The Democrat's Construction of Jan.6 as a Cultural Trauma

While commemorative events for the first anniversary of the January 6th insurrection were filled with comments by Democrats about preserving the historical record, Democratic remembrance was less about preservation than construction. While the insurrection is accepted as a traumatic experience for those in the Capitol Building that day, Democrats seek to construct the event as one that threatened and continues to threaten the nation as a whole. It is a cultural trauma deserving of commemoration and requiring recourse for those who aided and abetted it. While this construction is certainly intentional, and in many ways politically motivated, labeling it as a construction in no way delegitimizes the trauma presented. To sociologist Jeffrey Alexander, cultural traumas are never natural or objective, but socially constructed. Alexander explains that “traumatic status is attributed to real or imagined phenomena, not because of their actual harmfulness or their objective abruptness, but because these phenomena are believed to have abruptly, and harmfully, affected collective identity” (2011:308). The insurrection’s harm to America’s collective identity, particularly its idea of itself as a stable, model democracy, dominate Democrat’s commemoration of the event. Identifying this damage to the American collective identity constructs January 6th as a cultural trauma, one which requires continued commemoration and recourse.

Democrats largely used the anniversary to inform the public how the identified trauma should be collectively experienced. Alexander explains that to experience a collective trauma, the collectivity must define “a painful injury to the collectivity, [establish] the victim, [attribute] responsibility, and [distribute] the ideal and material consequences” (2011:309). A roundtable discussion between historians and congresspeople displays this construction. During this discussion, panel participants, all of whom were Democrats, emphasized the threat of the insurrection and the undermining by Republicans of this historically inerrant version of events, with Representative Lisa Blunt Rochester poignantly noting that “We had a front-row seat to what lies, hate or what pain old misinformation conjures… Jan. 6 was about so much more than an effort to break into a building. It was an effort to break down our institutions" (Shivaram 2022). Here, Blunt Rochester identifies the insurrection’s attempt to destroy American institutions as a collective injury. Victimhood is extended past those inside the capital that day to the entire American citizenry. Responsibility is attributed to Donald Trump and the misinformation that precipitated the insurrection. Additionally, democrats emphasize the complicity of Republicans both in the initial event and their dangerous decision to not acknowledge the objective truth of their wrongdoing. Organized by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the discussion intended to “preserve the historical record of Jan. 6,” a truth undermined by opposing politicians. This event not only commemorates the insurrection itself as an injury to democracy but also the ensuing Republican response as a continuation of and cover-up for collective trauma. According to Democrats, Republicans construct false narratives while Democrats preserve objective historical truth. The proposed consequence for this injury is not only the legal prosecution of those involved in the insurrection but also the electoral removal of irresponsible Republicans from office by the public in voting booths.

Suggested recourse for January 6th extends beyond Republican accountability. Democrats including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer used the anniversary to advocate for voting rights legislation. While he identified President Trump as inciting the attack and his Republican colleagues as perpetuating its traumatic effects through “attempts to rewrite history,” Schumer progressed to identify an expansion of voting rights as a necessary reaction to this democratic decay (Kim 2022). Repair to America’s damaged identity in this narrative must be achieved legislatively as well as electorally and legally.

 The commemorative contributions of Pelosi, Schumer, as well as president Biden who gave remarks to commemorate the attack, illustrate how Democrats use the visibility of their political offices to their advantage, increasing the attention paid to their narrative. To a greater degree than their Republican counterparts, they control a significant share of what Alexander calls “the means of symbolic production” (2002:11). As the party in control of the Executive and Legislative branches, they are afforded a degree of media attentiveness that positions their narrative as the dominant one. While this does not universalize recognition of January 6th as a cultural trauma, it does allow for the vast proliferation of the Democrat’s trauma narrative. The success of this trauma construction will be evidenced by the degree to which the recourse it suggests comes to fruition. If Democrats maintain or expand their positions of symbolic production and succeed in passing legislation justified by the insurrection, the collective trauma will be experienced. If these measures fail, the collective trauma construction will be unsuccessful, at least for the time being.

References

Alexander, Jeffrey. 2002. “On the Social Construciton of Moral Universals The ‘Holocaust’ from War Crime to Trama Drama.” European Journal of Social Theory:5(1):5-85.

Alexander, Jeffrey. 2011. "Toward a Cultural Theory of Trauma." Pp. 307-10 in The Collective Memory Reader. Edited by Jeffrey K. Olick, Vered Vintizky-Seroussi, & Daniel Levy. New York: Oxford University Press.

Kim, Caitlyn. 2022. “Schumer calls out Trump and calls for voting rights legislation.” NPR, January 6. Retrieved May 9, 2022 (https://www.npr.org/live-updates/jan-6-anniversary-events).

Shivaram, Deepa. 2022. “Members of Congress and historians stress the need to preserve the historical record.” NPR, January 6. Retrieved May 9, 2022 (https://www.npr.org/live-updates/jan-6-anniversary-events).