January 6th was Successful
A Slow-Motion Coup
Today is January 6th and I feel a certain tedium and impatience about marking the anniversary of the Capitol Hill attack four years later. There seems to be a growing consensus that it, along with all of Trump’s other menaces to constitutional rule, is not worth taking seriously. The line on January 6th is that even if it was a coup or insurrection attempt, it was a farce and a failure. But this is wrong. In retrospect, it was a great political success for Trump. Not only because he got away with it, but because of how he could fracture and polarize the response. Attention paid to it is now considered sour grapes: part of a discredited political strategy and a remnant of liberal sentimentalism that is fast going out of style. He came back from it and rallied even those who initially condemned it or were frightened by it to his side. And he made the defense of the constitutional order a partisan issue.
We are accustomed to repeating now that Trump’s coalition is fragile or that there are intrinsic weaknesses in his governing style. True so far as it goes, but how fragile is a coalition that reformed and expanded after he attempted to overthrow the U.S. government? And how weak is someone who managed to suffuse the atmosphere with a sense of total credulity about himself and total cynicism about his opponents? This is an attitude now shared even among those who do not consider themselves his supporters. There is now a process of retrospective legitimation, as if the vote somehow wipes the slate clean, and makes lies the truth. There is a kind of spiritual Gleichsaltung going on: Trump is now the man and to continue one’s criticism forcefully makes you a sad deadender. Resistance liberalism is turning into Vichy liberalism and the NeverTrumpers suddenly discover they were AlwaysTrumpers. Some of that can be blamed on the failure of the media or the opposition party, but some credit has to be given to Trump himself. The great insult comic has landed his jibes: he has embarrassed the opposition, he has humiliated them. They are forced to laugh along now or look like spoilsports. Looking back in the 1960s, the Italian socialist Pietro Nenni remarked, “Everyone in Italy agreed in not taking Fascism seriously.” Not being taken seriously is probably the thing that helps Trump the most, on the one hand, it drives him, it torments him and everything he does can be read as a demand to be taken seriously, but it is also his greatest political gift and strength, it allows him to glide.
On January 6th Trump successfully broke the system: there is no neutral, recognized arbiter of the law and the constitutional order, there is just raw politics. That does not mean he will necessarily prevail in every political contest, but he should never be seen as the underdog. His political skills should not be underestimated. His appetite for risk has been rewarded. Why would he not be emboldened to try other desperate stratagems since he’s faced no repercussions thus far?
The most astute court watchers are describing a parallel phenomenon. Lawyers are filing briefs that are little more than paeans to a supposedly new regime of authority ushered in by Trump's election––as if an electoral win made actual jurisprudence moot. When these non-briefs win, it reinforces the idea that this is what law is now. And few other voices in the legal profession are bothering to say, "that's actually not what a legal brief is supposed to do."
Sherrilyn Ifill's stinging critique the accommodation by most of the legal profession is worth listening to. As is her bracing reminder that anyone who doesn't want to just surrender has to commit themself to a long-haul process of trying to "seed" the ground for better conditions that might not prevail for a long time to come. (interview with Dahlia Lithwick).
You say here that Trump "successfully broke the system." I think that this is not the best way to think about all of this. I think the better approach is something more along the lines of, "Trump tore the veil right off of the system." The difference is (as you have argued repeatedly (me too) that "the system" has been about oligarchic power and privileging the few all along. Formalistic egalitarianism has served as the cover for this for a couple of centuries now.
All Trump did was to expose the actual nature of our "democratic" capitalist system. What 99.9% of Americans view as democracy is but a formalistic potential precursor to actual democracy. Our egalitarian struggles have carved out a fine modicum of room for those us us lucky enough to be born into privilege or get on the finely tuned and guarded pathways to "success." But our cowboy capitalism rules and always has. It's just been a long time since white men suffered insecurity in the numbers that the Neoliberal version of economic policy wrought over the last 40 years.
Oh, and then there is the original sin, the scourge, of racism along with other populist bigotry triggers that the oligarchs so easily deploy to capture and divert the predictable popular anger and turn it into bigoted resentment.
I think we have to get back to the basics. Our society is built on a quite vicious cowboy capitalism that has always operated under a veil or a series of veils. Mainstream Republican Reaganism Trickle-down economics, eventually signed-off on by us Democrats and ridden for 40+ years, is the first force since the Great Depression to do enough damage to the white working and middle class to threaten some sort of mass rebellion. Trump was able to step into the void of any sort of decent leadership and 'seize the day' for his own purposes. And now the Muskovites of our world are all over the opportunity that Trump has created.
If we adopt the perspective that Trump broke the system, how can we ever begin to formulate a meaningful opposition? What is the project in that perspective? Instead, I think we need to use this "opportunity" to put forth a different narrative and, especially, a vision that is far more than simply 'restorative!" I think FDR did provide an overall guidepost when he is quoted to have said,
“If American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land.”
Democracy needs to move forward as a living force! We need to flesh it out in our thinking and in our actions. Substantive (rather than our current formalistic) democracy is still the answer. It's got to be our vision. The skeleton that we have built can only really come to life when we put real substantive flesh on those bones. Otherwise, even the bare bones of democracy we have put in place to date may soon be reduced to little more than fossil remains.