Lucky countries have celebrations that remind their citizens of what binds them together — think Memorial Day or the Fourth of July.
Unlucky countries do the opposite: They commemorate the divisions that drive them apart.
In Northern Ireland, Protestant militants march noisily on July 12 to remind the Catholic minority which side won the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbs march on Jan. 9 to assert their independence from the groups they fought in their country’s war.
After the U.S. Civil War, Southern states celebrated Confederate Memorial Day on a different date than the North’s Decoration Day; the holidays didn’t merge until World War I.
Last week, with the anniversary of the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, the United States slipped onto the list of unhappy countries.
The day turned into a festival of national division — not a single, unifying commemoration but three very different observances.
President Joe Biden gave an unexpectedly fiery speech, blaming Donald Trump for inciting the mob that attacked the Capitol and for continuing to stoke the poisonous myth that the 2020 election was stolen.
“The former president of the United States of America has created and spread a web of lies,” Biden said. “He’s done so because he values power over principle … and because his bruised ego matters more to him than our democracy.”
PREDICTABLY, Trump rose to the bait, issuing four angry statements from his exile in Mar-a-Lago, all renewing his spurious claims.
“The Big Lie was the election itself,” he wrote. The election outcome was “the real insurrection,” he said. And he accused the Biden administration of “appalling abuse of political prisoners,” an apparent reference to defendants held on federal charges after the riot — a favorite cause of his fringiest followers, like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga.
Caught in the middle were Republican leaders who know Trump lost the election but don’t want to say so because it would enrage the vengeful former president.
They observed Jan. 6 by offering muddled statements that disapproved of the riot but blamed Democrats for “politicizing” the issue — as if there were any way to avoid connecting the invasion of the Capitol to politics.
“The actions of that day were lawless and as wrong as wrong can be,” House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., said. The problem now, he complained, is that Democrats “are using it as a partisan political weapon.”
It’s a difficult straddle to execute, as Sen. Ted Cruz discovered when he incautiously described the riot as “a violent terrorist attack,” a phrase he has used in the past.
Heresy! Cruz, who ran against Trump for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination, was assailed by Trump supporters and subjected to interrogation by Tucker Carlson of Fox News. “It was not a violent terrorist attack,” Carlson insisted.
