January 6, 2021

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Some have said or implied that that day will live in infamy. I have a different view. I think yesterday was a turning point.

Yes, our nation’s legislature was besieged for the first time since the War of 1812. A mob of our own did the deed. Yes, Members of Congress cowered, as instructed by police, on the floors of their Chambers and under their desks. Yes, the mob raised a Confederate flag in the sanctity of our Capitol.

The rioters must have felt proud of themselves, as must our outgoing presidential loser. After all, he had inspired and incited the rabble with lies about a stolen election.

But the mighty gears of our democracy ground on. They confirmed Biden’s presidency before midnight, with less whining and disputing than expected. Georgia sent the South’s first Black Democrat ever, and its first Jew since 1900, to the United States Senate.

The Old South that made war against the rest of us to split the Union and preserve slavery finally died yesterday. It succumbed after a centuries-long battle against morality and history. It hasn’t yet received a proper burial, but it will. Even now, its monuments are passing from pedestals to museums, where they belong.

In its place a New South is rising. For that, we can thank years of work by organizers like Stacey Abrams, Nsé Ufot, Helen Butler and Marisa Franco.

If the truth be told, the entire Trump presidency has been an exercise in unintended consequences. Many voted for Trump, including a friend and former student of mine, just to shake things up. They learned that earthquakes are not the way to build true. They learned the value of experience and character. Maybe they even learned patience.

Yesterday taught our legislators something, too. As they cowered on the floor, under their desks, or in bunkers, they learned that fomenting rage has consequences. They learned that rage is hard to control. Maybe they learned to see something more important than ambition, even winning elections. Didn’t Mitt Romney say something about principle?

Now, mirabile dictu, a do-nothing, stand-for-nothing, political theater-in-the-round Congress is finally beginning to resemble a third branch of government. It’s pressuring Mike Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment. It’s preparing new articles of impeachment and removal, with less than two weeks to go, so that Trump may never stand for public office again. It’s preparing to expel its renegade members, like Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, who proved eager to pawn their sacred trust for a chance to lead the next mob.

Congress still has a long way to go. It’s all but abdicated its power to declare war. It let Trump flout the House’s “power of the purse,” stealing military money for his useless Wall. Where Congress used to imprison contemnors in its own special jail, it let Trump and his minions ignore its subpoenas as if they were writs of some drunken country sheriff. It has let powerful private firms—Fox, Facebook and Twitter—destroy our common concept of “facts” and our civil discourse.

So if it took a mob despoiling its chambers to get Congress to stand up on its hind legs, that’s not a bad thing. Better late than never. It’s hard to balance a three-branch stool on two legs.

No, yesterday was nothing like the real day of infamy, when the Imperial Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor over 79 years ago. That attack killed 2,403 of us, including 68 civilians. It put our Pacific Fleet mostly out of action for a long time. It marked the beginning of a long, hard, four-year war, which would get much worse before it got better.

We’ve gotten through things much worse that this. Yesterday only four people died. A female veteran was apparently shot by police. Then there were a heart-attack victim, a man who tased himself, and someone who died of unreported causes.

Even the coddling of the insurrectionists, as compared to Black Lives Matter protestors, had its upside. A bloodbath was in no one’s interest, far less the interest of Congress or democracy.

The mob’s despoliation of our Capitol was more an embarrassment than a catastrophe. It was a wake-up call to legislators and Trump apologists in our media who’ve been asleep for far too long.

As the ancient Greeks believed, “the suffered is the learned.” In cowering from a mob that some members helped to inspire and incite, our pols have learned not to play with fire. They’ve learned that making their own reality is not as safe or effective as dealing with the one that exists. Maybe they’ve learned to police their own ranks and kick out the worst of the mob’s legislative ringleaders. (Our Constitution gives each House that right, by a two-thirds vote among its members. Article I, Section 5, Clause 2.)

Unintended consequences loom large in the human condition. Few of us have a plan for everything like Elizabeth Warren. Fewer still get a chance to carry their plans out.

Why should a rabble be any different? They came to Washington to overturn an election. They succeeded only in reminding us how precious is democracy and how hard we must work to keep it. They never intended the legislators who fled their violence to learn those lessons so well.

Now we face problems far more serious than an unruly mob or a master-showman on his way out—and maybe to jail.

We’ve got a pandemic to suppress. We’ve got a nation to vaccinate. We’ve got an out-of-control regime of biased policing and incarceration to fix. We’ve a got a crumbling infrastructure to repair and rebuild, while bringing good jobs back onshore and converting to renewable energy in the process. We’ve got battered alliances to repair.

Now we understand that unintended consequences of serious plans are bad enough. We don’t have to help them along by having no coherent plans at all.

Having suffered random unintended consequences for four years, our people are ready to think, discuss, plan and build again. We’ve got united government, in Democratic hands for the first time in a decade. After looking deep down the well of despair, we’ve got hope. Let’s get to work.

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