Feb 21, 2021 4 min read

As crisis gripped Washington in the early days of the Cold War, an aide to Secretary of State George C. Marshall asked how he managed to remain calm. “I’ve seen worse,” Marshall answered.

Indeed he had. As Army chief of staff before and during World War II and then at the State Department, Marshall faced a series of crises, any one of which threatened to short-circuit the America experiment in self-government.

It would be interesting to divine Marshall’s reaction to today’s crisis. This one is purely homegrown. That Americans might storm the Capitol in an attempt to upend a presidential election, one can reasonable assume, never crossed Marshall’s ever agile mind.

Questions concerning the domestic underpinnings of democracy were not matters Marshall or his contemporaries ever had to seriously wrestle with.

It would be nice, in the circumstance we find ourselves in, to maintain a Marshall-like equilibrium. However, many of us are finding that remaining “calm” is not possible – not, for instance, when we hear from characters like Dave Ball, the Republican party chairman in Washington County.

Angry and confused because Sen. Pat Toomey joined six other GOP senators in voting to convict former president Donald Trump of inciting insurrection, Ball told KDKA-TV, “We did not send (Toomey to the Senate) to vote his conscience. We did not send him there to do the right thing, or whatever he said he was doing.

“We sent him there to represent us.”

By “us,” Ball meant the Republicans of Washington County and the state of Pennsylvania.

One can’t fault Ball for being a partisan. He is, after all, a party chairman. But even party leaders should recognize that some things are beyond the scope of narrow political considerations.

If only Ball were alone. He is not. Toomey has been condemned by party leaders across the state, from Lawrence to York counties. The Fayette County GOP took to Facebook to take a shot at Toomey, a conservative and fiscal hawk from the Lehigh Valley who was first elected to the Senate in 2010.

In one Facebook posting, the local party likened Toomey to Benedict Arnold, the American general who sold out to the British during the Revolution.

“The party’s sick right now,” said Congressman Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, who has been critical of other Republicans for abandoning this fundamental of democracy: losers accept defeat and leave office peacefully.

For his troubles, Kinzinger was attacked by members of his own family.

A cousin posted a letter online which declared she and others felt the congressman had damaged the family name by joining “the devil’s army” of Democrats in the impeachment vote against Trump.

“Oh my, what a disappointment you are…. You are going against your Christian principles.”

Kinzinger cousin Karen Otto told the New York Times that she “wanted Adam to be shunned.”

The congressman has said he wants to return the Republican party to an “idealized version” of its self.

When the Republic was being formed, Alexander Hamilton, in the Federalist Papers, declared, “The judgments of many men must unite in the work.”

Many men and women Republicans today are not uniting in the work of sustaining democracy.

Is there a better way to frame the siege of the Capitol, the rejection of Trump malfeasance, the ex-president’s continued grip on the imagination of the party, and, now, the grassroots GOP revolt against representative government and democratic politics?

Toomey did his duty, as did the six other Republican senators who voted to hold Trump to account. Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell added his voice if not his vote; his bottom line position: for orchestrating “an intensifying crescendo of conspiracy theories” that resulted in the sacking of the Capitol, Trump left himself fully exposed to criminal charges and civil litigation.

In the midst of crisis, George Marshall remained calm. He had seen worse. However, it’s not at all clear that this isn’t the most fraught crisis since the Civil War, superseding even World War II.

What’s at stake is incalculable: the country’s democratic future.

Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. His latest book, “JFK Rising,” is available on Amazon. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.