A failed coup d’etat or a succesful coup de theatre?
Was what happened in Washington on January 6 a failed coup? An armed insurrection against the state? A terrorist attack of the caliber of 9/11? A sacrilege in the temple of democracy? A slap in the face of America like Pearl Harbor? The equivalent of the Nazi Crystal Night? Was it “one of the darkest days in American history”? The media and politicians were not lacking superlatives to describe the event. Even the Murdoch press (Fox News etc.) participated (reluctantly).
But a coup d’etat is something else. If thousands had caught the Capitol by force and taken politicians hostage as part of a coordinated plan to seize power, it would have been a coup attempt. But that was not what we saw on January 6.
Terrorists or tourists?
“Surreal” is a word that comes to mind when describing the circus. Trump set it in motion, exhorting his jamboree of thousands of hardcore followers to go to the Capitol to pressure Congressmen to reject the election results. “I will walk with you!”, he promised, after which he quickly returned to the White House to watch what happened next on TV. But even without him, the Trumpists arrived in an excited and determined mood at the Congress building where the undermanned police could not stop them. They pushed aside the barricades and entered, many amazed that this was so easy. This “victory” had an euphoric effect. But even though they were later all collectively labeled as terrorists, many behaved more like tourists. They lined up obediently in the rotunda between the velvet ropes that are there for tourist tours. They took countless selfies. They live streamed to their friends. They took souvenirs. And when it was no longer clear what else there was to do, most of them were led out with no resistance.
The occupiers of the Capitol were a mixed bag, including some whose images traveled the world. The “Q Anon shaman”, with his painted face, bare torso and bison helmet, shouting “Where’s Pence? Show yourself, Pence! ” (the vice-president who, according to the Trumpists, betrayed Trump). The man who grins broadly and waves at the cameras, a torn pulpit in his arms. The Proud Boy leader smoking a cigarette in the democratic sanctuary and crushing the butt on the gleaming marble floor. The guy who in Nancy Pelosi’s office snuggled in her chair with his feet on her desk. They are now all world famous and arrested.
The Hard right
Not all of the roughly thousand people who entered the Capitol behaved like tourists. Some were police or military veterans trained in war tactics. Proud Boys, 3-Percenters, Boogaloos, Oath Keepers, KKK, Nazis and other ultra-rightist militia had come to fight. And they fought hard. One agent did not survive their attack. Some carried weapons and handcuffs. But only the police fired, resulting in one death1, and no one was taken hostage. Small time bombs were found at the headquarters of both parties, but they did not explode. Which is not to say that those groups are harmless folklore. Their resolute action changed a rowdy protest into a rebellious riot. For a brief moment, they were the masters in a principal center of power. “Let’s make some laws”, one of them proposed in the Senate chamber.
In the last five years, the Trump movement has given the ultra-right wind in their sails. But the cause of their growing appeal can’t be reduced to Trump-devotion alone. It feeds on the same fear, anger and longing to be part of a community that inspired the anti-police riots of last year, but it captures those feelings in a web of vicious lies.
They hate the Republican establishment as much as the Democrats, but they follow Trump, because he seems to despise the establishment too (the ‘swamp’, the ‘deep state’, which are at the same time real and conspiratorial myths), because he brazenly breaks rules, and in all his ugliness comes across as more real and sincere than all those formatted and shape-shifting political pros, even though he lies whenever he opens his mouth.
Embedded in the victorious Trump movement, the ultra-right gangs became more and more aggressive. Fighting with Antifa militants became an end in itself, an extreme sport like for football hooligans in Europe. During last year’s protests, they fought on the side of the police, now against it. The storming of the Capitol is now celebrated in ultra-right circles as a great victory. Even if it did not bring them anything, they are very proud of it. It reinforces the idea that ordinary people can have a major impact through determined collective action. It makes them even more militant. And now that the government will no longer be the government of their idol Trump, they can unambiguously go against it. But it remains a marginal milieu, with no common goal or strategy. Compared to the US government with its immense powers it is a thorn on the paw of a bear. There was zero chance that last Wednesday it could overthrow that government, and it hasn’t tried to.
How the hell …
The question remains how the invasion of the Capitol was possible. This was not a secretly planned action; the “storm” was announced in advance in thousands of posts on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Parler and other “social media”. The preparations were open, the intention to storm the Capitol was explicit. Blueprints of the building were openly posted. Trump had called on his followers to come, urging them to be “wild” and to “fight for our country.” Could the warnings be any clearer? Moreover, Washington is full of security forces. They were all posted during the anti-police protests: the metropolitan police, the (military) National Guard of DC, Virginia and Maryland, agents of the Secret Service, the Department of Homeland Security, the DEA, BATF, FBI, DOC and other acronyms. Four federal military units had been put on alert, and the Air Force sent a combat helicopter to circle low above the protesters’ heads. We did not see that on 1/6. Major government offices in Washington have their own police forces. The Capitol Police has 2,000 officers. Manifestly, only a minority of them was deployed on January 6. They asked for the National Guard but the Pentagon stalled the request.
The “storm” was clearly announced and could have been stopped without much difficulty. That did not happen. Why? An investigation will be launched which will conclude that misjudgments were made, that bureaucratic misunderstandings arose, but many will be skeptical. Given the extent of the state’s power in regard to what’s called “intelligence gathering”, and the ample warnings of violent actions, suspicions will remain that this was no ordinary fuck-up. The capitalist state is macchiavellian by its nature. There are not one, but thousands of ‘conspiracies’ that permeate capitalism, thousands of overlapping covert agreements between companies, banks, politicians, media and other power brokers, that are kept out of the public eye, and whose aim it is to manipulate markets, prices, currencies, wars and more, but most importantly, people. The capitalist state has proven itself more than capable of setting events in motion with the purpose of shifting public opinion. But it’s also true that explanations based on a secret conspiracy behind the scene, are often lazy substitutes for a real analysis of the events. They are very popular these days. Some, like Q Anon, are outright crazy, many are wildly speculative. There is always an element of speculation in a suspicion, otherwise it wouldn’t be one. But some suspicions are more plausible than others.
