To figure out what’s coming next, we need to understand what happened on January 6 at the Capitol.
The participants in that insurrection included insurrectionists, law enforcement, and politicians.
The insurrectionists were:
– Donald Trump: Incited the insurrection at his rally directly before that, but had been preparing right wing radicals to reject democracy since before he won the electoral college in 2016. Trump was not always the creator of various aspects of the far right’s alternate reality, but he was clearly the leader, both requesting tweaks to the big lie and approving new aspects of it. Trump was the high commander of the insurrection.
– Propagandists: Various propaganda outlets from the big (Fox News) to small (individual Trumpers on social media) have been pushing anti-democratic strategies and conspiracy theories since before Trump won the electoral college in 2016. Some propaganda outlets only became relevant during his time in office (Q Anon). These include Rudy Giuliani, who at the rally directly before the attack on the capitol said it was time for “trial by combat”. These can be considered assistant commanders of the insurrection.
– Co-conspirators: Individuals who became part of the executive branch during the Trump administration and were willing to actively game the functioning of the US government in an attempt to achieve a fascist dictatorship. Trump had been steadily replacing heads of important departments during his entire tenure for the specific purpose of facilitating a coup. Chad Wolf (head of Homeland Security, which includes ICE, Border Patrol, the Secret Service, and TSA; assigned in November of 2019) and Christopher Miller (head of the Pentagon; assigned in November of 2020) would be the most important two.
– Ground Troops: The small army of clowns numbered in the hundreds. Most of these were just garden variety Trump fanatics, but there were also Proud Boys, police, Oath Keepers, and Three-Percenters among them. Importantly, none of those organizations seem to have been organized at the insurrection in the sense of having any kind of plan or objective, and they were not effectively armed. Only the Proud Boys were present in significant numbers. These ground troops were never given a clear objective for the day by any of the people in leadership roles (above), were told nothing by the command hierarchy in advance of the day, and were only given vague instructions on the day.
The law enforcement actors included:
– Capitol Police
– Capitol Police leadership (e.g., Steven Sund)
– Secret Service Agents
– National Guard troops
This moment had been building for 5 years; anyone who didn’t see it was willfully ignoring the evidence. For example, here’s an article that was published in Vox in March of 2016 explaining Trump’s dictatorial tendencies. Many Republican politicians fought against his election, but once he won, they were happy to kiss the ring. About a third of American adults embrace fascist ideals – usually calling themselves “patriots” – and those politicians were willing to go along with Trump’s agenda to try to satisfy those people and stay in office.
In fact, technically, this moment has been building since the big business response to FDR’s New Deal began in the 1930’s, and reflects a strong trend since then for the United States to ignore fascism (including white supremacy) and instead work every possible angle to destroy the good ideas of the left. Examples of that include the Red Scare, the assassination of Fred Hampton, the War on Drugs (designed specifically as a selective enforcement attack on leftists and the Black civil rights movement), and the international war against democracy manifested in coup after coup backed by the US government. You could even trace this back further to 8 years after the end of the Civil War when the US government decided to end the occupation of the south. Or you could trace it back to the day the first European boot landed in the Americas. Regardless of when you see the beginning of this trend happening, though, the upshot is that AMERICA CHOOSES FASCISM OVER AND OVER AGAIN.
This specific event itself was created on social media by various small-time propagandists.
At the event Trump, Giuliani and (I presume) others incited the crowd to attack Trump’s latest list of enemies (including the Vice President) with the bigger goal of stopping the electoral college vote count. Although this count is technically a “ritual” and not a necessary part of the election, the concern that politicos showed it revealed a more important truth: That the entire election procedure is meant to create legitimacy. This idea of an election being “valid” is socially constructed, and this ritual is part of that construction. If Trump could stop the performance, it would allow that fascist third of Americans to believe that the election was not valid. The election was valid, but the aspects of it that make it valid are not as salient or compelling to a normal human as this string of important people blessing the work of bean counters and robots.
In addition, Trump hoped that the riot would create terror among the trapped politicians — including Pence — and thus convince them to participate in the coup. He was actively contacting them during the attack asking if they were ready to cooperate yet. Had Congress decided to comply with his demands, Trump would have called off the attack.
In the background, Trump and his co-conspirators had arranged for help to be dramatically delayed once the siege began. I’ve mentioned before that force is the ultimate authority; in this case, Trump and his co-conspirators were not confident that the agents of violence that they command would comply with illegal orders to eliminate congress, or even a subset of congress. Therefore, they decided to simply not send help. More specifically, Christopher Miller (or people directly under him) delayed the deployment of National Guard troops (Sund says he requested the National Guard six times ahead of and during the attack on the Capitol, and each request was delayed or denied). They assumed that if they could wait 4 hours before sending help, the deed would be done.
In addition, the Capitol Police command hierarchy, which includes chief Steven Sund, the DC mayor, and the Sergeants-at-arms of the House and Senate, either purposely sabotaged the Capitol Police response on the day or were so comfortable with Trumpism that they simply didn’t imagine that there would be any issues. Today’s news indicates that they were more concerned about the “bad optics” of securing the building than the threat of an attack. The Capitol Police were warned by both the FBI and the NYPD (which has its own intelligence unit) about the potential for violence on that day making their failure all the more suspicious. (The police chief and both Sergeants-at-arms have resigned.)
