Are the January 6th Hearings Just Doomed?

It’s fun watching professional pundits live-tweet the January 6th hearings, like the ESPN commentators they secretly are. They breathlessly relate details guaranteed to verify their self-selecting audiences’ prevalent beliefs. Reducing the President’s Secret Service detail to Keystone Kops incompetence, or Josh Hawley to an also-ran from the Ministry of Silly Walks, makes True Believers feel good, Everything hinges on “revelations” that tell people what they already believe.

These hearings have been great political vaudeville. By running them during Prime Time, which many Representatives are ancient enough to think is still when grown-ups watch TV, they’ve hooked an audience for something that ordinarily would appear as compelling as reading aloud from the dictionary. New information dribbles out just fast enough to maintain soap-operatic pace, and audiences care about what’s happening with a “Who Shot J.R.?” level of dedication.

That’s the problem, however. By whipping audiences into high dudgeon, getting the emotional reaction that drives clicks and sweet, sweet internet ad revenue, these commentators create the illusion of action. Audiences feel like they’ve already done something by getting angry, then expressing their anger on the internet. They’ve already performed the necessary actions of political investiture, so there’s no reason to pursue anything further, not until Election Day anyway.

Meanwhile, Attorney General Merrick Garland has yoked America’s justice system to the illusion of neutrality. Garland believes his office should remain somehow aloof, apolitical and no respecter of electoral outcomes—a delusion that didn’t plague, say, James Comey. Unfortunately, for powerful people, neutrality is always illusory. In every situation, doing nothing ultimately supports the status quo. And that’s what we’re seeing from coup supporters who realize they won’t face consequences.

I’m old enough to remember the Iran-Contra hearings, my generation’s first immersion into real-time political muckraking. Like these hearings, they spread an administration’s dirtiest secrets across national media. Unlike these hearings, the Iran-Contra hearings occurred during daylight hours, but they also occurred mainly during the summer, so audiences my age, mostly schoolchildren, saw events develop. The gap between reality and middle-school American Civics was, ahem, educational.

Audiences definitely had strong reactions to Iran-Contra. While progressives decried a President who made an end-run around the Constitution to protect his ridiculous moral precepts, conservatives made a national hero of Oliver North, whose lies were egregiously obvious, though nobody could prove it. As Rachel Maddow writes, the Reagan Administration’s humiliation was so thoroughgoing that no less an authority than Newt Gingrich declared Reagan’s reputation was beyond rehabilitation.

My biggest historical takeaway from Iran-Contra, however, is that ultimately nothing happened. Oliver North spent some time in the pokey, sure. But after Lee Atwater successfully submarined Gary Hart’s presidential campaign, the first George Bush became President by essentially pledging to be Reagan: The Sequel. Old Ronald himself eventually received the rehabilitation Gingrich prophesied he’d never receive, to the point that Reagan’s executors have distanced themselves from President Trump.

Those televised hearings, like those happening now, allowed voters to enact the emotional journey of justice and reconciliation, without powerful people needing to do anything, and just as importantly, without forcing anybody to accept consequences for their illegal actions. Because we’d already had the cathartic experience, the process was, for us, finished. We felt no impetus to pressure the justice system to make consequences happen. So they didn’t.

Don’t mistake the importance here. Anybody who’s walked around a primarily Republican area recently and heard talk about Ronald Reagan (including the effusive hero worship still sometimes heaped upon Oliver North) can attest that conservative True Believers think justice happened in Iran-Contra. I’ve literally heard Republicans say they believe the guilty were held responsible, because they saw the guilty shamed on live television. People truly believe something happened.

We’re on track to witness that happen now. Without concomitant dedication from Garland’s Justice Department, Americans will believe something happened in these hearings, because we’ve already had the emotions necessary. By performing the kabuki-like rituals of justice, but not actually prosecuting anybody, the hearings lead Americans on an emotional journey that ends with us believing we’ve witnessed something. This authorizes us to rewrite history in our own brains.

We cannot permit ritual to upstage action here. Kabuki is appealing because it never changes, but we have to change. As racism, poverty, and global warming continue getting worse, the rituals of justice become not just repetitive, but dangerous. Airing the public humiliation of coup plotters does nothing if they’re permitted to rehabilitate their records later. That’s exactly what’s at stake unless somebody is prosecuted, and soon.