Tragedy and comedy, outrage and reconciliation: exploring the insurrection of January 6, 2021, through Burkean frames

ABSTRACT

In this article, I rhetorically analyze the Final Report by the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6^th Attack on the United States Capitol, released in January 2023, as a jumping off point to explore possible limitations of and opportunities for rhetorical responses to political crises in the wider U.S. public discourse. In contrast to the Report’s tragic centering of Trump as agent, I argue that using a comic frame in the wider political discourse could help bring the scene, or the state of democracy, to a place of interrogation, and allow for a broader accounting of agents and agency, as well as their relationships to one another. Rather than deny an ultimate reckoning of a tragic situation, this article examines the importance of comic processing in service of elevated democratic discourse. By providing a space to reinterpret and resituate the pentadic motives underlying an act of democratic crisis like the insurrection, a comic frame’s pentadic vision can potentially open up new and transformative ways of understanding citizens’ public selves, their political relationships, and democracy, while still allowing for the expression of warrantable outrage.

KEYWORDS:

• Pentad
• tragic fame
• comic frame
• January 6

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. An estimated 250 law enforcement officers and United States Capitol Police were injured, and 5 police officers died in the days following the insurrection (Report, p. 711). During the insurrection, 4 rioters also died (Cameron, 2022).

2. Earlier, in February 2021, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi attempted to form what came to be known as the “January 6^th Commission” or The National Commission to Investigate the January 6^th Attack on the United States Capitol Complex, which was passed by the House with a Democratic majority but filibustered in the Senate.

3. “Report” will be used in all future references.

4. Despite what it sounds like, the comic frame does not have to be humorous (Christiansen and Hanson, 1996; Carlson, 1986; Powell, 1995).

5. For example, in his analysis of the television show The Office, Biebel (2010) argues that the comic lens is helpful because it allows for viewers to go beyond looking at the characters as fools to investigate the wider economic and political circumstances impacting a white-collar office setting.

6. Scholars have used this framework to analyze everything from campaign rhetoric (Kelley, 1987), to presidential rhetoric (Birdsell, 1987) to the obesity pandemic (Peterson, 2018) to policy debates (Hogan & Rood, 2015; Smith & Hollihan, 2014).

7. Ballot counting took longer than usual for the 2020 Election because of the unprecedented number of mail-in ballots due to the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic and people wanting to avoid in-person voting (Deliso, 2020; Vesoulis, 2020). Democrats were more likely to use absentee voting (Pew Research Center, 2020), and more Biden votes were counted after Election Night; accordingly, even though it appeared Trump was in the lead in certain states, after all the mail-in ballots were legally counted, Biden emerged as the clear winner.

8. Only one case out of 62 resulted in victory for Trump. See Wheeler (2021) for a more detailed and comprehensive overview of the cases.

9. The eight chapters are followed by a chapter on Recommendations and four Appendices: “Government Agency Preparation For and Response to January 6^th,” “DC National Guard Preparation for and Response to January 6^th,” “The Big Rip-Off: Follow the Money,” and “Malign Foreign Influence.”

10. The Report dedicates an entire chapter to “The Big Lie,” one that was “premeditated” (p. 196) and “actively propagated” (p. 197) and “actively promoted conspiracy theories and false election fraud claims even after being informed they were baseless” (p. 213) so that Trump “supporters latched onto these false claims” (p. 203).

11. Chapter 7 of the Report (pp. 577–634), “187 Minutes of Dereliction,” contains an entire section more closely outlining “The President’s Anger When He Could Not March to the Capitol” (Section 7.3, pp. 587–592). It concludes, “There is no question from all the evidence that President Trump did have that intent” (p.75).

12. Moreover, after twenty-five pages of outlining the chaos that ensued on January 6^th with regard to a lack of coordination between agencies and actors regarding the deployment of the national guard, the Report concludes that it was a “byproduct” of necessary processes: “While the delay seems unnecessary and unacceptable, it was the byproduct of military processes, institutional caution, and a revised deployment approval process” (p. 749).

13. This aligns with political psychology research which has clearly demonstrated that facts do not usually change people’s beliefs, which are attached to deeply held cognitive biases (Flynn et al., 2017; Nyhan et al., 2020).

14. It is important to note that two of the nine members on the Select Committee were Republicans, so the use of the label “Democrats” is used generally here to and throughout the paper to categorize, understanding that the party is not a monolithic group.

15. Take, for example, when Trump’s legal counsel Rudolph Giuliani booked and held a press conference to outline legal challenges to ballot-counting at an actual warehouse, Four Seasons Total Landscaping, located between a sex shop and a crematorium, instead of the Four Seasons Philadelphia Hotel. It can be seen as quite comic not just because of the exposure but because of its representativeness of the common political ploys that make up our democratic scene.

16. See also Mettler et al. (2022).

17. The Report does note that the insurrectionists sometimes had their own ideas, like the Oath Keepers being willing to invoke the Insurrection Act even if President Trump did not do it himself (p. 514), but it was still connected to the rhetorical agency of Trump’s election fraud lies.

18. A 2015 Pew Opinion Poll found that although the least financially secure people preferred Democrats, almost just as many had no preference, and most did not vote, which disproportionately affects Democratic support.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Meg H. Kunde

Meg H. Kunde is an associate professor at Augustana College in Rock Island, IL. She teaches political communication and rhetoric courses. Her research focuses on how political actors and political parties use texts, visual images, symbols and speech to enter into both formal and informal agreements with constituents and how this influences political discourse, relationships, and policymaking. This research would not have been possible without the sabbatical leave provided by Augustana College, for which the author is very grateful. The author can be contacted at [email protected].