They sound very different from the former president’s toadies, who lavish him with absurd praises. But they are part of the same project.

The collapse of Republican resolve in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election on January 6, 2021, and Trump’s continued designs on power have together ensured that conservatives find it necessary to downplay or dismiss those events as much less than what they were: an assault on American democracy.

This much was predictable. In the immediate aftermath of the attack, my colleague David A. Graham anticipated that the events of January 6 would be “memory-holed,” and the Republican Party’s continued dependence on Trump made that inevitable. The task of justifying or minimizing January 6 became more urgent once courts began to consider whether Trump’s actions that day disqualify him from seeking reelection under the Fourteenth Amendment, which bars those who have betrayed an oath of office by engaging in “rebellion or insurrection” from holding office again.

Rationalizing Trump’s actions demands rewriting both history and the English language. Committed Trumpists are happy to warp reality to fit whatever distortions their leader demands. Yet distinct from the Trump sycophants are the Trump enablers, both witting and unwitting, more serious figures who eschew such crude gestures of devotion in favor of cautious minimizations that obfuscate the truth rather than openly contradict it. There are all too many serious writers willing to oblige, intelligent people making clever arguments that amount to sophistry.

Earlier this month, the conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat endorsed the liberal writer Jonathan Chait’s definition of insurrection as an attempt to “seize and hold the Capitol” or “declare a breakaway republic.” After I pointed out that this limited definition would exclude most insurrections in American history, Douthat tries a little historical research to distinguish the Whiskey Rebellion from the assault on the Capitol by insisting that the Whiskey Rebels’ use of “a six-striped flag representing claimed independence for five Pennsylvania counties” amounted to proof of the existence of an “incipient political formation in those western counties opposed to the authority of the federal government and the Constitution.”

Adam Serwer: Who’s afraid of calling Donald Trump an insurrectionist?

This is a very thin reed for Douthat to hang his claim on, for a number of reasons. For one, as the historian William Hogeland notes in The Whiskey Rebellion, the six-striped flag “is unlikely to have been a flag of the rebellion—and might have been a regimental flag of the suppressing federal army.” The Whiskey Rebels made no declaration of secession, because the odd mix of radicals and moderates never developed a clear political program beyond violent opposition to the whiskey tax. It is strange for Douthat to insist on the importance of overt seditious declarations to the definition of insurrection and then, in his own example, fail to provide one. But at any rate, this definition continues to exclude many of the most famous insurrections in American history, from Fries’s Rebellion to John Brown’s seizure of Harpers Ferry.

In this response, Douthat does not mention his prior insistence that an insurrection is defined by the declaration of a “breakaway republic” or an attempt to “seize and hold the Capitol.” Rather, he offers a new one: “What transforms a political event from a violent riot or lawless mob (which Jan. 6 plainly was) to a genuinely insurrectionary event is the........

© The Atlantic