January 6 in History

Was it a key moment in the republic’s eventual demise or a milestone on the road to democracy’s ultimate triumph? The meaning of January 6 is yet to be determined

The January 6 assault on the Capitol – credit: REUTERS

What was January 6? On one level, the answer is fairly clear: After years of investigations, a detailed picture has emerged of what happened between the 2020 presidential election and the attack on the Capitol. Donald Trump and those around him engaged in a multi-week, multi-level auto-coup attempt – a deliberate campaign to nullify the result of the election, prevent the transfer of power, and end constitutional government in America. The strategies they pursued evolved, ultimately culminating in the instigation of a violent assault on Congress.

On a different level, the meaning of January 6 is not only politically and legally contested, but also yet to be determined historically. Politically and legally, the struggle revolves around the question of whether or not January 6 constituted an “insurrection.” Three weeks ago, the Colorado Supreme Court decided it did, and disqualified Donald Trump from holding office under Section 3 of the 14^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Trump is challenging the decision; the Supreme Court will hear the case in February and rule whether or not the insurrection clause applies and Donald Trump is ineligible to become president again.

While the legal battle is playing out, many of the nation’s leading opinionists have already made up their minds. According to elite commentators from across the political spectrum, applying the insurrection clause to Trump is not just risky, but actually a threat to democracy! Immediately upon the Colorado Court’s decision, elite opinion from the Center-Right all the way to the proper Left mobilized against it – from Ross Douthat on the Right to Damon Linker at the Center to Jonathan Chait among the anti-“woke” liberals to Samuel Moyn on the anti-liberalism Left: A remarkable coalition united in anti-anti-Trumpism.

But what about January 6? Well, you see, it was bad, quite certainly – but an “insurrection”? Nah, more an “attempt to secure an unelected second term,” as Jonathan Chait mused in New York Magazine. The fact that the legal conflict necessarily centers around a specific term in the constitution, “insurrection,” has brought out the worst in pundits: Empty wordplay, silly sophistry in defense of a premise that is never seriously scrutinized, cynical debate-club cosplay instead of an actual argument.

Beyond the immediate political conflict and the courtroom battle over constitutional law, the meaning and role of January 6 in U.S. history is yet to be established in a more fundamental way. Was the attack on the Capitol a failed, desperate, last-ditch effort by delusional extremists? Or was it an important milestone in America’s accelerating descent into authoritarianism – an assault on the system that didn’t succeed initially but would ultimately play a key role in democracy’s demise? The answer to these questions is not decided by facts and past events. In a very real sense, January 6 isn’t over yet, and the success or failure of the Trumpian auto-coup attempt is yet to be determined by what happens next.

How “history” determines meaning – how we create “history”

Events in the past have no fixed meaning. “History,” understood as the stories we tell and accept about the past, the prevailing narratives about where we come from and how we got to where we are, is constantly in flux. It is inevitably a revisionist project. What we call “history” is a never-ending struggle, an always-raging debate over the past – informed, shaped, and fueled by ever-changing realities, interests, sensibilities, and conflicts in the present.

One historical event that has often been invoked as an analogy to January 6 can illustrate that process – and the dynamics shaping it – quite well: The Beer Hall Putsch, Adolf Hitler’s failed coup attempt in November 1923. Hitler and his Nazi Party wanted to emulate the “March on Rome,” which had resulted in Benito Mussolini rising to power and installing a fascist regime in Italy in October 1922. The plan was to unite far-right factions and the military in Munich and then march on Berlin and establish a new government under national-socialist lead. Hitler and his allies were certain that the Weimar Republic, which had been founded just five years earlier in the wake of the German Empire’s crushing defeat in World War I, was ripe for the taking. This remarkable democratic experiment had indeed been under pressure from the start, never more so than in 1923, when a French and Belgian military occupation of the Ruhr area, Germany’s industrial center, as well as hyper-inflation, economic collapse, and a steep rise in unemployment all contributed to a fundamental political crisis. 

The Beer Hall Putsch, however, was unable to capitalize on this situation – it was a rather dilettantish affair. The Bavarian Right did not unite behind the attempted coup, the military did not join, and the march of about 2,000 supporters on the Feldherrenhalle in Munich’s city center on November 9 ended quickly when police forces opened fire, leaving four police officers and 16 putschists dead.

Hitler was arrested and charged with high treason. But because the judges were rather sympathetic to his political project and inclined to lend credence to his version of the events, in which he presented himself as a true patriot who tried to save the nation, he got off easy: He was sentenced to just five years in prison and was granted significant comforts and privileges. Due to good conduct, he was set free before the end of 1924, having spent less than nine months behind bars. It was during his time in prison that he wrote – or rather: dictated – the first volume of Mein Kampf. Just a few years later, on January 30, 1933, Hitler was installed as Chancellor and immediately started dismantling what was left of the Weimar democracy.

As America is debating what to do with Donald Trump, what happened after the Beer Hall Putsch seems to offer a crucial warning: This is what you get when extremists who attack the republic aren’t held to account. But from a historical perspective, it is important to emphasize that there are rarely any clear-cut lessons to be learned from “history,” and presenting past events as perfect analogies is facile, reductionist, and problematic. The prime directive of historical thinking is to take seriously the specifics of context, contingency, and complexity. If we do, then we must reject the idea of history as a cycle of recurring situations, constellations, challenges that would allow us to apply the lessons learned from the last time an issue came up to the next time the same problem appears. History doesn’t repeat itself, it accumulates, an accumulation of specific experiences; and it doesn’t unfold according to abstract, generalizable rules.

