The Whiskey Rebellion is a slightly different case, since it was a more diffuse phenomenon, not a single political event, and some of its happenings were more mob-like and thus more like Jan. 6. But we remember it as a “rebellion” precisely because it grew into something more than just the tarring and feathering of tax collectors. Its escalation, in fact, resembles the American Revolution (not a surprise given the historical context) in its movement from spontaneous protests to committees of correspondence to conventions to a militia revolt against federal authority, culminating in the formation of a rough-and-ready army that marched on Pittsburgh, to quote from a 2004 paper, “under a six-striped flag representing claimed independence for five Pennsylvania counties (the four ‘inflamed’ counties plus Bedford, just to the east) and a contiguous county in Virginia (Ohio County).”
That the subsequent show of force by the federal government collapsed this rebellion without a pitched battle doesn’t change the fact that there was, for a period of time, an incipient political formation in those western counties opposed to the authority of the federal government and the Constitution. That, again, is not what happened on Jan. 6. The entire John Eastman fantasy was that Trump could get away with retaining the White House within the parameters of constitutionally delegated powers, using the supposed authority of Mike Pence to leverage an 1876-style legislative endgame for a disputed election. And when that implausible hope dissolved, the angry mob mostly believed itself to be standing up for constitutional government against the purported chicanery of Biden’s allegedly fraud-enabled victory. The rioter carrying a Confederate flag was invoking past insurrection, yes, but he was not practicing it in the way the Whiskey rebels clearly did.
Serwer would doubtless respond that saying Trump sought to retain power under the Constitution, not as a post-constitutional dictator, is a sanitized version of what he did and aimed to do, since his strategy involved abusing the powers of the presidency to induce the cooperation from state officials that his scheme required to succeed.
But one can abuse the powers of the presidency for one’s own political benefit without it being an insurrection or rebellion under the terms of the 14th Amendment. Woodrow Wilson engineered legislation that led to the imprisonment of a political rival; that was wicked and abusive, but it was not insurrection. Richard Nixon covered up an election-year criminal conspiracy against the Democratic Party; that was abusive, but it was not an insurrection. Trump’s scheme to manufacture supposed proof of voter fraud, had it found many more cooperators among Republicans, would have been worse — but “worse than Watergate” is not in the text of the 14th Amendment.
Or imagine a world where Trump himself did what he accused Biden and the Democrats of doing and organized a ballot-box-stuffing operation in key swing states that made him the elected president by the narrowest of margins. (Basically, a version of what Lyndon Johnson and the Daley machine were accused of doing in the 1960 election to tip Texas and Illinois to the Democrats, or what some conspiracy-minded liberals claimed happened with Ohio voting machines in 2004.) Imagine that it worked — and that Democrats had a certain amount of evidence that this occurred, but their legal challenges were unsuccessful, a last-ditch round of objections and protests failed to prevent Trump being sworn in, and dispositive proof emerged only after his second term was well begun.