Law's Tacit Dimension: Audiovisual Proof of Incitement in the Impeachment Trial of Donald J. Trump.

The second impeachment trial of Donald J. Trump provides a useful test case for exploring law's tacit dimension – a domain in which thinking in pictures and sounds remains largely hidden (or disguised) and thus protected from the deliberative work of critical reason. The impeachment team's failure to refer to the January 6 rally video suggests an insufficient understanding of how, and with what predictable impact, Trump's video helped to incite his supporters to violent insurrection at the nation's capital. Lawyers, judges, and lay jurors alike can ill-afford to ignore the implications of such a massive blind spot when it comes to the strategic composition and critical assessment of such a pervasive form of communication in contemporary society. If trial lawyers cannot identify how jurors are being tacitly persuaded on the screen, they will be unable to properly test the sounds and images their opponents rely on in court. This is how the adversarial quest for truth and justice breaks down. As spectacle and critical reason contend for dominance in late modern culture an insistent question echoes: will the craft of reason overcome the wild impulses of spectacle in our time? The fate of liberal democracy hinges on our response. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]