Reconciliation or Reconstruction?: We Need a Social Revolution

In the wake of the right-wing storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, there were predictable calls for “healing” and “unity” to counteract the clear division and extreme polarization in U.S. society. Immediately, however, there came rejections of these appeals, with an insistence on accountability for those who helped promote and radicalize the Trump supporters who attempted to occupy the Capitol and possibly execute the Vice President and members of Congress. These diverging demands echo two rival perspectives when it comes to the MAGA movement: whether the left should seek to entreat right-wing discontents based on their more valid grievances, or accept there is an insurmountable disconnect when it comes to ideas, beliefs, and values.

The so-called “Trump insurrection” has, for many, validated the latter argument. While President Donald Trump undeniably used a rally to encourage his followers to overturn the “stolen” 2020 election, the common threads uniting the mob that raided the Capitol are adherence to irrational, bogus philosophies: white supremacy, the anti-Semitic “QAnon” conspiracy theory, widespread voter fraud that never took place, etc. A movement that once proclaimed “Blue Lives Matter” in opposition to “Black Lives Matter” had no problem killing one Capitol Police officer and injuring several others. One of the more iconic figures to emerge on January 6 was the “QAnon shaman,” a shirtless man tattooed in white supremacist iconography, wearing an animal skin headdress adorned with horns. To find common ground with those individuals who invaded the Capitol is too tall an order for many Americans, many of whom have come to resent the respectability afforded to deplorable, dangerous ideas in our society.

Yet the argument that leftists should have empathy for right-wingers persists, both among centrists as well as more radical voices. Pete Buttigieg during the Democratic primary blamed Trump’s electoral success on working class communities left behind by globalization; Noam Chomsky repeatedly said leftists should seek to organize members of the Tea Party and Trump’s base, not mock them. According to this line of thinking, Trump voters are not so much motivated by racism, sexism, or any other kind of social chauvinism, but by economic anxiety. If Trump, FOX News, or Glenn Beck have induced these people to rally around anti-immigration or anti-government sentiment, then that represents a failure by the U.S. left to offer them the “correct” alternatives to those ideas.

Several studies have demonstrated, however, that those areas of the U.S. that flipped most dramatically from supporting to Obama to Trump correlated not with low income or high unemployment rates but with racial make-up. Trump’s hate-mongering against Mexican and Muslim migrants resonated with so many Americans not because of “economic anxiety” but due to fears of a more diverse and multicultural culture, one that acknowledges and rebukes white supremacy in U.S. history, disdains the repression of women and LGBTQ+ people, and wants to erode the outsized influence of the economic elite in our politics. In response to these shifting attitudes and principles, conservatives have coalesced around increasingly extreme attempts to retain a whitewashed and purely nostalgic view of the U.S., our past, and our moral authority in the world. They have been conditioned to see the U.S., its role in the world, and its history in a certain way, and in the face of a growing counterculture that challenges those beliefs, they are resorting to progressively radical strategies, from rallying to the demagogic and petulant Trump to assailing the headquarters of the national legislature. With further political violence from far-right extremists likely, it appears this progression will continue.

The reality is that right-wingers are not interested in debate. Unlike an episode of The West Wing, their threat cannot be defused by decency, rule-following, and reason. Their ideological programming goes deeper than FOX News; numerous institutions, from the family unit to the U.S. education system to popular entertainment, have all planted and reinforced a dogma that validates and praises the status quo. White mothers teach their children to be suspicious in Black neighborhoods. Movies and television portray women largely as supporting characters to help the leading man get to where he needs to be. Teachers teach their students that, because liberalism and capitalism “won” in the 20th century, our political system cannot be improved upon and our economic system is the one most conducive to human nature. Prior to the glut of new scholarship coming from Eric Foner and Henry Louis Gates, the Reconstruction era in U.S. history was depicted as government overreach instead of an attempt at a “second founding.” To this day, the Founding Fathers are typically presented as enlightened, benevolent demigods who created an infallible Constitution rather than a collection of elite mostly slave-owning oligarchs explicitly dedicated to protecting “the opulent minority” from the servile masses that constituted the actual majority. As a growing number of Americans realize that the conservative romantic ideal of the U.S. never existed, particularly among young Americans, the fervor with which conservatives have sought to defend this non-existent conception of an infallible, solely glorious vision of the U.S. (and, to an extent, the whole nationalist-capitalist-white male chauvinist project that emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries) has increased exponentially, to the extent of open violence in the streets.

