The body of Officer Sicknick lay in state in the Capitol Rotunda this week – the same Capitol he died defending about a month ago when bloodthirsty right-wing thugs invaded the building by the thousands, hoping to forcibly stop the Senate’s counting of the electoral votes which, somewhat remarkably, reflected the will of the majority of American voters in denying Trump a second term. For all of the failings of law enforcement that day, Sicknick and many of his fellow officers fought fiercely to keep the insurrectionist mob at bay long enough so that members of Congress and the Vice President could be moved to more secure locations. As I have said before, this was nothing less than an attempt at a self-coup, and though there are many in the political class who would prefer that we forget about it and move on, that is the absolute last thing we should do. We forget this at our own peril – they have provided the template for future attempts, and we must be prepared.
I’ve talked about this quite a bit on my podcast, Strange Sound, but I think it bears repeating, hopefully by people with larger audiences than mine. There’s a lot to criticize about our federal government. It has inequities built into its very constitutional foundations, such as slave economy measures like the electoral college, the Senate, and so on. Even the 13th Amendment, which abolished chattel slavery, explicitly allows that toxic institution to persist for incarcerated people. Bernie Sanders is right, in fact, when he says that we need a kind of revolution in governance, but I think he would agree that he’s not talking about an actual political revolution involving a forcible overthrow of the U.S. constitutional order. Actual revolutions are a bloody business, and you never know where they’re going to end up. They also require more effort, energy, and suffering than just hardscrabble organizing in all fifty states. So from a left perspective, in my humble opinion, overthrow of the national government is a bad idea and an unnecessary one for the promotion of positive change.
That’s the left. The right, on the other hand, are bomb throwers. The people who attacked the capitol last month were bent on autocracy. They had been fed the big lie for years, with a ramp up over the course of the 2020 campaign – the election is rigged, vote by mail is rife with fraud, the whole thing is fixed, etc. This was Trump’s plan A in 2016. It never got implemented because something unexpected happened – he won. This past year he resurrected Plan A, and it nearly led to the gutting of the federal legislature, the murder of our representatives, and the installation of someone who plainly lost the last election, hands down. Do these deluded right-wingers want a revolution? I don’t know, but they almost got one, and that is some pretty scary shit. For all the “defense” bluster our government puts out on a regular basis, all the posturing on terrorism, all the billions it spends on war materiel, it seemed somehow powerless to stop a bunch of white Americans from trashing the center of government. Plainly all that anti-terrorism prep, like that clause in the 13th Amendment, was not meant for whitey.
R.I.P., officer Sicknick, and condolences to your family. We’ll have to work harder to ensure that his loss was not in vain.
luv u,
jp
