Deplatforming: After the mayhem on Wednesday, the president was suspended from Twitter for 12 hours and from Facebook for at least the next two weeks, but Greg Bensinger argues in The Times that the bans should be permanent. “Jan. 6, 2021, ought to be social media’s day of reckoning,” he writes. “There is a greater calling than profits, and Mr. Zuckerberg and Twitter’s C.E.O., Jack Dorsey, must play a fundamental role in restoring truth and decency to our democracy and democracies around the world.”
The consequences for the Republican Party
Mr. Trump has hardly acted alone in his campaign to overturn the election results: At one point or another, his efforts have enjoyed the support of 14 Republicans in the Senate and a majority of Republicans in the House. After the violence on Wednesday, eight Republican senators and 139 of 211 Republican representatives, including the party leader, still voted against against certifying the election.
One of those eight senators was Ted Cruz of Texas, whose campaign sent out fund-raising messages during the attack to help support the president’s gambit. As the Times editorial board points out, Mr. Cruz has favorably invoked the precedent of the 1876 election, during which Democrats violently suppressed the Black vote and then demanded the end of Reconstruction as their price of concession, plunging the country into a new era of white supremacist terror.
“The modern Republican Party, in its systematic efforts to suppress voting, and its refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of elections that it loses, is similarly seeking to maintain its political power on the basis of disenfranchisement,” the Times editorial board writes. “Wednesday’s insurrection is evidence of an alarming willingness to pursue that goal with violence.” What should be done about it?
Form a third party: “Even if only a small group of principled, center-right lawmakers — and the business leaders who fund them — broke away and formed their own conservative coalition, they would become hugely influential in today’s closely divided Senate,” the Times columnist Tom Friedman writes. “They could be a critical swing faction helping to decide which Biden legislation passes, is moderated or fails.”
Launch financial pressure campaigns: From here on out, Osita Nwanevu argues in The New Republic, companies that support the Republican Party should be subject to boycotts. “A decision was made 10 or 11 years ago that the future of the Republican Party would rest upon delegitimizing or undermining the votes of its opponents,” he writes. “A plan was made; corporations financed it.”