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Shame Day for America’s Democracy
| Reading time: 3 minutes
“I’m calling the mob: stand down!”
In Washington, supporters of President Donald Trump stormed the Capitol building. In a short speech, US President-elect Joe Biden called on the protesters to stand down.
The United States experienced its first attempted violent coup: Trump supporters stormed parliament and initially prevented Biden’s election victory from being confirmed. Politically responsible for this are the president, his lies, and a cowardly Republican party.
WWhat the United States experienced Wednesday was nothing more than a coup attempt by the Trumpists. Protesters have stormed the Capitol, the heart of American democracy. And in fact they have managed to avoid the electoral vote count that is currently taking place and the certification of the election of Trump’s successor, Joe Biden.
Windows were smashed, doors were smashed, tear gas was used in the central rotunda of the Capitol, protesters occupied the central podium of the parliamentary chamber and broke into parliamentary offices, including that of the majority speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, formally number three in the state. Vice President Mike Pence and congressmen from both houses had to be desperately evacuated.
This was not a spontaneous outbreak of violence; it was the logical result of all the lies and bottomless accusations of electoral fraud that Donald Trump, his cowardly Republican counterparts and their accomplices have been spreading in the conservative media for the past two months. All of them systematically paved the way for the mob’s violent assault on the American Parliament at a time when the complicated electoral process with the counting of electoral votes was about to come to a ceremonial end.
Even before the election, the president toyed with the idea of violence over and over again if he lost the election. Shortly before Christmas, he had asked his fans to go to Washington, DC in large numbers to demonstrate against the alleged electoral fraud. “Big protest on January 6 in DC,” he tweeted. “Come there, it’ll get wild!” And then it really got wild.
Many Republicans have secretly presented Trump’s election fraud allegations as a kind of political game that will play out when the Trumpists vent their frustration. That “political game” has now turned bitterly serious. A reminder that inflammatory words are not just words, they have real effects in the real world.
Indeed, the storm of Trump fanatics on Capitol Hill meets the conditions for an uprising against the constitutional order as defined by American law. Because it is the violent interruption of a legitimate democratic act. And there is no doubt that the political blame for this day of shame for American democracy rests squarely with the president and his party.
At least 13 Republican senators and dozens of deputies had announced before the vote in the joint session of both houses of parliament that they would vote against the certification of Joe Biden’s electoral victory. For weeks they fueled the stab at the legend of an alleged major conspiracy said to have pulled Trump out of an election victory. And if, despite the lack of evidence, one really believes that Joe Biden’s electoral victory was a fraud, then the enforced prevention of parliamentary certification of that electoral victory appears to be a kind of legitimate democratic self-defense for those who have stood up. intoxicated by Trump’s propaganda of recent weeks. .
When the American founding fathers went to a cloister in Philadelphia in 1787 to discuss their future constitution, Benjamin Franklin was asked what form of government he and his colleagues had agreed upon. “A republic, if you can keep it up,” Franklin said at the time. A reminder that a democracy can only survive if the majority of citizens uphold this kind of bourgeois self-government.
The Trump mafia that has arrived in Washington will not succeed in ending the unique project of American democracy. But it is shocking that part of American society does not appear to have a problem persistently damaging the institutions of this admirable democracy and its fragile processes.
