[corrected] 5 Uncomfortable Truths Behind the Capitol Riot
With thanks to attentive readers ...
Many readers have written to let me know that one sentence in an earlier version of this newsletter was missing the word “haven’t,” giving it the opposite of its intended meaning. Thank you! I’m also grateful that many people wrote back with such kind words.
And for the three or four of you who did the opposite of that, here are five more truths: 1) If you asked me to unsubscribe you, your request is being processed. 2) The election was not stolen from Trump; he’s a loser. 3) The pandemic is not a “Nazi lie.” 4) The shift-key is not your friend; an all-caps email is not very readable. 5) Have a nice day anyway.
In 2018 I drafted a book proposal for an alternative history of the United States based on a simple premise: What if Bernie Sanders had won the Democratic nomination and presidency during his first campaign (a campaign I served as head writer and editor)? The climax came in January 2021 with a series of bloody clashes at the Capitol involving Trump supporters who had been told that victory—in this case, the 2016 and 2020 elections—had been stolen from them. In a Brechtian agitprop move, I left the outcome of those clashes unresolved. It was pretty old-school stuff: The people decide how the story ends. Hokey, but you get the idea.
Pretty prescient, right? Not really. Reality has outdone even this product of my fevered imagination. In my draft, elements of America’s police were functioning as a paramilitary army for the right. But it never occurred to me that the Capitol would be left undefended, as it was, for reasons we have yet to fully understand.
For those of us who want to create a better world, it’s important to understand what is happening now. That means setting aside our preconceptions, and our sense of the world as we would like to see it, in order to see things as they truly are. Some of those truths are uncomfortable, as are some of the questions raised by this incident, starting with:
1. Are all riots “the language of the unheard”?
Over the years, many people have approvingly quoted Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr’s observation that riots are “the language of the unheard.” Is that true here? White nationalists were the rioters on January 6, and we haven’t had a minute’s break from those jerks for the last four years. This riot was “the language of the when-will-they-shut-the-hell-up.” But that doesn’t mean we can’t learn something from it.
Dr. King’s full comment, by the way, was as follows:
“I think that we’ve got to see that a riot is the language of the unheard. And, what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the economic plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years.”
To understand Dr. King’s observation, context is key. He was addressing the intersection of race and class in American politics. As for the White Riot (to borrow a phrase from The Clash), I don’t personally believe that these rioters were motivated solely, or even larger, by economics. OI think oher, darker psychological forces were at play. But others who have turned to the right are responding to economic forces, and that deserves our attention. Which gets us to:
2. A large chunk of the population has already fallen into a rabbit hole. That doesn’t make them bad.
QAnon has become the bat signal for white nationalist, Islamophobic, anti-Semitic fanatics everywhere. But a great many people supported the riot because they believe what they’ve been told: by QAnon, by Trump, by Cruz, by Hawley, and many others.
It may take a while for the poll numbers to stabilize, but the topline is bad. Three-quarters of registered Republicans believe the election results were changed through fraud, according to a YouGov poll taken as the riot was subsiding, and 45 percent supported what the pollsters politely called “the Capitol protest.”
The next day, when the extent of the violence became clearer, nearly one in five Republicans (18 percent) still supported the rioters and more than two-thirds (69 percent) believed Trump bore little or no responsibility for the incident. Half thought he bore no blame at all.
These people have been fed an alternate reality, and they’ve absorbed it. I’m not talking about the “Camp Auschwitz” guy or the other thugs on Capitol Hill. I’m talking about millions of people who are decent and kind in their everyday lives. How could that happen? That gets us to our next uncomfortable truth:
3. The media has failed the public.
There has been a lot of posturing from the mainstream media, but the fact remains: they didn’t do a good job of reporting on the issues that affect people’s daily lives. They focused on an elite-driven, consensus view of the world, emphasizing (for example) government budget deficits but not the death of the middle class.
The media report on war from the viewpoint of policy makers, not soldiers or their families. They treat partisan politics as a sport, not as a conflict that shapes people’s lives – and often decides whether they will live or die. And they elevated Trump in the public eye, which means they bear a great deal of blame for his presidency.
Outlets like Fox News have been egregious in their manipulation of the truth. But MSNBC and other outlets have a large share of the blame, too. The relentless focus on Russiagate influenced Democrats to build their first impeachment hearings around Ukraine, not on the kind of blatant, reality-based corruption voters can understand.
(Matt Taibbi and I discussed the state of the media this week; video is here.)
4. Democrats and liberals have failed the public, too.
The problem was compounded by the fact that Democrats have largely failed to help voters understand why so many of us are unable to live secure lives. Humans are pattern-seeking creatures. Most of us intuitively sense that there are underlying forces behind the difficulties so many of us are facing.
Unfortunately, Democrats have not explained those forces in clear terms. Perhaps they can’t. Unlike the Republicans, they must try to balance the aspirations of their voters with the interests of the people who finance their campaigns. That leaves them without a coherent story to tell. In the absence of a clear story from the Dems, voters started looking elsewhere. Some of them turned to QAnon.
We’re not just talking about “deplorables,” either. In one of the most interesting twists on that story, it turns out that the QAnon narrative has found surprising traction in the world of yoga and New Age spirituality.
It makes sense, when you think about it. New Agers are questioning the existing paradigm—and they’re right to question it. In the absence of a clear narrative from the left, some of them have latched onto a right-wing mythos instead. We can judge them, or we can start telling the true story of our lives.
5. Too many of us have acted as if politics doesn’t matter—or that its practitioners are evil.
Last October, Pew Research concluded:
“Roughly half of all voters (51%) say they think about politics as a struggle between right and wrong, while about as many (48%) say they don’t think about politics this way. The share of voters saying politics is a struggle between right and wrong has increased 14 percentage points from 37% in January. Trump voters are more likely than Biden voters to view politics as a struggle between right and wrong.”
It is a struggle between right and wrong, at least for me. I think it’s wrong that tens of thousands of people die every year because we don’t have Medicare For All. I think it’s wrong that we kill innocent people overseas with impunity. I think it’s wrong that millions are jobless and millions more struggling while billionaire wealth has exploded during the pandemic.
Unlike the rioters, however, I think these are the products of an evil system. As much as I despise Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, I don’t wish them personal harm. That would degrade me, and it would only reinforce the current system. We must be unafraid to call out the evils that surround us without personalizing them in any individual or group of individuals.
I have more thoughts, but this newsletter is already longer than I had hoped. We’ll get through this somehow, together. Until next time.
Thank you for these postings! They are lucid and well stated.
Great essay. My thinking exactly. Forwarded from a friend and now I shall send it on to my email list and post to Facebook.
I would add one thing: that the new congresswoman who insists on carrying a Glock in her purse and refuses to go through the metal detector or open her purse for inspection - she should be expelled pronto. The very idea of bringing guns into the House or Senate chambers is unacceptable and should be criminal.