The January 6th Committee as Televisual Séance | Anonymous

Guest Column #027

---

The root word of séance, based in Old French, can actually refer to any form of sitting —such as when viewing a movie— or session (one may think of a session of Congress).

The January 6th committee is a televisual séance in numerous senses. It is essentially the third senatorial trial-by-spectacle of Donald Trump, after two fruitless impeachments.

By following the rituals, congressional and historical, in the right order, invoking the correct names (“John Dean!” Alexander Butterfield!) and the proper procedural incantations, it is as though Democrats and their allies such as Liz Cheney intend to call up the ghosts of Richard Nixon and Watergate to ensure Trump never re-enters the Oval Office.

Washington, unlike say, the City of London, is relatively bereft of eldritch characteristics. An artificial city conceived under deists, it is not the first place to summon truly ancient spirits (although the city’s location and Hunger Games-scale wealth divide might provide an author with a deep pool of Southern Gothic potential).

Instead, the magic on offer at Washington is that of “history”. This is something that is granted by the high priests of the media. Without the press and politicians, DC is a sealed tomb.

Much has been made of how this sorcery is immediately diluted by the fracturing effect of modern social media. Audiences viewing the spectacle on broadcast or cable television may be largely pre-converted and old enough to have both witnessed Watergate and, more likely than not —given the scale of his 1972 victory— to have voted for Nixon themselves.

This unsettling possibility reveals an unanswerable flaw in the sense of the high priests’ own power. Procedure and discourse play a role in creating history, but the idea of a perfect, progressive, and unedited narrative is simply fake news. Neither Virtue nor Time are lived as, nor morally, linear.

The sepia-gossamer fumes of the spells cast by camera limelight come with a pervasive stench. Standard-issue right-wing commentators have taken to using the term “ugly” to describe the events of January 6th. Although this is regarded by many —and probably is— a sort of throwaway dismissal of the fiasco, it contains an insight that explains more than both attempts to excuse the riot as a peaceful protest gone awry, or to paint it as the culmination of an artful and elaborate conspiracy.

In the month shortly leading up to and after the 2020 election, some liberal intellectuals, including Masha Gessen, Peggy Noonan, and Suzanne Nossel, fingered the appeal of Trumpian ideology to the American public. In invoking a simulacra of voters’ memories and past promises to the American Dream, Trump spent much of the summer of 2020 decrying alleged Democratic schemes to destroy the suburbs and, in his Mount Rushmore speech, invoking American heroes as living statues to protect a particular idea of belonging and his own right to rule.

The final chapter of Gessen’s Surviving Autocracy argued that this appeal be countered by a new vision for America, more inclusive than Trump’s. Importantly, this would be premised on the future, one that would be so seductive as to woo the public away from nostalgia for the Trump era forever.

Democrats’ attempts to do so were doomed even as mascot Amanda Gorman expressed them on Inauguration Day. Economic conditions and spiritual and real-world conflicts —mostly, though not entirely, outside the control of the Washington wizards— have retroactively transformed the appearance of Trump into a sort of Daddy Warbucks who made America rich with gasoline cheaper than bottled water; who dropped $100 bills to outstretched arms below from the balcony at his private box at the Kentucky Derby.

Among those outside his support base, calls for a sort of truth and reconciliation body had been floated in the months prior to the election through the Capitol riots themselves. Such an idea would be focused necessarily on the past, even if the aim was to clear the air for the future.

Almost from the beginning, conducting such a ritual of fumigation would entail a possibility of backfiring. An attempt to address the alleged roots of Trumpism (considered by many progressives to extend to the construction of the material and philosophical origins of the city’s Foundation) would arguably amount to a razing of not only the ideology of progress but modernity itself. As much as this would paradoxically delight certain spiritual radicals, it could confirm the overthrow of the authority of the political and hasten entropy.

The January 6th Committee thus sought to ritually cleanse Trumpism in isolation, pathologizing in an individual and his mad-king persona aspects of modernity and postmodernity that society has not been able to acknowledge honestly. In so doing, it raised the cynicism of the Committee members, and of Trump, to a pungent boil.

Nothing attractive, with the power to woo, can come out of this morass. The séance of the January 6th Committee has perhaps left Trump with a lasting “ick”, but the spell has at the same time rebounded on those who cast it.

It is in the peripheral states —Florida and Texas, California and the boroughs of New York City— where visions of the past and future are now being contested. Any seer’s gaze should be directed outward for clarity.