“Capitol Offense.”

The “domestic war on terror.”

2021, not 1812. (Tyler Merbler, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)

JANUARY 29—Let me begin with a modest prediction: Wednesday January 6, 2021, will not live in infamy. The storming of the Capitol by a mob of deluded Trump-worshipers will not rank with December 7, 1941, or November 22, 1963, or September 11, 2001. If anything, an overreaction to that afternoon’s protest is what we should now be on guard against. 

As was probably to be expected, the reaction to the events of January 6 by our media and political elites has been a curious combination of self-pity and self-aggrandizement—a combination that inevitably lends itself to the making of rash judgments. And so we have them. 

In this, the Age of Trump, reporting and political analysis often degenerates, in the blink of an eye, into farce. And so, in the hours after hundreds of the protesters stormed the Capitol, the former Obama staff over at Pod Save America were declaring that the events of January 6 were “worse than 9/11.” 

The response by the political class was just as hyperbolic. Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer compared the protest with Pearl Harbor. Senator Cory Booker invoked the storming of the Capitol during the War of 1812. Congresswoman Elise Slotkin posted a video to Twitter on which she voiced her opinion that while external security threats posed by foreign terrorist organizations, China, and Russia are “still serious,” attention now must be paid to what she described as “the single, greatest national security threat right now”—which is “the threat of domestic terrorism.” This is particularly notable because, as recently as this past June, Slotkin, a former intelligence operative, claimed that “Americans are quite literally paying in blood for [Trump’s] pandering to Putin.”

Slotkin’s overreaction aside, drawing parallels to past terror attacks makes little sense. As anyone with a cursory familiarity with American history knows, the anarchists of the early 20th century, the Weather Underground of the late 1960s and early ’70s, and right-wing terrorists such as Timothy McVeigh and Eric Rudolph in the ’90s posed far greater threats to the public than today’s Q–Anon and Proud Boy marauders.

Rep. Elissa Slotkin @RepSlotkin

The post 9/11 era is over. The single greatest national security threat right now is our internal division. The threat of domestic terrorism. The polarization that threatens our democracy. If we don't reconnect our two Americas, the threats will not have to come from the outside.

A more measured, less hysterical view than that offered by Slotkin would note that while, yes, the primary responsibility for the Capitol Hill protest lies with Trump and the protesters themselves, what happened several Wednesdays back was also a failure of policing. The Capitol Hill police, which, as a Cato Institute report wryly notes, are funded in the amount of $516 million annually to defend two square miles, has much to answer for, not least because a number of videos that show their officers fraternizing with the protesters and removing the barriers around the Capitol to allow the protesters to enter the complex unopposed.

Clearly, a serious review of security protocols on Capitol Hill is in order. Yet many are calling for more far-reaching measures that, upon examination, seem problematic at best. Democratic Senator Dick Durbin has announced his plan to reintroduce the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act, which he and Illinois Congressman Brad Schneider unsuccessfully brought before Congress in 2019. Durbin is set to become the next chairman of the Judiciary Committee, while Schneider is quickly becoming AIPAC’s point man in Washington, having just sponsored a bill that would give Israel veto power over U.S. arms sales. 

Over the past two years, similar legislation has been sponsored by House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff and Senator Martha McSally, which, as a report by the liberal Brennan Center for Justice has noted, “would dangerously expand the definition of ‘terrorism’ to include crimes that involve property destruction and threats, which could, especially in the current enforcement climate, harm political protests and advocacy protected by the First Amendment.”

Politicians like Slotkin, Schiff, Durbin, and Schumer, and many others besides, seem intent on confusing what is after all a law-enforcement issue with a kind of existential threat to the nation. Recall that after the first congressional vote to authorize military force three days after 9/11, we slid down the slippery slope with alacrity: In short order, “with us or against us” transformed into justifications for assassinations of American citizens on foreign soil. Indeed, the government’s initial response to 9/11 quickly evolved into a violent and senseless two-decade global crusade.

But in the looking-glass world of Washington nothing succeeds like failure, and so the path Congress and the executive invariably take when a policy is failing is to double down on it. Hence George W. Bush’s celebrated Iraq “surge” of 2007, and, soon after that, Barack Obama’s Afghan “surge” in 2009. 

And now, in response to the events of January 6, politicians are reaching for the old “War on Terror” playbook, while establishment media follow dutifully along, with cosseted MSNBC personalities shouting “Sedition!” at every turn. And yet, the green-room jingoists calling for a domestic iteration of the war on terror seem blissfully unaware of the consequences of empowering the U.S. government to wage a domestic campaign against designated enemies of the state. Is it unreasonable to ask where the line gets drawn in an era that has already seen the erosion of due process for those even suspected of a crime?

But now members of Congress have come face to face with the threat of violence, and so they see an urgent need to “do something.” And it is true that Congress should “do something.” Just not this. What Congress ought to do instead is address the root of the problem and ask, Why are the Capitol protesters so enthralled with Trump? What is really going on here? 

I submit that the problem turns primarily on economics. It is safe to assume that the 74 million people who voted for Trump this time around were driven by a wide variety of motives—some of them, no doubt, pretty base. The reflexive reaction of the liberal bien pensants in New York and Washington has been to dismiss them all as racists and end the discussion. This is a mistake for a couple of reasons, not least because it absolves the American political, media, and corporate elites of their gross mismanagement of the economy over the past three decades—and the inequality and dispossession that have resulted. 

Indeed, the United States of 2021 resembles less a constitutional republic than an oligarchical national security state in which the Congress and the executive have long abandoned any pretense that they are responsible to, much less care about, the ordinary citizens they claim to serve. Nothing more clearly illustrates the problem than the recent “Covid–19 relief package,” which provided minimal financial assistance to Americans in need but was tied to a larger appropriations bill that included $500 million to the Israeli military, $453 million for Ukraine, $1.65 billion for Jordan, $2 billion for U.S. Air Force missile systems, $4 billion for Navy weapons procurement, and $2 billion for Trump’s Space Force. 

All this largesse for foreign countries and the already obscenely overfunded Pentagon at a time when a deadly combination of an opioid epidemic, a collapse in intergenerational mobility, and third-world levels of economic inequality contributing to 150,000 “deaths of despair,” in Angus Deaton and Anne Case’s morbidly moving phrase, over the past year. 

It seems not unreasonable, then, to worry whether proposals such as Durbin’s and Schiff’s and McSally’s are what the moment calls for. As with the Global War on Terror, a government-funded domestic antiterror campaign will further tip the balance of the economy in favor of the defense industry, which will stand to profit from the continuing militarization of domestic law enforcement. Still more, the stipulations written into Durbin’s domestic terror legislation, which calls for the creation of  “dedicated domestic terrorism offices” within the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security, will be a windfall for defense contractors specializing in domestic surveillance and intelligence gathering. 

In The World Crisis and American Responsibility, his 1958 collection, Reinhold Niebuhr warned that the U.S. was at risk of relying “too much on military strength” at the expense of “all the other political, economic, and moral factors” on which our “unity, health, and strength” depend. This is a warning we have ignored to our detriment.