The Four-Year Assault
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So this is how it ends. Four years of rage and lies; four
years of racism and xenophobia so coarse and inflammatory Richard Nixon might
have blushed; four years of dismantling economic and environmental regulation,
packaged as a populist revolution on behalf of the forgotten (white) American;
four years of ‘law and order’ indistinguishable from moral and political disorder;
four years of war against the media, ‘globalists’, ‘elites’ and other ‘enemies
of the people’, which is to say his people, or
rather his loyalists; four years of contempt for the vulnerable, whether
Muslims, undocumented immigrants, Black victims of police brutality or those
afflicted with Covid-19; four years of garish exhibitionism parading as
leadership – four years of Donald Trump in power have led to the bizarre and
grotesque spectacle of 6 January.
To
call the explosion of the mob that took over the Capitol building an attempted
coup, or an insurrection, is unfair to the plotters of coups and insurrections.
Like the man who egged them on in a speech that morning – and who had spent the
last two months refusing to concede the election, going so far as to order
Georgia’s secretary of state to ‘find’ votes to overturn the outcome – the
revellers in DC were practitioners of what
political scientists call ‘expressive’ politics, capable only of defiant
stonewalling and destructiveness. Some had arrived in full Civil War
re-enactment regalia, carrying rifles and Confederate flags. Others looked as
if they were auditioning for a sequel to The Big Lebowski,
notably the ‘QAnon shaman’, Jake Angeli, a tattooed, shirtless man who strutted
through the chambers of the Capitol with horns on his head and red, white and
blue paint on his face. And then there were the neo-Nazis, white supremacists
and militia members, the ‘fine people’ of Charlottesville. For all their shouts
of ‘USA, USA,’ they represented a
furious, desperate, lumpen minority unwilling, or unable, to accept defeat – or
the ‘surrender’ of Trump’s Republican collaborators, who could no longer go on
pretending that Joe Biden hadn’t won, especially when they realised the
potential political costs of doing so.
Trump indulged them,
of course: ‘We love you.’ Here were the people who turned out at his rallies,
who made him feel like a populist leader, like a patriot, like a king, like a
billionaire – like all the things he wasn’t, except in his imagination. ‘Very
special’, he called them on 6 January, as they rioted in the Capitol. The
Republicans, like his wives, were always temporary partners whom he’d used
(just as they’d used him). The mob, like his own narcissistic reflection, was
what he really loved. The only difference between 6 January and an ‘ordinary’
day during Trump’s tenure in office is that the mob had to force its way into
the corridors of power.
In
a famous Saturday Night Live skit from 1984, ‘White like
Me’, Eddie Murphy painted his face white, put on a suit, and discovered the
secret joys of life in white America. The newspaper man refuses to accept
payment; a bank employee hands him stacks of cash. ‘Slowly I began to realise
that when white people are alone, they give things to each other for free.’
Among those things, it turns out, is relatively untrammelled access to the
Capitol building, the ‘temple of democracy’, in the words of innumerable
politicians and commentators in the States, the least secular of secular
republics.
The
peaceful protesters in the Black Lives Matter demonstrations in DC last summer were met with rubber bullets and tear
gas. During the siege on 6 January, one woman, an air force veteran and QAnon
supporter, was shot dead, three others died of ‘medical emergencies’, and a
police officer was so badly beaten with a fire extinguisher he later died of
his injuries. But on the whole the violent mob was so decorously treated by the
Capitol police they might as well have been escorted into the building with
White Lives Matter banners. Once inside, they seemed to have unusual knowledge
of its layout, including the location of offices belonging to the politicians
they most despised, notably the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi. Was there
collusion? Stephen Sund, the chief of the Capitol police, has resigned over the
security breach, but the responsibility does not lie with one man. ‘This is our
house!’ the mob cried. They had been given no reason to think otherwise. The
hallucinations of leader and mob – abetted, until 6 January, by the Senate
majority leader, Mitch McConnell, and the rest of the Republican leadership –
fed on each other over the last four years in a spiral of nativism, white
supremacy and conspiracy theory.
