel by the neo-Nazi leader William Luther Pierce, which animated anti-government militiamen and white nationalists in a common front to upend the voting process and thwart democratic institutions.

The insurrectionists savagely attacked the police officers defending the Capitol with lead pipes, fire extinguishers, flagpoles and bear spray. And yet, because federal officials didnt fear their presence and didnt deploy the forces needed to fend off the insurrection, most of the insurrectionists walked away from the scene and only now are being rounded up by the FBI.

Contrast this treatment with that of Black Lives Matter protesters who have marched not to take over the U.S. government, but for social and racial justice, and have been met with phalanxes of law enforcement officers wearing the gear, and wielding the instruments, of battle.

If were to find a way forward, we need to draw inspiration from Thaddeus Stevens and Dr. King, and launch a new reconstruction that roots out, and remedies, the systemic racism that leads to such disparate treatment in every area of American life.

Were going to need Republican leaders to confront rather than pander to those in their party who think they have a special claim to this nations privileges.

Were going to need a full and honest reckoning with the truth, however painful that might be.

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In the wake of the insurrection, Republicans must confront the racism that besets their party [editorial] - LancasterOnline