January 6 anniversary and the authoritarians

On the anniversary of January 6, 2021, it is worth reviewing some lessons learned and some that should have been learned but may not yet be.

Most, but not all, of the arrested insurrectionist foot soldiers of January 6, 2021, have now openly confessed to having been conned by Donald Trump, the P.T. Barnum of American politics, now turned NFT hawker. They chose to believe a lie and are now doing or facing jail time for trying, for the first time in this country’s history, to violently overturn a free and fair democratic election. Many have openly expressed consternation that Mr. Trump, the instigator and prime mover of the attempted insurrection, seems to have escaped accountability and continues to play golf at Mar-a-Lago and pass the hat in Naples and in other friendly environs, at least for now.

It remains to be seen if the higher-level coup plotters who occupied the Trump orbit will stand in the dock at some point. One would hope, however doubtful, that those passive coup supporters, to include prominent Florida politicians who suddenly lost their voices, have already engaged in some degree of personal soul searching.  Dr. Martin Luther King’s aptly stated, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” should give the rest of us hope. The Justice Department, again independent under Mr. Biden and applying the law without fear or favor, has meticulously accumulated evidence against individual January 6 defendants and convicted or exonerated them on the merits of that evidence, in a court of law.

There have been no public hangings or en masse trials or convictions, both Trump and authoritarian preferred tactics for dealing with their political opponents.  The process has been tedious and time consuming. It is the way democracy and our legal system works. It is the price for trying to get it right.

It is the aspiring authoritarians who revealed themselves as judge, juror and hangman of any opposition voices when they have been heard shouting “lock her up” and “toss him across the Potomac.”   Mr. Trump was the most blatant practitioner to ever occupy the White House. Ask Mike Pence. Mr. DeSantis, with a somewhat finer, but never-the-less clumsy touch, substitutes a compliant Legislature for the mob in going after dissenting voices in Florida and those ever-present "stubborn facts" that he seems unable to overcome in the courts.

Fortunately for us all, both Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis have found themselves stymied by that one branch of government, the judicial branch (minus the Aileen Cannons), which still serves as the last bulwark against the frequent pettiness and authoritarian bent we see in far too many Republican elected officials.

Democracy held on January 6, 2021, and continued in the 2022 midterms, but it, like freedom, requires eternal vigilance. In 2023, authoritarians will continue to attempt to undercut our democratic institutions and norms through lies, disinformation and pure propaganda (see grand jury on harm done by the COVID-19 vaccine), all for personal political gain and the achievement of raw power. The good news is that, as we are seeing with Mr. Trump and his henchmen, a strong democracy, while often slow to act, eventually strikes back against the authoritarians at the voting box and, when needed, in the courts. Mr. Trump and many of his acolytes around January 6 are seeing that now. True patriots should take heart in 2023 and others should take notice.

A retired colonel with the United States Marine Corps, Thomas Minor is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, the U.S.  Army War College and the U.S. Naval War College with a  master's degree in national security and strategic studies. He spent 30 years as a Marine infantry officer with the last assignment as head of the Department of Naval Science and instructor of leadership and ethics at the Virginia Military Institute. He is currently employed by General Dynamics as a security contractor for the Department of Homeland Security and is a resident of Bonita Springs.

This article originally appeared on Fort Myers News-Press: January 6 anniversary and the authoritarians