The chronology is so symbolically perfect that it borders on the eerie. Next week, we will commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Watergate break-in. And this Thursday night marks the start of the House Select Committee public hearings on the Jan. 6 insurrection — a chilling event that displaced Watergate as the gravest threat to American democracy since the Civil War. …
Armchair experts argue that Americans no longer have the attention span to watch any type of protracted congressional hearings. Also, at a time of hyperpartisanship, there are supposedly too few voters in the middle whose voting behavior might be influenced by the hearings. In short, the widespread feeling is that the era when the 1973 Watergate hearings could galvanize the nation has come and gone. Instead, the upcoming hearings will be just another blip in a tumultuous news environment that has hurtled from Ukraine to Roe v. Wade to inflation to Uvalde.
The problem with these glib judgments is that there is literally nothing in modern political history that compares to the Jan. 6 hearings. Never has a congressional committee spent months investigating what was, in effect, an attempted coup to overturn a valid election. CONTINUED
Walter Shapiro, Roll Call
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