From the Civil War to my own childhood in Louisiana in the 1950s and 1960s, to the attack on our Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, one thing is clear: MAGA politics does not confine itself to the voting booth. It escalates quickly to unjustifiable political violence.
As a boy, I had to wake up early, take a bus across the parish, and not get home to study until 4:30 p.m. because I couldn’t go to school a mile from our farm. It was for whites only. This wasn’t in a foreign country or sometime hundreds of years ago; this was my childhood, right here in the United States of America.
That was decades ago and in the Deep South. But to paraphrase former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu from an organizing call for Vice President Kamala Harris in late July, under former President Donald Trump, we’re now witnessing the worst of MAGA enter the political mainstream.
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We already know that Trump will stop at nothing to gain and keep power. To him and to his followers, even violence is justified if it means getting their way. The world watched in horror as they stormed the Capitol. Now, no matter the results this November, we all must be prepared to withstand additional acts of violence by former Trump and his followers following the 2024 Election.
In the United States, we look back on the men who signed the Declaration of Independence and the countless souls who fought for freedom as patriots who died for their country. Technically, they were engaged in hostilities, but it was not violence for the sake of violence, nor was it for personal gain. Theirs was the fight to create a government of the people, for the people.
Since then, unfortunately, there have always been people in our society who have misunderstood the meaning of our revolution and our rights and responsibilities as citizens. During the Civil War, secessionists believed they had the right to wage war against their country, arguing that Washington was oppressing them just as the British Crown had once oppressed the colonists.
In the past three years, there have been 1,300 prosecutions arising from the attack of Jan. 6. The great irony is that all the twisted legal defenses the insurrectionists raise to excuse their criminal conduct come from the very Constitution they betrayed that day.
Meanwhile, the leader of this MAGA movement has escaped justice at almost every turn. He is a convicted felon, but those state charges came out of his fraudulent businesses in New York, not his unprecedented assault on American democracy. His followers stay loyal to him despite his criminality because they see him as their last hope to keep political power exclusively in their hands.
Their arguments were nonsense, and their true cause was never justified. Powerful Southern men didn’t want to lose their plantations nor the humans they held for free labor, and from whom they grew rich. That’s why they took up arms. They revolted against their country not to advance the common good, but to preserve their own narrow personal interests.
Today, we are drowning in disinformation and conspiracy theories that have Americans fighting each other over long settled facts. Like the sad souls who wore gray uniforms in the Civil War, followers of the former president are woefully misinformed. They aren’t defending their rights. They’re undermining our democracy to avoid sharing it with people of color.
Nov. 5 will be a historic day. Once again, America will face a familiar choice. Either our nation will elect the first woman to the highest office in the land, or we will give away our power to a man who has pledged to destroy our constitutional order.
American democracy belongs to us all, and it is our shared responsibility to defend it, no matter the violent threats or acts of the former president’s most extreme followers. Democracy, once lost, is nearly impossible to get back.
LTG. Russel L. Honoré (Ret.) is a former U.S. Army commander who led Task Force Katrina following the devastation of New Orleans. He was tasked with leading the review of Capitol security following the January 6, 2021 insurrection.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
