Speaking Thursday about the potential that American might see more events on par with Wednesday’s storming of the Capitol building by pro-Trump extremists in the future, Rosa Brooks warned on Boston Public Radio that “anyone who thinks it couldn’t happen here is wrong.”
Brooks is a former Pentagon official in the Obama administration and co-founder of the Transition Integrity Project. Over the summer, that group, comprised of bipartisan constitutional law experts and political insiders, gamed out various potential outcomes of November’s presidential election. Using precedent as their guide, they established a series of most-likely responses from both candidates to each possible election result. One of those determinations found that, should he lose, President Donald Trump would deny and resist concession and encourage resistance from his base of fervent supporters.
Following Wednesday’s events, Brooks said she was "simultaneously unsurprised and still shocked” by everything that unfolded. She even went as far as to say it was "in some ways the best-case scenario” that the ensuing violence was unsuccessful in preventing Congress from certificating the Electoral College votes.
"I think our hope had been by sounding those warning bells early on, that people would take enough actions to prevent things from ever getting this bad,” she said. “I think that the fact that we ended up where we are suggests deep, collective failures of imagination, of political will [and] of courage.”
Moving forward, Brooks said it’s still to be seen whether American leaders will recognize the fragility of our country's legal structure and encouraged a full embrace of the dedication and vigilance necessary to protect peace, stability and progress in the U.S.
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“If the political will exists to make some of the needed reforms to our presidential election systems in Congress ... that is indicative of a powerful surge in concern about the underlying norms,” she said. "I think if there’s not enough political will to make any of those legal reforms, that tells us that we don’t have a commitment to the underlying norms — and that’s my fear, frankly.”
Brooks cautioned listeners from ever assuming that anti-democratic, worst-case scenarios could never happen in America.
"Every horrific thing that has ever happened anywhere could happen here," she said. "I hope it won’t — it’s our job, collectively, to make sure it doesn’t. But it could, and I think unless we proceed on that premise, that democracy doesn’t sustain itself, that a culture of nonviolence and lawfulness does not sustain itself, that it takes hard work all the time from every single person to sustain it … then we increase the likelihood that things fall apart."
Rosa Brooks is a former Pentagon official in the Obama administration and a professor of law and policy at Georgetown Law. Her forthcoming book is " Tangled Up In Blue: Policing The American City."
