How do we know when great events have occurred, when something happens which is of great consequence, the road of history having taken one fork rather than another? Sometimes there are announcements and celebrations and ceremonies. Neville Chamberlain announced that Great Britain was at a state of war with Germany on Sept. 1, 1939. FDR announced there was a state of war with Japan at a joint session of Congress on Dec. 8, 1941. There were crowds of people in Times Square on V-E Day. Bells rang when the Declaration of Independence was announced and read at numerous crowds. Great events are also proclaimed at technological events. There were fireworks when the Brooklyn Bridge opened, and crowds of people crossed it in celebration at the new marvel. People cheered and were itself a celebration when Edison opened up the Pearl St. station in lower Manhattan and so began the Electric Age. There was a ceremonial golden spike hammered in by the last link between the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific to commemorate the opening of the railroad from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans.
Economic events, however, do not get celebrated. We don’t have a day for when the industrial revolution began. We do not even recognize much less celebrate the development of the corporation when states legislated general incorporation laws in the early nineteenth century even though every country, including China and even North Korea are corporatist in that every economy is organized around the multiple corporations that administer every facet of economic life. And there are technological advancements that are also uncelebrated. Noone has a date when the computer or the internet began, though those were momentous. It isn’t because it happened gradually and so has no date. You can just assign a date.The Holocaust is celebrated as the date when the Soviets liberated Aushwitz, many other dates available, such as its official opening for business. Some celebrations just jump the gun, as happened when the French Revolution announced the beginning of a new year one but that ended twenty years later with the final defeat of Napoleon.
And what to do with political events that are not acknowledged as such because there is a contention that it did not happen? I am thinking of the Insurrection on Jan. 6th, which was the first time in the history of the nation that there had been an armed camp to interfere with and stop the legal transfer of power from one president to another. It was unparalleled and it was important but most Republican Party Congresspeople and Senators refuse to acknowledge that and so, it seems to me, are ipso facto no longer members of a loyal opposition but a party that wants to forget an insurrection ever took place.
There was a simple way whereby the Congress might have gotten past the event of the Insurrection by engaging in a ceremonial event. Members of Congress could have supported a resolution that the election of Joe Biden was legitimate. That way most republicans and all Democrats would have taken allegiance to being either the dominating party or those of the loyal opposition. That did not happen because many Republicans legislators do not want to offend the constituents who believe that the Biden election was legitimate. Instead, the Congress has had to engage in an impeachment and a trial to show that the President had indeed fostered an insurrection and so should be recognized as having done so. But that engages in legal arguments about whether or not there are grounds for conviction because he is no longer in office, which sidesteps the point of what actually happened on January 6th and so lets Republicans off the hook, and so there will be no accountability for Trump and so no announcement that the insurrection was a grand event or that there should be a commemoration of having it ended.
Moreover, legal argument tends to be beside the point in that a litigator can make second or third degree removed arguments so as to vindicate their case. It is no wonder that lawyers are advocates of thor own causes rather than each of them required to give a balanced view in which each consider both the pros and cons of the issue and decide a judgment, all things considered. Lawyers contend with one another rather than make a brief on the basis of truth; they do not incorporate their alternatives thought, as Plato did, was the basis for arriving at a truth, rather than the view of the Sophists, who persuade people to follow a point of view. Thus is certainly the case with those lawyers representing ex-President Trump in his impeachment trial today. One or another of them said that Trump was subject to a criminal trial after leaving office and so did not need to be convicted of his impeachment trial. But the whole point of an impeachment proceeding is to avoid taking a past president into the criminal dock. That is indeed what happens to past leaders in the fabled banana republics. We don't want continual criminal harassment of past leaders, and so I am vry leary of any attempt to prosecute Trump for his tax or Stormy Daniels problems now that he is no longer in office. I think he should get a “Get Out of Jail” card free and clear, just to be rid of him, though an impeachment conviction is warranted so that he is no longer eligible to hold office. He is not, as his lawyers said today, being prevented from doing what every citizen can, which is run for public office. It is an extraordinary penalty warranted only by having been convicted of impeachment. Moreover, the most important point of a conviction of impeachment is the disgrace which such a judgment places. Nixon felt very well that he had been shamed and spent the rest of his life trying to rehabilitate himself as a man of some stature, opining, as he did, in books on foreign policy. All in all, I sometimes muse that lawyers would use only their best arguments rather than muddying the waters with dangling additional arguments in that during normal conversation people will judge the validity of what someone else says by looking at the package or making holes in the weakest arguments as those testify to the tenor of an argument, while lawyers will add up arguments to see if anyone will fly. That happened today when a Trump layer said that the precedent that Hastings impeachment after he resigned office and invoked by the prosecution managers was illegitimate because the U S had thrown off Great Britain, when the defenders were well aware or should have been aware that British law continued as precedents in American law for a considerable time after the American revolution.
