Thread by @cjcmichel

NEW: A new president enters the White House following a failed, impeached president, amidst unprecedented racial reckoning, and battling white revanchists bent on insurrection.

Here's what Ulysses S. Grant can teach Joe Biden: politico.com/news/magazine/…

The events earlier this month were hardly the first insurrection in U.S. history, and there's a direct through-line between the white terror-backed examples from Reconstruction and the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol:

The overlap between the pro-Trump insurrection and the insurrections during Reconstruction are impossible to miss: "The Red Shirts of South Carolina have been replaced with the Red Hats of MAGA."

And the "Lost Cause" is becoming the "Trump Lost Cause."

politico.com/news/magazine/…

What was Grant's response to insurrection(s) across the South? First, the creation of the DOJ—and appointing the right people to head it.

As AG Akerman said, the white supremacist insurrectionists were leading “war, and cannot be effectively crushed on any other theory.”

And second, Grant brought the full weight of the federal government down on the heads of the white insurrectionists:

"Grant’s willingness to bring the full legal and military authority of the government to bear [broke] the Klan’s back and produced a dramatic decline in violence"

Yet Grant's successes in crushing insurrectionists also contained the seeds of failure:

Grant "realized that however welcome enforcement of Reconstruction would be in the short term, in the long term it was politically suicidal, and no longer enjoyed support of white Americans."

So what can Grant teach Biden? Two things.

1. Use the full weight of the federal government, and all—all—resources available. "There are so many more federal laws that can be used now... there are any number of laws on the books now that theoretically could be used."

2. Biden and others must make clear that there's no quarter for insurrectionists in the American body politic.

'The quicker you say, ‘There’s a line you can’t cross,’ the better... ‘And if you do, we’ll come down on you like you won’t believe.’”

And the lessons of successfully—or unsuccessfully—putting down American insurrectionists can't be implemented soon enough.

As @BrooksDSimpson said, "The stakes are actually bigger this time than during Reconstruction."

politico.com/news/magazine/…

"You see a common pattern in the Capitol insurrectionists. They are mainly middle-class to upper-middle-class whites who are worried that, as social changes occur around them, they will see a decline in their status in the future.”

Coverage of the American right circa 2009-11 has aged horribly:

—The Tea Party? Morphed into ethno-nationalist anti-democratic MAGA base
—Militias? Morphed into ethno-nationalist anti-democratic shock troops
—The guy leading the birther movement? Incited an insurrection