Our Democracy Will Ultimately Be Saved By The Insurrection

No one will ever forget what happened on 1/6/21. Someone needs to explain that to Republicans.

I sat on my couch that afternoon, on month ten of working from home, glued to my television. It was hard to process. Even as my phone blew up with concerned texts, e-mails, and phone calls from friends and family who know I live within a mile of our Capitol, the full impact hadn’t struck.  

Then my wife, a preschool teacher from Virginia who has been in-person since August, came home around 4 p.m. and she was crying. I was shocked. What happened? Was something wrong? Did something happen at school?

“That,” she said, pointing at the TV screen. “Look at what those [expletive deleted] are doing to us!”

I will never forget that moment for as long as I live. The way she said, “us” was far beyond me and her. It was the first time in my 38 years on Earth that the thought of American democracy failing had legitimately crossed my mind.

Fear wasn’t new to me. I lived in Washington, D.C. on 9/11/01, as a college junior at The George Washington University, within a few blocks of the White House. I knew that fear. I had a college friend whose apartment overlooked the Pentagon and saw the attack happen in real-time. I had another friend who quite literally found God on that sunny, terrible Tuesday. I lived for months with a tank outside of my apartment building. The fear was not new.

The difference between 9/11/01 and 1/6/21 is that our country was on the brink of collapse on only one of those days.

That’s a long-winded way of explaining why 1/6/21 will save democracy in this country because we will never let it happen again.

I know, you’re probably reading this and scratching your head. You see Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz telling us to move on. You see Tucker Carlson mocking Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for being scared. You see supposedly “good” Republicans like Marco Rubio spinning themselves into a frenzy about truth, and big tech, and trying to distract you from what happened.

Their words ring hollow and shameful. We know what we saw on 1/6/21. We know what we heard from the speakers at the insane rally beforehand.

Especially for us in Washington, D.C., we had been warned for days by Mayor Muriel Bowser and others about what would happen. The most striking aspect, in retrospect, was the lack of a counter-protest on 1/6/21. We knew their plan was to be violent. We did not know that their plan would be aided by members of our then-government or cheered on by our then-President as it happened.

In the aftermath, there’s something very important happening that you may not immediately realize if you only watch cable news. There’s a lot of talk about Joe Biden’s use of executive orders, or the ridiculous “unity” attacks from Republicans, and the new administration’s strategy to fight COVID.

But in Washington, D.C., the lead story on my local NBC news this past Friday was “The Fight for Democracy.” What you don’t hear about is America’s greatest tradition taking place – we rally around the flag. It’s happening again.

Joe Biden’s approval ratings are north of 50 percent and closing in on 60 percent, depending on which poll you look at. Only Barack Obama cracked 60 percent this early into his Presidency in my lifetime.

So why aren’t we talking about this? Because rallying around the flag in 2021 means rallying against other Americans. That’s a foreign concept to our sensibilities and our news media’s definition of the phrase. It’s easy to spot “rally around the flag” when the enemy is a group of terrorists from Afghanistan. It’s harder to spot when the terrorists came from Virginia, and Georgia, and Florida, and every other state in the Union.

The best news I’ve heard in recent weeks are the thousands of people who switched their registration from the Republican party in the wake of the attacks, a repudiation of what they saw on 1/6/21. I was a Republican too once upon a time, having voted for George W. Bush as a believer in less government spending, tough foreign policy, and compassionate conservatism.

That myth, for me, was shattered years ago. I remained independent until early 2020, when a new driver’s license meant that I officially joined the Democratic Party.

Others have held on to the myth, through and after the 2020 election. Good men like Peter Meijer and Adam Kinzinger, as well as principled women like Liz Cheney, have seen through the façade. They remain in a hopeless battle for the soul of a party that has gone full MAGA.

Still, the majority of this country is finished with MAGA. No, we won’t stamp out this threat to republic in a week, or even a year. Regardless, we’re taking steps to end it, aided by the crucial first step by the Biden Administration to publicly call out the threat of white nationalism and domestic terrorism. It is a pox that had been fermented over the past four years and will no longer be tolerated.

I watched a 2015 Joe Biden interview with Stephen Colbert this past weekend, as the late-night host devoted a special to his previous interviews with then-Vice President Joe Biden. In Colbert’s third show as CBS host, he interviewed our now President about loss and faith, who responded by revealing an inspiring quote that Dr. Jill Biden had left for him that made an imprint.

“Faith sees best in the dark.”

1/6/21 was our darkest hour, yet my faith in the greatness of this country has never been stronger. Call me crazy, call me naïve – I believe in us.

The only question is whether “us” includes the Republican Party moving forward.  

Follow me on Twitter