Out d'Coup LIVE | Civility, Insurrection, and the Crisis of Democracy | January 11, 2021

We can only hope that the rest of 2021 doesn’t look like what we experienced this past week. For the first time since 1814, the U.S. Capitol building was stormed by fanatical Trumpsters, QAnon conspiracy theorists, white supremacists, and other right-wing radicals in what was nothing less than an attempted coup. That is exactly what Fiona Hill, the former Senior Director of Trump’s National Security Council called it. While the smell of tear gas was still strong in the Capitol, we already began to hear calls for “moving beyond” the events and return to the good old days of civility. That’s right, even before most of us could even process this right-wing insurrection, we saw lawmakers and pundits put out the call for civility. “This is not the America we all know,” we were told. 

Chris Hayes was part of an MSNBC panel the night of the insurrection. He seemed to capture the sense of gaslighting many of us felt as the calls for “a return to normalcy” and “civility” felt. Listen for yourself: 

[Chris Hayes: Trump Must Be Lawfully Removed from Office As Fast As Possible]

I'll be kicking off the discussion tonight with an article I wrote back in 2018 about the breakdown of democracy in the lead up to the 2016 election. We'll take a look at the failure of liberals to recognize the coming crisis and the need to be prepared to fight to end the clear threat to the future of democracy in the U.S.

My article, "We Are Not All In This Together: A Case for Advocacy, Factionalism, and Making the Political Personal," appeared in the amazing collection, "Unruly Rhetorics: Protest, Persuasion, and Publics," edited by Jonathan Alexander, Nancy Welch, and Susan Jarratt.