There is a precedent for how things proceed when there is no celebration or announcement about a political event of significance because there are so many political reasons to avoid doing so, as is the case with the Insurrection, Republicans attending to being primaried or even believing that the Insurrection was not really a big deal and can be best dealt with by forgetting about it. That was Reconstruction. The United States troops had evacuated the South in 1876 as that was conjoined with the election of Hayes, the Republican, over Tilden, the Democrat, and it saw in the next twenty years the defeat, as a consequence of it, the restoration of the Old South through the establishment of Jim Crow Laws concerning social segregation and the elimination of Black representatives in Senatorial and state and county offices. The South was changed for eighty years, let us say, or we might better say that the Confederacy was extended for eighty years despite having lost the Civil War.
There was no pact which recognized how the two enemies, the Union and the Confederacy, had reconciled with one another by the North agreeing to relinquish the South its primacy about how the South might govern the ex-Confederate territories. There was no need to do so because circumstantial and vital events were looking in that direction without formal declaration. You don’t need a treaty between opponents if everybody is marching in the same direction. Southern ex-Confederates were now in the U. S. Congress and were challenging the Northern Republicans for the majority of Congress and would soon do so. Northerners accepted that a free market system in the south was just an excuse for the Jim Crow sharecropping that would endure for those eighty years.Black legislators were excluded from office by hook or by crook because they were not regarded as worthy legislators. The U S Army wanted to be out of an occupation. And so the final resolution of the issue was the simultaneous evacuation and the Hayes-Tilden controversy that, as C. Vann Woodward said many years ago, was not a trade (and so not to be taken, in my words, as a kind of treaty) but rather the inevitable unraveling of the situation within each of the two parties, the South, that wanted to do its own thing so long as it agreed not to start a new war, and the North, not very concerned with the plight of Southern Blacks, but very concerned with the conflict between labor and capital that was going on because of Northern industry, an issue that was not much of a matter until northerners went south to crete textile factories at the turn into the twentieth century.
So how do we muddle through with the impact of the insurrection now that there is no ceremonial event to move behind into the past the great event that took place? The N Y Times suggests today that Republicans will be disgusted with what happened on Jan. 6th and will switch to registering as Independents or even Democrats. Maybe voters will vote against Cruz and Hawley when they have to run for reelection. But it is very unlikely that there will be a mass exodus of Republicans from their party because of the Insurrection. Time will pass and so the Congressional election of 2022 will be the result of other circumstances. Perhaps Joe Biden will be so successful at having quelled the pandemic and rebuilt the economy that Democrats could win more seats in Congress rather than for voters to chastise Trump for the events in 2021. Or maybe the inevitable demographic changes whereby there are more educated and minority voters will lead Democrats to do well in 2022. So there will be no referendum on Trump. There will be an ever unsealed wound until over the long verdict of history it will become understood that trump had been disgraced rather than vindicated. But even more important is the fact that there will be a historical rather than a legal precedent for engaging in violence against the lawful election of an elected President. It will remain in history as a singular moment and so in our collective historical memory as something that might happen because it has happened.