Unfortunately, many Americans still refuse to believe mainstream conservatism is aligning itself with this hardcore reactionary tendency, even though poll after poll shows a significant number of Republicans believe President-elect Joe Biden’s election was “illegitimate” or do not accept Trump’s culpability in inciting the January 6 revolt. These are mostly the same Americans who witnessed said revolt and professed complete shock and surprise, rather than seeing it as the logical evolution of the emboldening of right-wing extremism in Michigan, D.C., and elsewhere. The “we are better than this” crowd clings to the fantasy that Biden’s inauguration will magically turn the U.S. back to “normal,” a comfortable and prosperous nation where white-collar professionals can brunch in peace. The truth is the Biden administration will not resolve systemic racism against people of color among law enforcement, the staggering inequality between the haves and the have-nots worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic, or any other of our compounding crises. The architects of U.S. policy remain an unaccountable coterie of elites who take their cues from billionaires. The democratic deficit between what a majority of people want (such as universal health care) and what we will actually get will continue to widen. The surge in populism is a genie not returning to the bottle.

If there is reason to hope, it lies in the very limited triumphs of the aforementioned counterculture challenging the foundations of the right-wing vision of the U.S. The election of our first Black president, the nomination of a woman nominee for president, and most recently the election of our first woman of color as vice president all point to very gradual civilizing forces at play. Of course, this progress is not nearly sufficient, as the grievances expressed by Black Lives Matter, the Women’s March, Occupy Wall Street, and Standing Rock all testify; we are literally facing an existential crisis as the human race and yet decisive and bold responses are absent. The sort of far-ranging, deep structural reform required is nowhere near imminent. What we need is a social revolution, a daring overturning of the entire social order, with a new Constitution arranged along modern and progressive values, to say nothing of a new political system and economy that works for everyone, not just those at the top. This also entails a cultural struggle, a “long march through the institutions,” so that we might have a clean break with the cultural hegemony that has produced the angry white Trump voter. Rather than seek to woo the reactionary, we must present them with an ultimatum: fix their hearts or be left behind in the very museum of half-truths and lies they worship.

Guns, Germs, & Steal: A Storm of Hate and Fear

On January 6, 2021, supporters of U.S. President Donald Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol building, breaching several layers of security and sending members of Congress scrambling for safety. The occupation of the legislative chambers only lasted for hours, but given that Trump himself had hours before encouraged those same supporters to actively overturn what he deemed an illegitimate election, it was clear that Trump had incited an insurrection against the government. In an era of intense cynicism, both the ease with which Trump’s followers took the Capitol as well as Trump’s blatant goading of their short-lived rebellion shocked the nation. For some, what was outrageous was the unexpectedness of the event; for others, it was surprising not everyone saw this coming.

Napoleon III

Karl Marx, in addition to offering history’s most salient critique of capitalism, was also a gifted historian. He coined the famous phrase “first as tragedy, then as farce” when he analyzed contemporary events in France, where Charles-Louis Bonaparte, nephew of Napoleon, was elected president and then seized absolute power in an 1851 coup. Marx contrasted the “farce” of Napoleon III to the “tragedy” of his uncle ending the French bourgeois republic in 1799. If the 1789 storming of the Bastille, the infamous prison and symbol of the cruelty of the French monarchy, was a glorious moment in the history of popular republicanism, then the storming of the U.S. Capitol in 2021 was its most inglorious. Whereas the taking of the Bastille embodied the masses using their own power to overcome autocracy, the taking of the U.S. Capitol exemplified the privileged white majority in this country seeking to overthrow democracy.

