A Liberal’s Lament: When the Governed Won’t be Governed Anymore

By DON ROLLINS

We wrung our hands, we stood in shock. A secular temple had been breached and defiled, the outlaws spurred on by the one person who could’ve stopped the madness.

Soon after came the images: flag poles, vests, faces contorted in rage — the chamber room selfies taken as though the backdrop were Disney World.

Then the sounds. The sounds of a balkanized people storming the high palace of their balkanized oppressors. Chants for the traitors to the cause to show themselves.

Glued to the chaos, we heard reports of a body count: People were hurt. People were dead.

Now we cannot unsee those sights, cannot unhear those sounds. And we cannot raise those dead.

On Jan. 6, the great American experiment reached a new and most unwelcome moral ebb. Casual assumptions about the limits of Trumpism were proven wrong as domestic terrorists roamed and defaced both chambers of congress. Anyone with half a heart for the country saw those images and was shaken to the core.

The trauma inflicted by the insurrectionists continues to reverberate far beyond the Capitol grounds. And we on the left should be listening.

For progressives and our increasingly misplaced confidence in institutional solutions, the trauma was done only to our psyche, but to the viability of republican democracy once the governed won’t be governed anymore.

This chilling possibility will strike some as alarmist, for American progressivism is firmly grounded in government as the great equalizer and protector— a central tenet that has seen us through wars, depressions, the Red Scare and Watergate. For most of us on the left, a political movement minus that defining conviction would hold no attraction.

Yet that tenet is precisely the one under siege on January 6th, as 21st century rebels rioted through the halls and took selfies behind desks and platforms. The presenting issue was a “stolen” election, but the intended outcome was to rattle the walls of government itself. And we should let that sink in.

There’s a natural impulse among some liberals to set aside nagging doubts about such ethereal things. Short more Jan. 6-style invasions, D.C. Democrats and Independents will be busy rolling back every last thing they can before the next election cycle. Get focused, it’s our moment.

But the attack on the Capitol should cause them and other progressives pause, for there is no governing a critical mass unschooled and uninterested in a greater good. The people who breached those walls aren’t just playing by a different set of rules. They’re writing their own.

Don Rollins is a Unitarian Universalist minister living in Hendersonville, N.C. Email donaldlrollins@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, February 15, 2021

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