Welcome to 2025

January 6th, Jimmy Carter, and the politics of wildfires

Welcome to 2025! Hopefully everyone had a nice holiday season.

I’m back, and I’m in the midst of planning next steps and fresh ideas for The Riel World in the new year. One of these is the introduction of an occasional “Politics Notebook,” sort of a politics-oriented version of my Sunday Morning Coffee posts — a chance to ponder a few topics in the news with a mixture of personal musings and links to what others are writing. A lot has happened in recent days, so this seems like a good way to ease into the new year.

But not everything in the coming weeks and months will be about politics. Rather, I’m planning a mixture of posts about politics and history mixed with others on travel, books, ideas, and more. I hope you’ll stick around and continue reading.

But today, it’s about January 6th, Jimmy Carter, and the California wildfires.

January 6th

The big political event of the first week of the year was January 6th. In the past, this was rarely a day that anyone other than political junkies cared about. But now it’s an actual event. A few days ago, the results of the 2024 presidential contest were certified by Congress. And given that it was also the four-year anniversary of the attempted insurrection during the 2020 election, many people were watching.

I personally found January 6th this year to be a weird day, with an odd mixture of emotions. On the one hand, I was gratified the certification proceeded smoothly and that democracy worked the way it was meant to work. But I was also disturbed to remember the events of four years ago and to realize that the president who tried to violently overturn the results of a democratic election was being returned to power and therefore essentially paid no price for an attempted insurrection.

It was also a strange juxtaposition to see Kamala Harris presiding over the counting of electoral votes while the results were cheered by some of the same Senators and Representatives who vehemently objected to the Biden-Harris election four years ago and who never acknowledged that administration as legitimate. It’s hard to imagine the scene this year would have played out quite as smoothly if Donald Trump had lost the 2024 vote.

Former GOP Vice President Mike Pence, for his part, commended Harris for her role. “I welcome the return of order and civility to these historic proceedings,” Pence wrote, adding that it was “particularly admirable that Vice President Harris would preside over the certification of a presidential election that she lost.”

I have no doubt that Democrats did what they should have done in certifying the vote without objections. If they’d protested what was a legitimate vote it would have inflicted lasting damage on U.S. democracy, as it would have meant that each major party in successive elections had chosen to dispute the results of an election it lost.

As I thought about the day, though, it struck me that we won’t really know the meaning of January 6th, nor the future of American democracy, for at least four more years.

For starters, Trump has said he plans to pardon the January 6th insurrectionists, and suggested that Congressional members of the January 6th Committee are actually the ones who belong in jail. Which, if it were to happen, would be a bizarre inversion of events. Those who attacked police officers and the Capitol in an effort to stop a presidential election would be freed, while members of Congress who investigated an attack on democracy would be prosecuted.

So I don’t know how the next four years will play out. How will the history of January 6th ultimately be written?

Perhaps more importantly, we may not know the meaning of January 6th until Republicans lose another presidential election. If, after the GOP’s next loss, party members accept the results then we may be able to put aside the past few years as an aberration in American history, like other periods of intense discord. But if the GOP in 2028 or 2032 or whenever refuses once more to accept the results of an election it loses, well, then the future of democracy will be more precarious than any of us would like to believe right now.

(For anyone interested in reading more, I’ve collected at the bottom of this post a few links to other thoughts on January 6th from a variety of individuals.)

Jimmy Carter

Former president Jimmy Carter was laid to rest yesterday in Plains, Georgia after a funeral at Washington National Cathedral.

I’ve posted about Carter a couple of times, once recounting an experience visiting his boyhood home and another on a book he’d written with stories of Christmas memories from Plains. So I won’t make this long, except to say that whatever you think of Carter as a president, he was certainly an extraordinary human being.

My favorite part of yesterday’s service was the eulogy delivered by the former president’s grandson, Jason Carter. It was both touching and funny. If you have a few minutes, check it out.

California wildfires and the politics of disasters

The other big story this week is the tragedy taking place in southern California. The devastation caused by the recent bout of wildfires has been described as apocalyptic. As I write this, about 10,000 (!) homes and businesses have been lost to the fires and 180,000 people are under evacuation orders. Entire neighborhoods have been reduced to ash.

Just look at this photo posted by women’s soccer player Ali Riley, with the caption: “This was our home. How is this real. It can’t be real.” Blocks and blocks of homes, all gone.

I have numerous friends who live in the area, and while they’re all safe many of them know someone who has lost their home. Or their workplace, or their church. Some are hosting friends who’ve been evacuated. All of them have their own evacuation plans and have been living on the edge, sometimes without sleep, waiting for an unwanted piece of news that a fire has broken out nearby and they need to leave. As one LA Times columnist put it, locals are living through “a collective trauma that will change hearts and landscapes for generations.”

There are several other threads to this story, aside from the tragic loss of homes and communities.

1. The impact of climate change. Climate change didn’t cause the wildfires. These wildfires are as much a fact of life in southern California as are hurricanes in Florida or tornadoes in Oklahoma. They were spread this week by a Santa Ana windstorm that sent gusts of up to 100 mph tearing through the area. Without that windstorm, the fires would never have turned into this disaster.

Unfortunately, the fires and the windstorm happened after a hotter than normal summer and a drought that saw the region receive only 0.16 inches of rain in the past eight months. So just as climate change is warming the ocean and creating conditions for more and stronger hurricanes, so did the unusually hot and dry conditions provide more fuel for the fires that were then driven by the Santa Ana winds.