It therefore makes no sense to simply equate January 6 and the Beer Hall Putsch, or Hitler with Trump, or the crisis of liberal democracy today with the rise of fascism in the European interwar period. Twenty-first century America is not Weimar Germany. In fact, my default position remains that the most important historical reference points, the key traditions and continuities, are not to be found in Europe’s past at all, but in U.S. history. Specifically, instead of reaching for1930s Germany right away, I believe we should pay more attention to how moments of social and racial progress in the United States were met with violent counter-mobilizations: against the country’s first attempt at interracial democracy after the Civil War for instance, or against the civil rights revolution in the 1950s and 60s.

No matter what the moment, event, or period in the past we want to invoke, the key is to be judicious about how interrogating history can actually help us make sense of the present. There is indeed something to be “learned” from history, only not through facile analogies and superficial lessons. Studying past experience can alert us to the complexity and contingency of factors that decide the path we take; it raises awareness for the larger historical forces and challenges that shape our lives in endlessly complicated ways. And it demands we be mindful of the fundamental openness of history, of the vast universe of outcomes – good, bad, catastrophic, and everything in between – that are possible at any given moment. The past has no fixed meaning: “History” awaits the future at all times.  

In this sense, it is indeed instructive to examine the dynamics that shaped and changed the meaning of the Beer Hall Putsch. Initially, it very much looked like it was going to be a cautionary tale – for extremists who believed they could take the republic down with little effort. So disastrous was the failure that the far-right political project was significantly compromised for years, Hitler and his party disappeared from the scene. Most importantly, the Weimar Republic stabilized after 1923. It always remained in a somewhat precarious state, but there is no direct line from 1923 to 1933, or from Hitler escaping serious punishment to his rise as dictator. What brought Weimar down was not the sins of 1923, but the completely changed political and economic landscape in the wake of the Global Depression in the early 1930s.

When Hitler was allowed to rise to power in 1933 because a significant part of Germany’s conservative elites was all too willing to make common cause with the Nazis in order to keep the Left in check, the Beer Hall Putsch’s significance in German history changed. Yes, it had clearly failed initially, but it still played a key role in Weimar’s fall, as it had become part of the mystique surrounding Hitler, and the subsequent trial had allowed him to build his national profile, to propagate the idea that he was defending the true nation. What happened in Munich came to signify not the republic’s ability to withstand violent insurrection, but the complicity of Weimar’s elites, their unwillingness to defend the system against anti-democratic forces who sought to destroy it. The meaning of the Hitler Putsch wasn’t determined by the facts of 1923, but by democracy’s demise thereafter.

The meaning of January 6: Two scenarios

What is the meaning of January 6? There is one scenario, one story, one “history” in which the attack on the Capitol plays a crucial role in galvanizing the pro-democracy forces in America, in getting more people to grapple honestly with the anti-democratic radicalization of the Republican Party, in sparking a mobilization of civil society in the defense of constitutional government. In this scenario, the system finally gears up to fight back against the immense threat of authoritarianism, proving it is able to defend itself and worthy of being defended. The constitution, it turns out, actually does apply to Donald Trump: No longer is his impunity justified by exceptionalizing him – for fear of backlash, or because of a self-defeating and empirically baseless assumption that every form of resistance could only ever benefit Trump. In this “history,” January 6 marks an important moment in an intensified push towards finally realizing the promise of egalitarian, multiracial, pluralistic democracy.

There is another possible “history,” however – one in which democracy does not persevere. In this scenario, those who are nominally tasked with defending democracy and the rule of law prove unable and/or unwilling to hold the line. Instead, America’s elites rapidly accommodate extremism. Rather than condemning January 6 unequivocally, they find a way to “both sides” even a violent assault on Congress and start referring to “dueling narratives” coming from Biden and Trump: “two interpretations,” all just partisan squabbling. In this story, January 6 didn’t accomplish its immediate goal, but still served as a catalyst for the radicalization of the Republican Party, a rallying cry for the Far-Right more generally, and a milestone on the path towards democracy’s eventual downfall.

This scenario does not hinge solely on what happens to Donald Trump personally, but also on whether or not the party that first elevated and then stuck with him will actually have to pay a significant price. January 6 has undoubtedly accelerated the process of ostracizing everyone who is not on board with openly embracing the authoritarian assault on the political system from the GOP ranks; over the past three years, the balance of power on the Right has shifted further in favor of the conspiratorial strands, the religious extremists, the white supremacists.

The result is a Republican Party that is fully committed to the core principles of Trumpism and, specifically, to the idea that Democratic election victories must never be accepted, that Democratic governance is fundamentally illegitimate. If a party defined by Trumpism (with or without Trump) is allowed to entrench its power on the federal level and take the presidency in 2024, the ideology behind the assault on the Capitol, the political project of maintaining discriminatory hierarchies and white Christian patriarchal dominance by whatever means, including violent threat, ultimately succeeds. If the insurrectionist-in-chief himself returns to power without ever facing any real consequences and while explicitly declaring his intent to establish a vindictive autocracy, then January 6 won.

What is the meaning of January 6? What is its place in U.S. history? We don’t know yet, because January 6 won’t be over for quite some time. For now, it is crucial that America’s pro-democracy forces grapple with the fact that we are quickly running out of time to force the answers we desire.