The Republican Construction of Jan.6 as non-traumatic

  For most Republicans, the first anniversary of January 6th was met with little fanfare. Commemorative events were sparsely attended by members of the GOP. Members that did attend these events were met with hostility from party leadership and conservative news outlets. This Republican silence represents a narrative construction, one which positions Jan. 6 as an untraumatic riot that did not damage America’s collective identity. While Democrats commemorate January 6th as a traumatic event for American Democracy, Republicans remember it as one of relative insignificance. Their proliferation of this narrative both verbally and nonverbally positions them as a carrier group in direct opposition to Democrats in deciding Jan. 6th’s place in the collective conscious. Sociologist Jeffrey Alexander defines a carrier group as “the collective agents of the trauma process,” those who “are situated in particular places in the social structure” with “particular discursive talents” (2011:308). Their Jan. 6th narrative reflects their “ideal and material interests,” (Alexander 2011:308) particularly the maintenance of their political power. As a carrier group, Republicans have refuted Democrat construction of the insurrection as a cultural trauma, enforcing their narrative through an internal policy of Forced Forgetting.

As a competing carrier group, Democrats worked to establish January 6th as a cultural trauma, specifying how the trauma ought to be reckoned with and who should be held accountable. Commemorative events during the anniversary of Jan. 6 set up by Democrats positioned Donald Trump and Republicans as responsible for the cultural trauma of the insurrection and proceeding misinformation that exacerbated it. The necessary recourse explicit and implicit in these specifications is the removal from office and possible prosecution of involved Republicans. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these commemorative events were sparsely attended by Republican lawmakers, their lack of acknowledgment signaling their rejection of Democrat’s version of events. Those Republicans who did attend, most notably Rep. Liz Cheney, were publicly reprimanded. Both her criticism of Trump and involvement in the anniversary commemorative events recognize Republican complicity in the insurrection. Cheney, who vocally criticized Donald Trump after January 6th, is no longer recognized as a Republican by the Wyoming GOP as a result (Wise 2022). This decision presents an obvious barrier to her potential reelection. Cheney’s ostracization demonstrates how Republicans can institutionally prevent dissent by casting out those who do not comply with their non-trauma narrative.

While the Cheney case is the most extreme, there were other visible instances of Republican narrative control during Jan. 6’s commemoration. The Republican non-trauma narrative is clearly articulated in the media reaction to party members who dissent from their version of events. When Ted Cruz referred to January 6th as a “violent terrorist attack," he was met with backlash from conservative pundits. Notably, Tucker Carlson responded by affirming the preferred Republican narrative, obsequiously clarifying for Cruz that “of all the things that Jan. 6 was, it was not a violent terrorist attack… it wasn’t an insurrection. Was it a riot? Sure. It was not a violent terrorist attack — sorry!” (Chappell 2022). Cruz’s characterization of Jan.6th as a terrorist attack supports the Democrat cultural trauma construction rather than the Republican non-trauma one. The sanctioning of Cruz by conservative media pundits allows for this deviation to be corrected, maintaining the GOP’s narrative coherence as a carrier group.

Both these instances illustrate a Republican policy of Forced Forgetting. Yifat Gutman and Noam Tirosh explain this idea in “Balancing Atrocities and Forced Forgetting: Memory Laws as a Means of Social Control in Isreal.” Forced Forgetting “makes official the memory of one group to actively exclude other groups’ memories from public debate on their shared past” (2011:706). While the GOP does not control public debate as a whole, they do control what discourse takes place publicly between party members, discouraging dissent from the party’s preferred Jan.6th narrative construction. Cheney and Cruz illustrate different ways in which dissenting memories are discouraged, by ostracization and media correction, respectively. Gutman and Tirsoh’s piece is centrally concerned with Forced Forgetting in memory laws but does acknowledge that it “has been evident in political speech as well” (2011:706). Extending internal GOP censorship to a hypothetical legal level bears interesting results. Considering both their implication on Jan. 6th as a collective trauma and recent conservative censorship policies (namely education restrictions like the “Don’t Say Gay” bill and anti-CRT legislation), the extension of this Forced Forgetting into the legal realm does not seem out of the question. Legislation of this kind would further cement and perpetuate the GOP’s non-trauma narrative and extend its Forced Forgetting, although certainly not without contestation.

References

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.

Chappell, Bill. 2022. “Republicans criticize Ted Cruz for calling Jan 6. a violent terrorist attack.” NPR, January 6. Retrieved May 9, 2022 (https://www.npr.org/live-updates/jan-6-anniversary-events).

Gutman, Yifat and Noam Tirosh. 2011. “Balancing Atrocities and Forced Forgetting: Memory Laws as a Means of Social Control in Isreal.” Law and Society Inquiry 46(3):705-30.

Wise, Emily. 2022. “Rep. Liz Cheney’s principled, lonely stand against her party.” NPR, January 6. Retrieved May 9, 2022 (https://www.npr.org/live-updates/jan-6-anniversary-events).