Commentary: Jan. 6 was just a start. Vigilantes are expanding, and legalizing, their attacks

The insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was aimed at preventing the peaceful transfer of power after Donald Trump lost the presidential election. This was clearly illegal, and the Justice Department has prosecuted hundreds for their crimes that day.

Had they been successful, the plan for Jan. 7 and beyond was to legalize such attacks on democracy.

While many Americans were shocked and chastened by the riot, one faction was energized by the events, which they saw as the first fruits of their breathless rhetoric, authoritarian ambitions, brazen recruitment strategies and radical initiatives. Perhaps most disturbingly, operatives for this bloc have found canny ways to secure legal cover for their campaigns of political domination and terror. Their vision of terroristic governance — let’s call it vigilante democracy — is as paradoxical as it is devastatingly effective.

It’s already far more widespread than one riot on one day. Across huge swaths of the United States, vigilante democracy is transforming how Americans work, have fun, study, love and participate in civic and political life. Relying on legions of citizen culture warriors — everyone from PTA moms to abortion snitches to heavily armed white nationalist militiamen — vigilante democracy is punishing women, racial and religious minorities and LGBTQ+ people who make dignity and equality demands that are perceived as threatening white Christian men’s political and cultural power.

Dogged reporters have documented the physical, economic and psychic toll imposed on transgender children in public schools, on pregnant women who must be airlifted across state lines to receive emergency abortions before sepsis kicks in, and on teachers who dare delve into the racist causes of the Civil War. They’ve recounted harrowing tales of violence against Black Lives Matter protesters and cataloged campaigns of intimidation and harassment against election officials in key districts in swing states.

But on its own, in-the-trenches reporting of specific vigilante practices doesn’t capture how discrete spasms of Christian nationalist rage do systemic damage to the body politic. Vigilantes force their targets to conceal their true identities, censor their words and activities and refrain from political and civic engagement. It is possible now for some Americans to become internally displaced people, fleeing persecution in certain states.

So far, the vigilantes’ success has been nothing short of staggering.

For the first time since the end of Jim Crow, substantial numbers of Americans are considering fleeing jurisdictions where legalized vigilantism imperils or diminishes their lives or livelihoods. And then there are presumably far more who can’t or won’t contemplate leaving because of family ties or financial constraints. Those Americans are increasingly resigning themselves to life as second-class citizens.

Meanwhile, red states are competing with one another to ratchet up the pressure they apply on their citizens, threatening to prosecute those who leave the state to seek abortions and even going after out-of-state individuals and organizations for providing financial or medical assistance. Those at the forefront of the legal vigilante movement — including members of the ethno-nationalist Proud Boys militia and book banners — are beginning to run for, and win, local offices.

The net effect is the enforcement of Christian nationalist values in nearly half the states, the entrenchment of MAGA political power (including at the national level), and the enervating and dispersing of left-of-center political challengers who otherwise, with free and fair elections, would be likely to unseat right-wing incumbents.

All of this shows why it would be a mistake to see vigilantes as just waging and winning a “culture war.” Cultural victory is not the MAGA movement’s ultimate objective. That is only in service of a broader, downstream electoral strategy, one that aims to subvert true democratic equality in America.

Although some, such as Adam Serwer of the Atlantic, have said “the cruelty is the point” of the MAGA movement, we believe that the cruelty is a means to an end: further subordinating already vulnerable and marginalized individuals and communities. If successful, the American right will prevent the targets of its terrorist campaigns from making what would otherwise be powerful and effective political demands at precisely the moment when white Christians fear the loss of their dominant position in society.

Suffocating democracy is the point.

As we look ahead to the next few rounds of critical elections, we remain haunted — less by the feverish rioters of Jan. 6 than by the cool, calculating strategists who spent the subsequent days, months and years devising and legitimating a vigilante-based regime that aims to ensure Christian nationalism never comes up short again.

Look closely at the events of Jan. 6 and you’ll find this insidious agenda, grabbing fewer headlines than rioters but posing a greater threat. Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, played the part of the respectable Republican that day, proclaiming publicly the importance of legal authority — not to protect the republic, but to protect Donald Trump. As he explained to the then-White House chief of staff: “This will end badly for the President unless we have the Constitution on our side…. We need something from the state legislatures to make this legitimate.”

Lee was not outraged at the prospect of anyone conspiring to overturn a presidential election. He just wanted to be sure the coup would succeed. Lee apparently considered the presidency to be Trump’s by right regardless of what voters said; his advice was putting a lawyerly spin on one of Trump’s most revealing of aphorisms.

“When you’re a star,” Trump grotesquely boasted in 2005, “they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”

Lee may not share anything like Trump’s penchant for fetishizing fame and denigrating women. But he and his ilk fetishize legalisms and denigrate real democracy. Their logic is that once you find a legalistic cover story, you can do anything.

Even subvert democracy.

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Jon D. Michaels and David L. Noll, professors of law at UCLA and Rutgers, respectively, are the authors of “ Vigilante Nation: How State-Sponsored Terror Threatens Our Democracy,” from which this article is adapted.

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