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.
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.
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.
Bakunin Matata! 