OK, we’re down. It was bumpy but we seem to be in one piece. Let’s take a deep breath and then check for damage.

One big piece of good news right off the top: He didn’t launch the nukes. That was never a sure thing, and there were plenty of times when I, for one, seriously hoped some adults were keeping an eye on him. But “Hooray, he didn’t destroy the entire planet” still leaves room for some notable wreckage. There is for instance the little matter of the attempted coup on January 6.

The attempt failed, but it was close; it was way too close. Maybe it wasn’t all that near overturning the election and installing Donald Trump as a dictator for life, I don’t know, but it was terrifyingly close to slaughtering a bunch of senators and representatives in the attempt. Trump had installed a number of allies in the civilian branch of the Pentagon in the days before the riot, and the reporting is that they refused urgent requests to send the National Guard to the Capitol. Since the insurrection did fail, this will now presumably be a pillar of Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate, but it could have been the key piece of the plot that enabled it to succeed.

It didn’t, though, and because it didn’t I find myself reverting to the lazy relaxed assumption that it couldn’t have, that we don’t really do that kind of thing. Sinclair Lewis titled his 1935 novel about a fascist takeover in America It Can’t Happen Here for a reason. It’s weirdly easy (for people with pallid skin) to ignore or forget what a roiling brew of resentment and chauvinism and revenge fantasies we live among.

The country has been here before. The bitter controversies over slavery and its expansion west of the Mississippi make today’s turmoil look like a Sunday school picnic, as Huckleberry Finn might have put it. (That novel, by the way, is partly about that expansion and those conflicts. We can see today’s White supremacists and gun-rights fanatics and violence lovers, not to mention crooks and con artists, in Huck and Jim’s flight down the river.)

One incident that has many echoes of the January 6 insurrection is the violent attack in 1856 by South Carolina Representative Preston Brooks upon Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, after Sumner gave a blistering anti-slavery speech. Sumner was working at his desk on the Senate floor after adjournment when Brooks suddenly loomed over him. Brooks said, “I have read your speech over twice carefully. It is a libel on South Carolina, and Mr. Butler, who is a relative of mine.”* Without further ado he bashed Sumner over the head with a cane, then kept on bashing until Sumner fell to the floor unconscious. It was three years before Sumner recovered enough to return to the Senate, and he had chronic debilitating pain for the rest of his life.

I’ve always found that incident horrifying, but also (I now realize) reassuringly distant. It’s not as distant as I thought. Just this past September a Republican candidate for the House, Marjorie Taylor Greene, posted an image on Facebook of the three Democratic women mockingly labeled “the Squad,” photoshopped with herself holding an assault rifle, over the caption “Squad’s worst nightmare.” Greene won that seat, and now Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Rashida Tlaib have to work in the same chamber of Congress with her. Now we have Democrats enforcing a rule against guns on the floor of the House and Republicans railing against the law and in some cases defying it. We haven’t made as much progress as we’d like to think.

In a supreme irony, just days after the violent insurrection the Trump administration staged a performance of this righteous indignation at versions of history that place slavery and ethnic cleansing out in front instead of in a footnote on page 735. Just two days before Trump’s dawn dash to Florida and obscurity, his administration issued the “1776 Report,” composed by a panel of business executives and conservative activists, informing us that our history was glorious and shining city on a hill–like in its entirety, and that it’s just political correctness run amok to say otherwise. It includes this tin-eared summary:

The most common charge levelled against the founders, and hence against our country itself, is that they were hypocrites who didn’t believe in their stated principles, and therefore the country they built rests on a lie. This charge is untrue, and has done enormous damage, especially in recent years, with a devastating effect on our civic unity and social fabric.

It’s not that simple, to say the least. The point is not to shout about hypocrites and lies, it’s to bring the issue of slavery out of the box on the bottom of the pile in the basement closet. Emphasizing the contradiction between declaring universal human rights and owning slaves is not saying the founders didn’t believe their own claims, it’s saying they failed to live up to them.

It’s not as if the rest of the world can’t see us, after all. We talk a good game, but we’re bad at putting it into practice. We’re not the only ones who have that failing, but we do talk louder (see: the Civil War, passim), so the chasm between rhetoric and action is more conspicuous. Maybe the hacks who composed the 1776 Report could see the point if we made it in more cynical terms: the clients don’t like it.

Note

* Andrew Pickens Butler (1796–1857), Preston Brooks’s first cousin once removed, was a U.S. Senator from South Carolina from 1846 to 1857. A pro-slavery Democrat, Butler coauthored the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which would allow new slave states to be founded in the northern West.