Five Uncomfortable Truths Behind the Capitol Riot
"Language of the unheard"? These guys won't shut up.
Sorry, guys, I just couldn’t bring myself to look at another picture of the riot — much less post one.
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, the outcome of those clashes was to have been left 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. My proposal made it clear that large elements of America’s police were functioning as a paramilitary army for forces of the right. But it never occurred to me that the Capitol would be left undefended, for reasons we have yet to fully understand.
For those of us who want to create a better world, it’s especially 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 by economics. Other, 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 all bad.
Let’s be clear: the rioters were, and are, horrible people who did a horrible thing. 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 so 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 issues. They focused on government budget deficits, not the death of the middle class.
They reported on war from the viewpoint of policy makers, not soldiers or their families. They treated partisan politics as sport, not as a conflict that shapes people’s lives – and often decides whether they will live or die at all. 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 bear a share of the blame, too. It can be argued that the relentless focus on Russiagate influenced Democrats to build their first impeachment hearings around Ukraine, not on the kind of blatant corruption more voters could 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 explained those forces in clear terms. Perhaps they can’t. Unlike the Republicans, they must try to balance their 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.
On the other hand, there are the members of Congress who refused to wear masks and infected Reps. Jayapal and Coleman. They waged biological warfare on their colleagues. They should be expelled from Congress – no if’s, ands, or buts. I don’t wish them personal harm, either, but they are a disease on the body politic and should be properly quarantined.
I have more thoughts, but this newsletter is already longer than I had hoped. We’ll get through this somehow, together. Until next time.
The attack on the Capitol was not merely a riot. I was a mob of armed militants, called into action by Republicans in office, to assault and destroy the heart of the United States government. This is terrorism against the government, the nation and the people of the USA. This was actually the third time these militants struck. Weeks earlier this same mob attacked the state capitols in Michigan and Oregon. In all three violent attacks, our authorities took inadequate measures to protect anyone or anything, they handled the attackers with kid gloves and white privilege, and they allowed these armed and dangerous hostiles to walk away free. Three times this sent a message to all the crazies, the message that all our capitol buildings are easy targets, and that our country the USA is theirs for the taking.
I, and my wife, commend you for your ability to”see” within, without, and beyond the mere picture that is shown to the masses concerning the global society, and how it is high time for change for all.Peace&Love