The next two years will be a reckoning for the United States.
Our justice system has been reinvented with the appointment of credible people that are not part of a criminal cover up but rather are seeking to reveal unlawful activity and punish it. This seems like a radical new position for the Justice Department after watching Bill Barr providing cover for a propaganda driven administration that reinvented a political party.
Well, maybe reinvented is a little strong. Dishonest brokers of the problems facing America and how white rich people were nearly always the cure for them have plagued the Republican party for forty years. The tactic invented under Reagan was that government itself was the enemy and all problems would be solved by eliminating federal influence as much as possible. Set the market free and the people with the money would create a great society that would be self leveling, self regulating, self democratizing. It was a complete and utter fraud, statistically incontrovertible if that mattered at all. But the Trump administration took things to a completely different level, accelerating the disassembly of both the protections from the excesses of corporate greed through deregulation and the constant and increasingly effective attacks on the national safety net, not wanting to encourage the “losers”. The Justice Department under Trump became an arm that would not only encourage the winner/loser dynamic, it would target the losers and criminalize them and winners would be protected or simply ignored, essentially the same thing.
With wide bipartisan support, Merrick Garland was confirmed as the Attorney General of the United States with a 70-30 vote, a huge margin in today’s blindly partisan environment in the Senate, once again accenting the absurdity of his blockage to the Supreme Court by Mitch McConnell in 2016. With his confirmation came a renewed commitment to the independence of the department and to pursuing justice separated from how it is defined by the Executive Branch.
On January 6th, Donald Trump delayed for hours any response to the insurgency taking place at the Capital on his command. When he finally addressed the country, he expressed his sympathy for the attackers, justified their motives, expressed his love for them but asked them to step back, as the political cost of the assault on democracy was beginning to take shape. It is a near certainty that had Trump been reelected the perpetrators of one of the greatest crimes against the United States Republic itself would have disappeared into the largely rural landscape, characterized as heroes and defenders of truth, justice and the American Way.
But he didn’t win. Joe Biden did, and A.G. Garland was nominated and confirmed and there are now nearly four hundred indictments targeting the criminals who threatened Senators, Representatives and democracy itself.
Over the next two years the story of American justice will be told.
A parallel story is the application of justice to people of color by law enforcement and the subsequent application of it to officers that overstep their authority and become executioners and to departments that provide an environment that make such officers possible. Under Trump the assumption was crystal clear. The idea of accountability for law enforcement was laughable on its face, a contradiction in terms. Law enforcement implied absolute authority and if someone died at their hands the liability for that was clearly on the victim as a default. This was the Law and Order position made popular under Nixon as he encouraged the brutal force that was turned against anti-war protesters now reborn as a balder and bolder defense of an authoritarian regime. Fascism was empowering and encouraging an armed branch of the attack on our crumbling experiment.
The two tracks seemed to converge as credible evidence has started to emerge that the support needed to put down the insurrection was not provided in a timely way, essentially green lighting the attack on the Capital. Other evidence suggests that some of the enforcement in place on that humiliating day were sympathizers, expediting the attack at early critical moments. More needs to be known about these acts, but investigations are underway pursuing the questions, and that alone is a sea change. Rather than being seen as abused victims that could take no more and had risen up, both they and their encouragers were being identified and their legal responsibility parsed.
The results of these two related paths that the justice system has defined will say a great deal about the survival of the great experiment in a government of, by and for the people. It will be a defining of who the people are, who is included and who is not invited to the party. Both have implications regarding the racist roots of the American story that run deep and have resisted all attempts to remove them. The rise of Trumpism is the story of the rise of the legitimacy of white supremacy, dog whistles quickly being replaced by blatant racist fog horns. They began with his speech announcing his candidacy that denigrated desperate brown immigrants at our southern border and continued throughout his term, giving cover to the Proud Boys repeatedly, from his response to Charlottesville to his directive to “stand by” during a presidential debate. The disparity of the treatment of black people by law enforcement and the subsequent refusal to find officers accountable is undeniable evidence of a skewed justice system in need of correction.
Even now with a renewed effort by the Justice Department to right some of these failures, we still see a reluctance to bring charges that seem to logically fit the crime. Where are the charges of sedition, of treason that seem so obvious to the casual observer of the attack on our government on January 6th? Trespassing? Unauthorized entry? We still see a reluctance, a fear to call this attack what it was. An attempted coup. Even with a newly empowered department attempting to right a sinking ship of state, political considerations forbid the portrayal of the opposition as actual enemies of the state, which they undeniably are. There is a need to be seen as a fellow competitor as opposed to an enemy of the GOP as it has evolved. Republicans need to be won, not crushed, rehabilitated rather than vilified. Even in a moment of justice being elevated in an attempt to make it universal, politics colors the battle, purity of motive still an unattainable myth.
The Derek Chauvin conviction marks the beginning of a very telling moment in the American story. Over the next two years there will be dozens of trials that will, with each subsequent decision, cement a future for our democratic republic and by example the future of democracy globally. If the idea of democracy fails here the hope of it surviving in places with fewer advantages seems dim at best.
The first hurdle has been cleared. The cases are being brought now where they may have never have seen the light with a second term for Donald Trump.
Now the work begins, and much is in the balance.