So yeah, it was pretty much a perfect storm of conditions, with both natural and climate change-induced causes as contributing factors.

2. The politics of disaster. Neighboring states have sent firefighters to help battle the fires. Canada sent equipment and crews. The Biden administration is providing aid. FEMA is involved. This is what happens after a natural disaster. People band together to help those in need.

But then you have Donald Trump, Elon Musk and the MAGA crew, who’ve once more taken to the airwaves to cast aspersions and blame. They’re blaming Joe Biden for the fires. And Gavin Newsom. (Or, “Biden/Newscum,” as Trump put it.) And the female Los Angeles fire chief. And DEI policies. And wokeism.

Whatever. It’s the same old, same old. A storm of misinformation, just as with Hurricane Helene. Just as with the Haitian immigrants in Ohio. It’s exhausting. If you care, CNN has a good fact check of the reality behind many of the false charges being thrown around.

Although, as Axios wrote this morning, fact-checking itself “suddenly looks quaint, inadequate and practically irrelevant” in this political environment. “We no longer need fact-checkers. We need reality-checkers.”

And the reality is that this is a complex situation.

• Could forest management be done better? Sure. But California has a mix of state and federal lands that make this is a challenging issue for multiple levels of government.

• Could people and communities in California be better prepared for the fires that they know are a risk? Yes. And so could people and communities in places like Florida that are ravaged by hurricanes.

• Should families rethink the wisdom of living in areas at high risk for a natural disaster? Maybe. And perhaps they will once more insurance companies pull out of the market. But it’s not just celebrities who live here, after all. These are communities of teachers and firefighters and small business owners. Some families have lived in the area for generations. It’s not such an easy thing to simply relocate.

These disasters are natural, but they’re being exacerbated by climate change. This one hit California, but other disasters affect red states. Any solutions that exist will require big thinking and cooperation across federal, state, and local governments, with buy-in from both major political parties. But instead of discussing the magnitude of the challenge, we’re left to sift through nasty right wing social media memes (again) and trash talk from the president-elect. Trump even found a way to insult Canada.

This happened right after Canada announced assistance in the form of water planes and firefighting crews. The same help we’d typically provide to them. “To our American neighbours: Canada’s here to help,” said Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Trump’s response? “We don’t need anything that they have.”

I mean, why? What’s the point?

3. So it makes me wonder: Why are disasters now so politicized? Seriously, how did we get to this point in our politics, where disasters no longer bring Americans together emotionally but instead are politicized? It wasn’t always this way.

Greg Sargent just had a podcast with historian Nicole Hemmer to discuss this very issue. Hemmer suggested the politicization is due to a combination of factors, some of it a media environment that over the past few decades has evolved to now favor “outrage and negative emotion.” But also, not surprisingly, there is the impact of Trump himself, who is “constantly seeking ways to be in the headlines” and has a natural tendency to turn everything into a fight. Said Hemmer:

“It definitely is the case that this is something Trump does, right? He takes these moments, moments that used to be a time when people began to come together a little bit, at least in that period of immediate disaster when there’s shock and horror ...

There’s something substantially different about entering that moment and saying, Actually, the person responsible for your problems are my political enemies, and instead of focusing on rebuilding, you should focus on hating them … There’s no space for a story of hope or renewal to emerge. It’s all just awfulness and destruction.”

Other reflections on January 6th

Finally, if you’re interested, here are links to some reflections from a few other individuals with varying connections to January 6th:

• “I Was Nearly Killed on Jan. 6th. Four Years Later, I Feel Betrayed All Over Again.” - Aquilino Gonell, Capitol Hill police officer.

• “January 6th Was a Success” - Bill Kristol in The Bulwark.

• “What Americans Should Remember About Jan. 6” - Joe Biden in the Washington Post.

• “Notes for Sentencing” - U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, a Ronald Reagan appointee, after presiding over a January 6th trial:

On January 6, 2021, an angry mob of rioters invaded and occupied the United States Capitol, intending to interrupt the certification of the 2020 presidential election results and thwart the peaceful transfer of power that is the centerpiece of our Constitution and the cornerstone of our republican legacy … In some cases, they engaged in pitched combat with the officers defending the Capitol, striking them with fists, poles, crutches, stolen batons and riot shields, and hurling objects of all sorts at them …

They told the world that the election was stolen, a claim for which no evidence has ever emerged. They told the world that they were there to put a stop to the transfer of power, even if that meant ransacking, emptying, and desecrating our country’s most hallowed sites …

Some have claimed that the Capitol Rioters were merely engaged in political speech, activity protected by the First Amendment … This is plainly not right, and rests on a groundless bastardization of the First Amendment. That Amendment protects certain core American liberties: the freedom of conscience, speech, and peaceable assembly, among others. A person cannot be prosecuted for the exercise of these rights.

No doubt, many of the rioters were motivated by sincere beliefs which they voiced before, during, and after the riot. Had they chosen to express those beliefs through peaceful speech and assembly, their conduct would have been protected. Instead, they chose to trespass on restricted grounds, destroy public property, assault law enforcement officers, and attempt to subvert the will of an electoral majority. Conduct such as this is lightyears outside the aegis of the First Amendment.

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Well, here we go into 2025. Let’s see what the coming year has in store for us. One thing we can almost surely count on is that it’s going to be a wild ride. I’ll see you along the way. Next week I’ll resume my normal schedule of a few posts per week.