More specifically, the events of January 6, 2021 were driven by the long-standing impulse of white nationalist conservatives to maintain power in a country where they believe that power is threatened. It is this same impulse that is behind our systemic disenfranchisement of people of color through voter suppression laws, as well as the run-off election system presently in place in states like Georgia. The Trump rioters were driven by the same hate and fear that drove tens of thousands of poor whites to fight and die for a Confederacy that represented plantation oligarchs. That hate and fear will likely be the cause for, if not civil war, more political violence.

Edmund Burke

Conservatives, as defenders of the old order, have always opposed the inherent tendency of democratic government to redistribute wealth and empower the powerless.  The father of modern conservatism, Edmund Burke, opposed not just the immoral nature of the popular revolution but also its official recognition of working class people as citizens. In his 1790 Reflections on the Revolution in France, he writes:

The occupation of a hairdresser or of a working tallow-chandler cannot be a matter of honor to any person—to say nothing of a number of other more servile employments. Such descriptions of men ought not to suffer oppression from the state; but the state suffers oppression if such as they, either individually or collectively, are permitted to rule.

Burke was an ardent critic of the “tyranny of the majority,” which he called “a multiplied tyranny.” Similarly, the Founding Fathers of the U.S. were concerned about “the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority,” as James Madison put it in Federalist 10. Neither Burke nor the Founding Fathers imagined that political participation would be extended to groups outside their own; true democracy was unthinkable in their time. Nevertheless, they feared disruptions to the status quo, which for them primarily meant the steady flow of commerce. Accordingly, the political systems in both the U.K. and the U.S. are geared against radical change, with powers separated and laws subject to review and rejection. Moreover, changing the mechanics of the systems entails Herculean acts of political finesse that, in the absence of widespread sanction, are likely to fail. Thanks to these structural limitations on change (along with the state having a monopoly on coercive force), the ruling class of the U.S. and U.K. have remained ultra-wealthy, male, and Caucasian in the 21st century as they were in the 18th century. In terms of the inequality between the elites and ordinary working people, we are clearly just as stratified as ever, with the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.

There have been efforts to expand rights and freedoms to marginalized groups, the most notable in U.S. history being Reconstruction and the subsequent civil rights movement that aimed to eliminate discrimination against Black people so they could participate in politics as equal citizens. Feeling their institutional protectors had failed, poor whites in the rural U.S. took matters into their own hands, forming groups like the Ku Klux Klan and engaging in paramilitary violence against Black legislators, voters, and their allies. Civil rights activists persisted, however, at great cost. The greatest testament to their efforts was the 2008 election of the first Black U.S. president, Barack Obama. This event, more than any actual concrete policy or decision during Obama’s presidency, touched off a white backlash, an existential crisis among white conservatives being felt today. One of the three branches of government, meant to safeguard their power, was held by someone who did not share their identity, who was outside the ruling class and therefore assumed to be hostile to it. It did not matter that Obama was a political moderate and an expert on constitutional law; he was attacked as a radical progressive and potential dictator.

Obama’s presidency was not the product of any agenda; he was a largely unknown name prior to his entry into the 2008 Democratic primary. He had navigated the Chicago political machine to the state and national level, trading on the traditional tools of the politician: eloquence, charisma, vitality. Once he obtained the highest office, he quickly showed his defining trait was not his vision but his safe pair of hands, hands that would reach across the aisle to befriend far-right Republicans like Tom Coburn. When race relations became a relevant topic in the Obama administration (be it the 2009 racial profiling of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates or the 2014 Ferguson protests), Obama remained more cautious statesman than outspoken firebrand.

Yet the right-wing reaction to Obama was the election in 2016 of a man who led the charge in questioning the “Americanness” of Obama, successfully pressuring the White House to release the president’s long-form birth certificate. Trump endeared himself to far-right extremists with his racist charges against Obama, and solidified his support among them by demonizing migrants, particularly Latinx people and Muslims. When pressed to repudiate his most far-right followers, Trump has repeatedly refused to do so. Even if he is no political mastermind, Trump has understood since his first presidential campaign that his power stems from his base. Going into 2021, with the Republican Party increasingly pressuring him to concede and admit Joe Biden had won the 2020 election, Trump’s base was all he had left.

