The Wild Reed: “How Can One Overreact to a Mortal Threat to American Democracy?”

Saturday, January 08, 2022

“How Can One Overreact to a Mortal Threat to American Democracy?”

This past Thursday was the first anniversary of the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

In marking this deplorable event and its aftermath, PBS Newshour host Judy Woodruff moderated a panel discussion which explored the broader effects of the insurrection on American politics, culture and democracy itself.

Woodruff’s guests were George Packer, staff writer at The Atlantic; Jelani Cobb, who covers race and politics at The New Yorker and is a professor of journalism at Columbia University; Stuart Stevens, a former Republican strategist and author of the book, It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump; and Gary Abernathy, a contributing columnist at The Washington Post.

As you’ll see from the video below, it was an informed and insightful (albeit disturbing) discussion and exploration, with all the guests but Abernathy expressing the belief that the January 6 insurrection was a “warning shot” and likely a “harbinger” of things to come.

I should note that although I appreciated what everyome had to offer, I thought it was unfortunate that the panel was comprised only of men. It’s a pity the producers of the show didn’t reach out to some of the many female social and political commentators out there, such as Heather Cox Richardson and Marianne Williamson, both of whom published thought-provoking pieces that same day (see here and here).

One last thing: This post’s title is taken from the following statement by George Packer (right) which he shared during the panel discussion.

How can one overreact to a mortal threat to American democracy, the first in my lifetime that actually seems to be on a road toward making it impossible for the popular will to be respected at the ballot box?

That’s been the goal of all these [Republican-backed] bills passed or debated across legislatures in Georgia, in Arizona, in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, which are not just about restricting access to the ballot, but are about putting elections in the hands of reliable partisans, so that, next time around, we will have states that claim that the election was somehow wrongly held, and that it’s thrown into the hands of a partisan legislature, which sends its own electors to Congress to choose the next president.

That’s exactly the strategy going on right now, and it’s building on what the Republican Party learned from January 6 and these events around it, which was: You need the right people in the right offices to be making these decisions in order to seize power.

They didn’t have it last time. They’re trying to get it next time. I can’t possibly overestimate the seriousness of that.