But
the fantasy of the ‘stolen election’, which Trump had promoted even before the
election took place, was not the only fantasy on display in DC last Wednesday. There was also the fantasy of an
American innocence sullied by ‘insurrectionists’ and ‘terrorists’, a fantasy
shared by Republicans, Democrats and a press with an inexhaustible supply of
exotic analogies for America’s long-running civil wars.
‘Violence
never wins,’ Mike Pence announced when the House reconvened on the evening of 6
January. ‘Freedom wins. And this is still the people’s house.’ The vice
president was followed by other Republicans keen to distance themselves from
Trump and the ‘basket of deplorables’ with whom they’d made common cause since
his inauguration, and to recast themselves as defenders of republican virtue.
‘If the election were overturned by mere allegations from the losing side,’
McConnell had said that morning, omitting his own complicity in creating this
crisis, ‘our democracy would enter a death spiral ... The
United States Senate has a higher calling than an endless spiral of partisan
vengeance.’ No one has stoked the spirit of partisan vengeance with less
scruple, or more effectiveness, than McConnell, who, in spite of his personal
distaste for Trump, took advantage of his presidency to pass regressive tax
legislation and to reshape the federal judiciary – now a redoubt of reaction.
It was McConnell who pushed for the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the
Supreme Court, within days of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death. But Trump and the
mob were now liabilities. So he cut his losses and covered himself in the
ennobling rhetoric of constitutionalism. So did his wife, Elaine Chao, Trump’s
secretary of transportation, who tendered her resignation along with other
administration officials ‘shocked’ by the storming of the Capitol and Trump’s
incitement of it.
Among the most vapid,
but also the most telling, of the Republican speeches after the House
reconvened was given by Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska. Sasse, a self-described
‘history nerd’ who has a PhD from Yale, admitted that ‘it was ugly today’:
But you know what? It turns out that
when something is ugly talking about beauty isn’t just permissible, talking
about beauty is obligatory at a time like that. Why? Why would we talk about
beauty after the ugliness of today? Because our kids need to know that this
isn’t what America is ... Generations of our
forefathers and our foremothers – probably not a word – our ancestors have
spilled blood to defend the glories of this republic. Why would they do that?
Because America is the most exceptional nation in the history of the world, and
because the constitution is the greatest political document that’s ever been written.
To
his credit, Joe Biden pointed out that if the rioters in DC had been Black, they would have been treated very
differently. But he, too, portrayed the violence as ‘un-American’: ‘the scenes
of chaos in the Capitol do not reflect true America, do not represent who we
are.’ Although the Democrats in the House have fought to remove Trump from
power by invoking the 25th Amendment or by impeachment,
they, too, have trafficked in soothing, this-is-not-who-we-are rhetoric, and in
the sacralisation of the American republic. When Chuck Schumer – soon to become
Senate majority leader – reached for an analogy, it was the ‘day of infamy’ of
Pearl Harbor, an attack by a foreign power.
The American media
have largely echoed this language. The storming of the Capitol, we were told,
was something that happened in a ‘banana republic’, not in America. (No mention
of the fact that the ‘banana republics’ of Latin America were corrupt and
authoritarian in part thanks to American meddling.) The presence of raucous,
overwhelmingly white militants armed with guns stirred comparisons with Nazi
Germany, Afghanistan and Syria, as if the many available and suitable
comparisons from American history had been declared off-limits, threats to our
amour propre. What to call the mob provoked a great discussion – ‘protesters’?
‘dissidents’? ‘insurrectionists’? – until, finally, much of the liberal press settled
on describing them as ‘terrorists’, the word we reserve for all that is evil
and un-American, and usually Middle Eastern. The use of the T-word represented
a belated recognition of how dangerous a threat the far right has become. But
it was also a consoling flight from realities that Americans still find so
difficult to face: a pretext instead for another war on terror, rallying
Americans behind the flag against an extremist fringe. Never mind that more
than seventy million Americans voted for the man who engineered the outrage of
6 January, or that nearly half of them continue to believe that the election
results were false, above all those in what Trump calls ‘Democrat-run cities’ –
i.e. cities with large Black populations. (In all, 139 members of the House of
Representatives and eight senators voted against the certification of Biden’s
victory.) A war on terror isn’t likely to be any more effective in
extinguishing the fires of racism, anti-democratic sentiment and conspiratorial
politics than it has been in fighting jihadism abroad.
