17 Nivôse CCXXXI

Remember, Remember the 6th of Whatever

The Coup of 18 Brumaire as painted by Bouchot

It’s now the second anniversary of January 6th, 2021 and we are still here. The country still seems “to slouch onward into its uncertain future like some huge inarticulate beast, too much attainted by wounds and ailments to be robust, but too strong and resourceful to succumb,” as Richard Hofstadter wrote some 50 years ago. The mob, as it were, has moved inside the House: At the time of writing, Republican leadership still can’t wrangle its rank and file and elect a speaker after 11 failed votes. You might call the people who are giving McCarthy such a hard time the “Jan 6 Caucus.”

“Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce,” so wrote Karl Marx in his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, perhaps the greatest piece of political journalism ever written. The tragedy was Napoleon’s coup that overthrew the First French Republic, the farce his nephew Louis Napoleon’s coup that overthrew the Second. The gap between that January 6th and this one seems to be between farce and travesty. I’m not one to downplay either the violence or political significance of January 6th, but with the benefit of the Committee’s report now available I think we can definitively say that it was never possible for the plot they cooked up to succeed. It was a totally idiotic endeavor made possible by the generally pacific nature of our domestic politics: in a land of coups like, say, Turkey, the plotters might’ve thought twice about going off half-cocked lest they all end up shot by the end of the day. Such consequences were apparently far from the minds of the principal actors. People in the administration only worried about not being able to get jobs afterwards, not firing squads. God Bless America, I guess.

I was not surprised at the idiocy of the scheme, but I was a bit surprised by the energy with which it was pursued. We often think of Trump as pretty lazy and unfocused. We counted on this laziness and lack of focus to see us through. But when it came to trying to somehow steal the election he really gave it his best shot: He pushed the thing the entire way and was one of the last to abandon it even when it had no chance of succeeding. We live in an age of conspiracy theories, but faced with the revelation of a real conspiracy, directed by a small, determined circle, the public just yawns. If more of Trump’s people were in key spots in the security state it still may not have worked, but there would have been a much more serious crisis and constitutional government might really have been in peril. If the paramilitary groups that showed had been larger and better organized, possibly combined into a single unit, we’d also be having a very different conversation about January 6th. I think that’s an important takeaway: If he could’ve, he would’ve. The country actually elected a president that would destroy it for the sake of his own ambition.

I initially thought that a good historical analogy to January 6th was the February 6th, 1934 riots at the French Parliament, when the anti-parliamentary far right leagues attempted to disrupt the investiture of a new government. But, even though the left thought it was at the time, that wasn’t really an organized attempt on power led by a few conspirators. This really was more like a pathetic (farcical?) March on Rome, without either the organization or political conditions that could make it possible. While I mean no strong analogy, it’s probably worth recalling here that the Beer Hall Putsch and the earlier Kapp Putsch were miserable failures. Fortunately, the higher ranks of the military just don’t have any appetite for this kind of thing. But in Germany, the army leadership always hated the Republic and couldn’t wait for an excuse to get rid of it.

So much for the “anti-parliamentary” January 6th, what of the “parliamentary” January 6th we witness today? Maybe it’s worth looking at the original quote from Hegel that Marx was paraphrasing in Eighteenth Brumaire, which comes from the section of his Philosophy of History dealing with the end of the Roman Republic and the rise of the Caesars:

But it became immediately manifest that only a single will could guide the Roman State, and now the Romans were compelled to adopt that opinion; since in all periods of the world a political revolution is sanctioned in men’s opinions, when it repeats itself. Thus Napoleon was twice defeated, and the Bourbons twice expelled. By repetition that which at first appeared merely a matter of chance and contingency becomes a real and ratified existence.

So, even though Caesar was assassinated, Caesarism still became the form of rule of Rome. Should we consider that Trump has been vanquished, but Trumpism lingers on, now normalized and institutionalized in the form of everyday parliamentary politics? Looking at these people, I recall the immortal words of Walter Sobchak, played by John Goodman, in The Big Lebowski: “Say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, at least it’s an ethos.” This seems to be politics without any object except attention. They don’t even want anything except to cause problems. It’s not clear what kind of deal could actually be struck with these people.

I sort of dislike the term “performative politics,” because all politics is performative, but this seems to really be all about performance and hysteria without any substance. They aren’t even interested in power in the traditional sense, or making corrupt, pork barrel deals in smoky backrooms, something politicians used to enjoy. Now they just want to be able to go on TV or social media and mouth off. This is another reason January 6 could not succeed. Ultimately, these are not men or women of iron will. In most cases, they just want to appear to be wild radicals, not unlike teenagers on the Internet who call themselves Stalinists. This new crop of Republican congressmen were bored and aimless people drawn into politics for a lack of anything else to do. The democratization of fundraising through the Internet has also created a perverse incentive: people are paying off their politicians handsomely to be ineffective clowns. At least corporate dark money wanted some tangible policy. People didn’t like Trump despite him being a stupid loudmouth jerk, they liked him because he was a stupid loudmouth jerk. They didn’t even necessarily want much else: just jerk time, all the time. Now that’s apparently our future: WWF-politik. To paraphrase Orwell in 1984, “imagine a guy doing some stupid dumb wrestling move on a human face — forever.” But it’s a mistake to assume that this vacuousness and irresponsibility is something ultimately totally innocuous. From the ranks of such losers also come history’s butchers: without purpose, without aim, and without pertinence, they seek to make their mark and prove themselves through destruction alone.

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