The Guardian Weekly 14 January 2022
12
states. Democrat Ruben Gallego
responded forcefully: “There is no
‘national divorce’. Either you are
for civil war or not. Just say it if you
want a civil war and offi cially declare
yourself a traitor.”
There is also the prospect of Trump
running for president again in 2024.
Republican-led states are imposing
voter restriction laws calculated to
favour the party, while Trump loyalists
are seeking to take charge of running
elections.
James Hawdon, the director of the
Centre for Peace Studies and Violence
Prevention at Virginia Tech university,
said: “ The country has been moving
more and more toward violence, not
away from it. Another contested elec-
tion may have grim consequences.”
Although most Americans have
grown up taking its stable demo cracy
for granted, this is also a society where
violence is the norm, not the exception,
from gun violence that takes 40,
lives a year to a military -industrial com-
plex that has killed millions overseas.
Larry Jacobs , the director of the
Cent er for the Study of Politics and
Governance at the University of Min-
nesota, said: “America is not unac-
customed to violence. [But] violence
is being given an explicit political
agenda. That’s a kind of terrifying
new direction .” While he does not
currently foresee political violence
becoming endemic, Jacobs agrees
that any such unravelling would also
The big story
America divided‘Violence is being
given a political
agenda – that’s
a terrifying direction’
T
he House select committee
investigating the 6 January
attack on the US Capitol in
Washington is facing a race
against time this year as Donald Trump
and his allies seek to run out the clock
with a barrage of delaying tactics
and lawsuits.
Republicans are widely expected
to do well in the midterm elections
in November and winning control of
the House would allow them to shut
down an investigation that has proved
politically and legally damaging to the
former president and Republicans.
The select committee opened its
investigative eff orts into the insurrec-
tion, when a pro-Trump mob stormed
the Capitol to stop the certifi cation of
Joe Biden’s election win, with a fl urry
of subpoenas to Trump offi cials to
expedite the evidence-gathering
process. But aside from securing a
trove of documents from Trump’s for-
mer White House chief of staff , Mark
Meadows, the committee has found
itself up against Trump and other top
administration aides seeking to delay
the investigation by any means.
Trump has tried to block the investi-
gation at every turn, instructing aides
to defy subpoenas and, most recently,
launching a last-ditch appeal to the
supreme court to prevent the release
of the most sensitive records from the
White House.
The eff orts amount to a cynical ploy
by Republicans to run out the clockBy Hugo Lowell WASHINGTON▲ Candles for a vigil at the Capitol mark
the anniversary of 6 January riots
XINHUA/REX SHUTTERSTOCKUNITED STATESRace against
the clock for
i n v e s t i g a t i o n
into storming
of the Capitol
Former president and aides
using any means possible to
stymie committee’s eff orts
before November midterm s90 %
Proportion of
the Republican
party that was
white at the
time of the 2020
US presidential
electionsbe most likely to resemble Northern
Ireland’s Troubles.
“We would see these episodic,
scattered terrorist attacks,” he added.
“The Northern Ireland model is the
one that frankly most fear because it
doesn’t take a huge number of people
to do this and right now there are
highly motivated, well -armed groups.
The question is : has the FBI infi ltrated
them suffi ciently to be able to knock
them out before they they’ve launch
a campaign of terror?
Nothing, though, is inevitable.
Biden also used his speech to praise
the 2020 election as the greatest dem-
onstration of democracy in US history
with a record 150 million-plus people
voting, despite a pandemic. Trump’s
bogus challenges to the result were
thrown out by a robust court system
and scrutinised by what remains a
vibrant civil society and media.
Josh Kertzer, a political scientist at
Harvard University, tweeted: “I know
a lot of civil war scholars, and ... very
few of them think the United States is
on the precipice of a civil war.”
And yet the assumption that “it
can’t happen here ” is as old as politics
itself. Walter has interviewed many
survivors about the lead-up to civil
wars. “What everybody said was we
didn’t see it coming,” she recalled. “In
fact, we weren’t willing to accept that
anything was wrong until we heard
machine gun fi re in the hillside. And
by that time, it was too late.” Observer
DAVID SMITH IS THE GUARDIAN AND
OBSERVER’S WASHINGTON BUREAU
CHIEF