From the Civil War, to my own childhood in Louisiana in the 1950s and 1960s, to the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, one thing is clear. MAGA politics is not limited to the voting booth. It quickly escalates into unwarranted political violence.
As a boy, I couldn’t go to school a mile away from the farm, so I got up early in the morning, took the bus across the parish, and didn’t get home to study until 4:30 p.m. . It was for white people only. This is not something that happened in a foreign country or hundreds of years ago. This was my childhood here in the United States.
That was decades ago in the Deep South. But to paraphrase former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, who under former President Donald Trump led an organized call against Vice President Kamala Harris in late July, we are now seeing the worst of MAGA in politics. We are witnessing the emergence of mainstream technology.
Supporters of former President Donald Trump participate in the “1 Million MAGA March” to protest the results of the 2020 presidential election in front of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, DC, on December 12, 2020. Supporters of former President Donald Trump participate in the “1 Million MAGA March” to protest the results of the 2020 presidential election in front of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, DC, on December 12, 2020. Olivier Drierly/AFP via Getty Images
We already know that Trump will stop at nothing to gain and maintain power. For him and his followers, even violence is justified if it means getting their way. The world watched in horror as they stormed the Capitol. Now, regardless of the outcome this November, we must all prepare to endure further acts of violence from former Trump and his followers in the aftermath of the 2024 election.
In the United States, we look back at those who signed the Declaration of Independence and the countless souls who fought for freedom and died for our country as patriots. Strictly speaking, they were engaged in hostilities, but it was not violence for the sake of violence, and it was not for personal gain. Their fight was a fight to establish a government of and for the people.
Since then, unfortunately, there have always been people in our society who misunderstand the meaning of our revolution and our rights and responsibilities as citizens. During the Civil War, secessionists believed they had the right to wage war against their own country, and that Washington was oppressing them in the same way that the British Crown oppressed the colonists. he claimed.
Over the past three years, there have been 1,300 prosecutions stemming from the Jan. 6 attack. The great irony is that all of the perverted legal defenses that the insurrectionists use to excuse their crimes derive from the very Constitution they betrayed that day.
Meanwhile, the leaders of the MAGA movement have evaded justice at almost every turn. Although he is a convicted felon, those state charges stem from a fraudulent operation in New York and are not an unprecedented attack on American democracy. His supporters remain loyal to him despite his criminality. Because they see him as their last hope of retaining political power exclusively in their own hands.
Their arguments were nonsense and their real reasons were never justified. Southern magnates didn’t want to lose their plantations, nor did they want to lose the people they secured as free labor and grew wealthy from. That’s why they took up arms. They rebelled against the state not to advance the common good but to protect their own narrow personal interests.
Today, we are drowning in disinformation and conspiracy theories, with Americans fighting over long-established facts. Like the sad souls in the gray uniforms of the Civil War, the former president’s followers are woefully misunderstood. They are not defending their rights. They are undermining our democracy to avoid sharing it with people of color.
November 5th will be a historic day. America once again faces a familiar choice. Our country will either elect the first woman to the highest office in this country or surrender power to a man sworn to destroy the constitutional order.
American democracy belongs to all of us, and it is our shared responsibility to protect it, regardless of the violent threats and actions of our former president’s most extreme followers. Once democracy is lost, it is nearly impossible to regain.
LTG. Russell L. Honoré (ret.) is a former U.S. Army commander who led the Katrina task force after the New Orleans disaster. He was tasked with leading a review of security at the Capitol following the January 6, 2021, riot.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own.
