Is this the end of American democracy or a renewal?
America’s news networks were quick to term it an “insurrection” and “sedition” soon became the theme of the hour. Perhaps it was both of those things but, equally, events on Capitol Hill might just have been a protest allowed to turn ugly through a combination of poor intelligence and weak policing.
That’s not to say there wasn’t malicious intent in the planning. Bombs would be found and advanced planning discovered in the usual places where the Far Right congregate on internet forums. Then emerged the implausible counter narratives as events were spun. Fox News pundits would later claim the rioters were really Antifa disguised as Trump supporters. Meanwhile, on the other side, liberal media outlets complained about the police response. Compared to the Black Lives Matters protests, they noted, the police showed too much restraint in quelling the riot. Never for a moment did they stop to think that perhaps it wasn’t that these protests were being under-prosecuted but that Donald Trump’s presidency has seen too many protests over-prosecuted. Balance is hard to find when the pendulum swings so wildly.
What’s evident in the dim light of a new day is that it’s too easy to make Trump the sole progenitor of yesterday’s chaos. Certainly, he was to blame for events yesterday, but he is merely exploiting anti-Democratic tendencies that stretch back much further than the last twenty years of toxic politics. Revolt is so enshrined in the very text of the Constitution that it is habitually ignored for the sake of convenience or some fiction about American exceptionalism. Reagan’s “city on a hill” really couldn’t possibly be surrounded by wilderness, could it?
Well, perhaps it could. That might even be what defines America and, by extension, its politics. Isn’t it a nation where the friction between the city and the frontier is felt at its most acute, and where people are still seeking the meaning of “American”? Self-definition is a national pastime too often expressed as difference to some ‘other’. It’s why Paul Revere’s warning that “the British are coming” has become something else in the lexicon of America’s Far Right – “the Mexicans are coming”, perhaps, or “the Jews will not replace us”. Shift the prism slightly and “insurrection” can all too quickly blur with “patriotic duty” or “fight for freedom” or any of the white nationalist slogans that adorn the t-shirts and placards of protestors.
Fears run deep and that’s precisely what made Donald Trump such a dominant force for these long four years. Trumpism isn’t just the product of a brash lifestyle, fame through TV, or even a billion-dollar empire built on loans. It found its origins in the so-called “Tea Party” movement, named after a famous act of domestic terrorism that is rarely framed that way. Trump was “disruptive”, they said, but that was merely a codeword for “revolutionary” and his appeal was obvious. People brought up to celebrate revolutionary heroes are paradoxically taught to revere a document that, some say, should never be changed. The result is a politics that is often riven with glaring contradictions, nowhere more evident today than in the picture of Republican Senator Josh Hawley giving a clenched-fist salute to Trump supporters as though he were some far-left radical. Look closely at the actions of yesterday and you begin to see the American carnage of Steve Bannon’s fantasy: “I’m a Leninist”, he once boasted. “Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal, too.”
Like so much of America’s legislative theology, the quasi-holy writ of the Constitution was forged in the crucible of revolution. It has long been a feature (some might more accurately call is a flaw) of American politics that a phrase like “well-regulated militia” can be so loosely interpreted to mean either the National Guard or any ragtag collection of gun nuts out to defend their vision of the union. It is considered a cliché to point out the discrepancy between America’s response to domestic terrorism (a real problem) and Islamic terrorism (less of a day-to-day threat). Yet the fact it is a cliché is itself indicative of the problem. Americans seem peculiarly gifted at looking the other way.
In April last year, members of an armed militia stormed Michigan’s Capitol Building, demanding the resignation of Governor Gretchen Whitmer. To foreign eyes, it looked inexcusable, yet condemnations by America’s media was often characterised by some hesitation that was entirely cultural, as if these invaders weren’t “domestic terrorists” but something almost wholesome. Even as pundits lamented those sad events, there was often a barely concealed understanding that everything about American democracy reduces to a few well-armed hillbillies “necessary to the security of a free State”. American Democracy must always be protected, they seemed to say, but that also allows the contradictory sense that Democracy must be placed in peril so it might be continually restored through conflict.
Perhaps that’s why America has never come to terms with the “militia movement”, which wasn’t new to the Trump era but certainly something that Trump learned to exploit. The President has always played fast and loose with right-wing branding. His sons pose with guns and dead animals whilst Trump gropes the flag whilst the entire family pander to a blue-collar culture that is entirely alien to them. Even as he condemned events of yesterday, his condemnation sounded like praise for the people fighting to overturn the election. The choice, he seemed to say, was between freedom and democracy and the former was really the true American value.
And that is the fundamental problem. Squint just a little and it’s hard to discern any difference between the actions of the mob who invaded the Capitol Hill Building and the actions of Republican lawmakers at the peak of the impeachment process who invaded the SCIF (the “Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility “) in the basement of the building, where they proceeded to protest by using mobile devices, eating pizzas, and generally leaving behind a mess.
So, what we witnessed on Wednesday wasn’t so alien to American democracy. It was, rather, that vestigial tail of the radicalism that remains part of the body politic. It was the anarchy from which democracy flourished and into which it can always again decline. A sad day, certainly, but also one in which a boil was finally lanced and America’s understanding of its fragile democracy might have undergone one of its periodic renewals.