The ground troops were completely incompetent. I don’t think that’s something that can even be debated. They had no idea what they were doing, and were completely ill-prepared. Trump said he didn’t like that they appeared to be “low-class”. If there was an organized element, it wasn’t what you’d call effective, either. We’ve seen an effective show of force many times by right wing militias – they didn’t show up; if they had, the story would have been dramatically different thanks to Trump’s executive branch basically leaving the door wide open for the attack.
It’s extremely important that some people did not show up:
– Antifa
– Black Lives Matter
– leftist community defense organizations
Had any elements of the left shown up that day, it would have provided for a plausible alternative narrative for the day and we would not be seeing the nearly universal condemnation of the insurrectionist mob today. In addition, the police would have been even more ineffective against the mob as it would have been overly focused on those leftist elements. Most concerning is the fact that this could have given Donald Trump an adequate excuse for declaring martial law, which is something his co-conspirators have been advising him to do for a very long time.
Today, Congress is threatening to finally do something about Donald Trump, but the level of agreement required to accomplish anything is still greater than what they can likely achieve.
Going forward, Trump and all of the villains that he chose to control executive departments are still in place. The propagandists that helped him create the alternate reality that Trump fanatics live in are still out there; thankfully, social media is starting to take deplatforming them seriously. Deplatforming fascists, which is today almost universally supported, was the sole purpose of antifa — will Americans now embrace antifa as the good guys? We don’t think that will ever happen.
Joe Biden has requested that Trump co-conspirators participate in making sure that the inauguration is secure against violence. At first blush, this seems stupid, but we already know that those agency heads are not confident that their troops would obey an unlawful order to attack Congress or the President Elect, and a further performance of incompetence would make it all too clear that they were willful participants in the insurrection. Therefore, I think we will see a peaceful inauguration with a huge police presence.
But that’s just DC.
Just like the January 6 riot was planned online, Trumpers are now planning a second insurrection event on January 17 – this time, the focus appears to be on state capitals. Here, the calculus for the left becomes more complicated, but, in my opinion, the result is the same whether you live in a red state or a blue one, or even a liberal-controlled city: Let the insurrectionists fight the police. No matter whether they decide to have a truly peaceful protest or engage in violent insurrection, the result is the same: We win if we don’t show up. This is definitely not always the case; the difference is that right now, law enforcement appears to finally be willing to fight them.
If you have specific individuals in your community that need to be protected from a fascist mob, encourage them to be in a safe location that entire weekend. That almost no politicians are on our side and it is a weekend should make this fairly easy.
While I don’t think we will see anything significant during the weekend of the 16th and 17th, the potential is there. Trump has already used Department of Homeland Security as a gestapo, and that could happen again. The Proud Boys — Trump’s brownshirts — are still out there and seem interested in participating that weekend. Three-percent militia and Oath Keepers could also decide to show up in an organized fashion.
I’m sure the liberal response to this will be, “They’re no match for the government,” but keep in mind that they have control of the executive branch, so the government might not show up to stop them or might even participate in the insurrection. Also, keep in mind that there are about 700,000 law enforcement officers in the US, and at least half of them are Trumpers. There are about 1.3 million troops in the US military — and they’re mostly occupying other countries. They are also majority Trumpers. If we make the false assumption that these troops would oppose an insurrection, there are still 100 million gun owners in the US (5 million of those are new in 2020); if even a third of them are fascist maniacs (which is a conservative estimate), you’re talking about over 30 million armed fascists against the roughly 2 million government troops, most of whom are not in the country. The widely-held belief that the US can use its weapons of mass destruction against a domestic insurrection is absurd — that strategy would kill far more civilians than insurrectionists. What you’d see instead would be state, local, and even the federal government trying to negotiate a peace with the fascists.
If the far right wants to have a protracted, horrific civil war, they’re in a good position to make that happen. What we have to hope is that they choose not to do that. It’s entirely up to them. It might seem self-destructive to you that they would choose a civil war, but you have to understand that their entire way of life — white supremacy, male supremacy, Christian supremacy — is being destroyed in a very real way and if they don’t make a stand now, they’ll be subjugated by capitalist elites in the same way that everyone else is. (They falsely call this subjugation “socialism” because they’ve been misinformed their whole lives.)
Regardless of what the far right decides to do before January 20, we are a very long way from resolving this. Given that fascism is a foundational element of US culture, the only thing that will permanently resolve the problem would be using any and all strategies to completely destroy fascism. We know this works, because the left has been dramatically hobbled by American society’s war against it. If we use our resources against fascism instead of the left, we can definitely beat fascism. (There was a candidate for President that promised to do exactly this — Democrats voted against him.)
If, in contrast, we choose to just look away yet again, fascism will be back, and it will be stronger and smarter next time. While the left has consistently and accurately pointed out fascism, conservatives deny it exists or pretend that the left are “the real fascists”. However, the most significant part of this erasure is from Democrats pretending that their politicians haven’t also been participating in fascism. Fascism denial by both Democrats and Republicans is motivated by misinformation about the left and “socialism” and the rot at the core of US culture that says that human beings are innately evil.
We all need to believe in democracy, and we need to believe that people can be good, and then we need to be willing to fight for good people and for democracy.