For Trump himself, the storming of the Capitol was less a calculated gambit to hold on to power and more of a tantrum, a way to lash out against his enemies but keeping his own hands clean in the process. Only after the deaths of five people and near-universal condemnation did Trump finally embrace the results of the election and declare his desire for a peaceful transition. Predictably, this has elicited calls of betrayal from his base, who remain primed for counterrevolution against an imaginary left-wing plot. They can be consoled with the fact that, despite losing Trump as their figurehead, they have gained a triumph of propaganda. While left-wing movements like Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, or Medicare for All have encountered nothing but state opposition and public apathy, far-right extremists can point to their almost bloodless takeover of the Capitol as proof their struggle need not be prolonged or difficult. The fact that people did die means these same extremists have martyrs, like Ashli Babbitt, who by virtue of her veteran status is treated with more respectability in mainstream circles than she would if she were Black, her creed Muslim, or her name Mohammed.

It appears doubtful that major institutions will repair the extreme polarization of the U.S. populace or reconcile the tensions driving our division. There is no reason to believe that the incoming Biden administration has the desire to tackle such politically thorny issues as white supremacy, systemic racism, impending climate disaster, or the failures of neoliberal capitalism. Even if such will existed, the fragile Democratic control of Congress is negated by the right-wing orientation of the Supreme Court. At a time of crisis when bold, decisive action is required, the U.S. government is hindered by the conservative bias intrinsic to its functioning. More than that, U.S. society has shown itself still unwilling to even admit the totality of crimes committed by the U.S., at home or abroad, past or present. How can we imagine instituting something like reparations or an equal rights amendment for women when a good portion of the U.S. populace rejects reparations and racism as pressing issues, or consider feminism an insidious form of social control? How can we achieve the “structural change” Senator Elizabeth Warren talks about in regards to a fairer, more just economy when so many Americans are convinced that the “horde” of non-white, non-Protestant migrants are a greater hazard to their future than heightening inequality and the boom in student debt? How can we jointly resist fascism when so many mainstream voices disdain anti-fascism?

Dozens of people who stormed the Capitol on January 6 have been arrested and will face charges. Dozens more, however, will remain unidentified and will not face penalties. This includes Trump, who is unlikely to be impeached, much less removed, in his final weeks in office. There is a tradition, followed by Obama himself, of “looking forward” instead of holding fellow elites to account, be it the bankers behind the 2008 financial crisis or the torturers in Iraq and Afghanistan. The magnitude of the crime is not relevant; the overriding message is that elites may act with impunity, without recriminations forced on them by the popular will. The optimism will remain that Trump has damaged his “brand,” that the “optics” of his followers storming the Capitol will be enough to tarnish his hopes of another presidential campaign. It may be Trump’s post facto mea culpa that actually dims those ambitions in the end.

As others have stated, the end of the Trump era may just be prologue to another chapter of right-wing populism, this one more ably led, whose policies may be more successful and more damaging. Even if another racist Caesar figure does not emerge, it seems clear that conservatives are far more likely to coalesce around a radical movement than their counterparts on the left, who are engaged in much the same bickering and infighting that has become synonymous with left-wing politics generally. What’s more, the news that among the Capitol rioters were politicians, police officers, veterans, and others drawn from the authorities demonstrates how much more institutionally entrenched the far-right is in this country, something already long-known to the victims of systemic abuse and discrimination. For all the talk of removing Trump, very few voices are calling for extensive purges of white supremacists from law enforcement or the armed forces.

The old cliché used to be that, whatever our differences, Americans would rally around a common threat. Even before the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic, the shared impact of climate change showed that, rather than bringing us together, such crises only end up politicized, driving us farther apart. How can there be appeals based on humanity when so many of us still deny the human rights of Black people, LGBT+ people, and non-Americans? No progress is possible until we acknowledge we are not moving forward but trapped in a spiral of hate and fear, an irrational tailspin into disgrace and disaster.