Why January 6 Was Not a Deal Breaker?

We need to urgently address the core reasons for growing stupefaction of the American public

I still find it impossible to answer the question how is a Trump presidency possible after what happened on January 6. Surely his role in instigating the riot, attempted insurrection and coup was a deal breaker?

Let’s also not forget the deaths and injuries that Trump’s insane effort to reverse the 2020 election. Isn’t there to paraphrase, Shakespeare something “rotten” in the state of the USA for this to even be contemplated for over the past four years and then it to actually happen? And then—-how does this 34 felony convict end up winning the popular and the electoral college vote and gets to now hold the nuclear codes? Insanity is one word that comes to mind. Jonathan Haidt in The Atlantic has helped me come somewhat closer to answer why this crazy episode in our history just happened. Haidt theory is that the growth of social media—in the last two decades has made us all stupid mainly because anyone on social media can rip anyone’s reputation apart if they can find a way to make their criticism go viral. The fear of getting darted was " most pronounced in universities, scholarly associations, creative industries, and political organizations at every level (national, state, and local).. Participants in our key institutions began self-censoring to an unhealthy degree, holding back critiques of policies and ideas—even those presented in class by their students—that they believed to be ill-supported or wrong.?

So how does this explain the Trump getting a pass on what was one of the most treasonous act in American history? Haidt’s theory lead s me to believes that this fear of “getting darted” was at the root of a shift away from covering Trump’s attempted coup with any degree of seriousness. The right wing media made it appear that this was not about someone who was trying to use violence to reverse an election and more about some sort of partisan effort to attack Trump once again. They just needed to make the incident controversial enough so everyone retreated to their own corners and started to point fingers. You saw the destructive affects of this on the Senate’s inability to censure Trump in their second impeachment. As CNN reported—the Republicans obejective was “to flood the zone with counter-programming against the hearing, the Trump campaign ran more than 2,000 ads on Facebook about impeachment, according to data analyzed by Laura Edelson, a researcher at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering.

“The Impeachment Scam hearings begin today!” one early morning ad read. It was accompanied by a video of Trump attacking Democrats for trying to impeach him.

The campaign called the hearing a witch hunt and urged supporters to help Trump raise $3 million in 24 hours.”

Haidt quotes from a what he refers to as the “Hidden Tribes” study which references the fact that particular groups have a way of using their own language to describe their specialized reality—to explain the way the January 6 narrative was adopted into the grand Trump story of his persecution by the establishment—"Donald Trump’s speeches make sense only to a small group of authoritarians” for whom anything related to external threats trigger an entire threat laden narrative, so “from his campaign’s ominous opening diatribe about Mexican “rapists” to his warning on January 6, 2021: “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” There is a clear narrative line that speaks to their sense of what they regard as true patriotism, leading to the most current version of events that this a violent assault on the U.S. Capitol was “legitimate political discourse,” A story line “supported—or at least not contradicted—by an array of right-wing think tanks and media organizations.” These beliefs and the violence that they engender could not have been conceived before the social media age and the distortions that Zuckerberg, Musk and Trump with his Truth Social platform ably assisted by Murdoch’s Fox news. were able to accomplish. These companies owned by rapacious billionaires have squeezed oversize profits out of our political and social dysfunction and resist regulation as if it were going to destroy their entire business empires. But the truth is that these band of social media barons have together not just rewired all our brains but our entire society. A society is at its root how we both listen and talk to one another. Before social media there was more than a fair chance that each group in our society as well the political parties would at least listen and discuss areas of agreement in a civil manner but now we seem incapable of doing that.

We cannot put the genie back in the box—what we can start to do is to both ask social media to curb its desire to make their money off controversy—as points out “the Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen suggests some simple remedies, such as “modifying the “share” function on Facebook so that after any content has been shared twice, the third person in the chain must take the time to copy and paste the content into a new post. Reforms like this are not censorship; they are viewpoint-neutral and content-neutral, and they work equally well in all languages. They don’t stop anyone from saying anything; they just slow the spread of content that is, on average, less likely to be true.” There are many other tweaks but we also need a massive education program to help young people the major users and victims of the new media use social media more critically.

If we don’t do this soon more stupefying events such as January 6 lie in wait for us and for our democracy.