Black
American commentators – who can’t draw comfort from fables of American
innocence – were more candid about the roots of 6 January. ‘We brought this
hell upon ourselves,’ Senator Cory Booker said in a short and powerful speech
that night. Rather than Pearl Harbor, he spoke about the Confederate flag, a
symbol of white supremacy which, since Trump came to power, determined to undo
everything that Barack Obama achieved, has become increasingly conspicuous, and
not just in the South. For Black Americans, the spectacle of violent
Confederate nostalgists in the Capitol building is less likely to recall
Japanese fighter planes than the campaign of racist terror that followed the
defeat of Reconstruction: more than six thousand Black people were lynched
between 1865 and 1950. And they have good reason to fear the language of
‘reconciliation’, which has often been a euphemism for bipartisanship among
whites, at the expense of Black people. As C. Vann Woodward wrote in his classic
study, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955), ‘just as
the Negro gained his emancipation and new rights through a falling out between
white men, he now stood to lose his rights through the reconciliation of white
men.’
Such a reconciliation,
fortunately, will be much harder to achieve today than it was during the Jim
Crow era, thanks to the successes of the Civil Rights Movement. America’s
demographics have also changed, which is another reason for the intensifying
fury of white nationalism: though hardly a spent force, it faces the impending
disappearance of a white majority. But perhaps the most significant political
development of the last few years has been the rise of Black women, who now
comprise the cutting edge of Democratic Party politics, and, one could argue,
the saviours of the republic.
While
6 January marked the gruesome conclusion of Trump’s four-year assault on the
institutions of American democracy, it also marked the culmination of another
campaign: Stacey Abrams’s ten-year effort to flip the state of Georgia. Led by
Abrams, an heir of the great civil rights leaders Ella Baker and Fannie Lou
Hamer, political organisers worked slowly and patiently to get out the vote,
especially among Black people. Some Democratic insiders were sceptical but
Abrams insisted that Georgia was changing. Thanks to the reverse migration of
Black people from the North, she noted, the Black population was now a third of
the electorate; Georgia also had an increasing number of Latino and Asian
voters who, along with liberal whites, could form a Democratic majority. In
2018 she came close to winning the gubernatorial election, and would probably
have prevailed had it not been for voter suppression. (Her opponent, Brian
Kemp, had presided as secretary of state over the cancellation of 1.4 million
voter registrations between 2010 and 2018.) Standing aside but refusing
formally to concede, she pressed on, devoting herself to the campaigns of
two US Senate candidates: Raphael Warnock, a pastor at the
Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where Martin Luther King Jr had preached,
and Jon Ossoff, who had interned with the Georgia civil rights hero, John
Lewis, who died last July. (Warnock presided at Lewis’s funeral.) And on the
morning of 6 January, both Warnock and Ossoff were declared victors in the
Georgia run-offs, allowing the Democratic Party to take back the Senate.
Warnock’s victory was especially
striking, because he is an unapologetic progressive, a prophetic left-wing
Christian in the King tradition who has excoriated American foreign policy and
the country’s ‘narcissism’ and ‘mindless consumerist impulses’ – including
among ‘the burgeoning Black middle class’. The campaign of his opponent, Kelly
Loeffler, the Republican incumbent, did its best to vilify him with the usual
racist tactics: darkening his skin in photographs, depicting him as an
antisemite, accusing him of spousal abuse. And still, he won, in a Southern
state that has never had a Black Democratic senator. Will ‘purple’ Georgia
become a blue state? Could Texas be next? Is this the dawn of a new South? It
is much too early to say, but the success of Abrams’s imaginative and tireless
organising – a Gramscian ‘war of position’ that has borne extraordinary fruit
after a decade of work – was as shocking, and no doubt more alarming, to
McConnell and Lindsey Graham, than the chaotic jacquerie in
the Capitol. Their abandonment of Trump and the mob is infinitely cynical, but
it also reflects the shifting balance of power. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won
the 2020 election, but the moment belongs to Abrams.
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