If indeed there was a conductor of this cacophony, who was it? Trump is suspect number one, since he set the show in motion. Did he really think he could change the election results that way? According to insiders, he had long since given up hope of staying in power. What he did in recent weeks was fire up his base. He cannot be a “loser” to his followers, that clashes too much with his image, so he must be the winner whose victory was stolen by the “deep state”. Trump needs his base, to remain a factor in the years to come, to protect his own interests. But because of the invasion of the Capitol, that base has suddenly become much smaller. That could not have been his intention.
It is not Trump who benefits from the results of 1/6. Who then? Regardless what one thinks of the odds that the weak defense of the Capitol was deliberate, it is clear that the event played in the cards of the capitalist state, and of the incoming government in particular.
What are the results?
Trump is marginalized. For many in his party, the Capitol invasion and the outrage it caused, cranked up by the media, was the long-awaited opportunity to escape from his grip. Trump was already defeated at the ballot box, but most of his voters believed that he won and was cheated. He remained the leader of the party, a party that is a pillar of the state, that he could force to oppose the legitimacy of the government and sabotage its attempts at “normalization”. Trump has not been entirely eliminated as a political obstacle to the Biden administration, but his influence has diminished significantly. The event left a stain on him that he can never remove. The business world and much of the media treat him as a pariah.
The opposition party is divided. The pro- and anti-Trump factions face each other with drawn knives. The Trumpists may still be the majority but big capital abandoned them, the media silence them. The fight within that party between the Trump cult and those who longed for the restoration of “normality” in the management of the state was inevitable anyway, but 1/6 has triggered it and changed the rapport de forces. The party-top seeks a break with Trump but the party-base resists it. The anger and frustration which Trump captured, are not disappearing. His “brand” is still strong in the party. Because of the American two party-system, this conflict will probably not lead to a split, but it will take time to settle the dust. A divided opposition is a weak opposition. So a civil war between the Republicans is convenient for the Biden government.
It also creates an opportunity for Biden to work with the anti-Trump Republicans and thereby reduces his dependence on the support of the left wing of his party.
The “storm” has spread a soft bed for the new government. It has strengthened the democratic myth and created a false mood of national unity and support for the state. Biden can now navigate a steady centrist course without being blocked by the right or the left. Political order has been restored. We can return to “normality”. But that normality was the problem in the first place.
A liberal 9/11
In recent days, the media bombarded us with alarming reports about the actions that the far right would be plotting on the occasion of Biden’s inauguration. The danger is inflated to keep us in the right mood. In the meantime, a manhunt has started for participants of the ‘storm’ and more than a hundred have already been arrested. Even nonviolent protesters who had entered the Capitol in the wake of others risk prosecution for terrorism. On the day itself, only 14 were detained. Some agents let the so-called terrorists pass through and posed for selfies with them. But now they are hunted wherever they are. They will be severely punished. The state wants to set an example. When later new protests and riots break out in reaction to the impoverishment and violence that the capitalist crisis will bring on, they can be punished just as severely.
Journalist Glenn Greenwald compares the atmosphere in this country to the one after 9/11. Then, too, there was general horror at what had happened that gave the state an opportunity to strengthen its hold on its citizens. The comparison is not entirely correct, of course. The casualties and material damage were immeasurably greater then and the enemy was foreign, which was used by the state to start a few wars and spend many trillions on the army and police. It was also the excuse for introducing the “Patriot Act”, which significantly expanded the powers of the various police forces. Anything was possible in the name of 9/11, in the name of the fight against terrorism.
It is astonishing to see how the rhetorical tactics used during the “War on Terror” to attack civil liberties are now being reapplied, Greenwald argues. He sees the same aggressive exploitation of emotions, the same scare tactics and exaggeration of the danger, the same demonization of incorrect opinions. While it was the Republicans who led the offensive then, now it is the Democrats who are pushing for more repression. 1/6 is, according to Greenwald, “in so many ways, the liberals’ 9/11 “. And indeed, it will not surprise us when, in the name of democracy and the war against ‘domestic terrorism’, the repressive capacities of the state will be expanded even further, in preparation of social struggles that will be a real threat to the capitalist state.
The newest form of repression is social media banishment. Not only Trump, but tens of thousands of other Americans are no longer allowed to use Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, etcetera. This is justified on the grounds that those platforms are private companies which have the right to decide autonomously who they allow on their property. As if they are newspapers sovereignly determining their own content. But they are not. They are infrastructure companies. Five American companies – Facebook, Google, Twitter, Apple and Amazon – together control most of the conversation on the internet and determine what is allowed and what is not. That is an enormous concentration of power. A perfect osmosis between state power and private industry, in which the latter’s virtual police supplements the repression of the physical police.
Left-wing Democrats like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez who applaud the silencing of their worst opponents, don’t think it’s censorship, because there are still other channels where right-wing rebels can express their opinions. Which is the same as claiming that you will not hinder someone’s freedom of movement if you prohibit him from entering the city, because he can still go to a village. If the village is not destroyed. Parler, a platform used by more than 15 million that is popular in ultra-right circles for not censoring, was effectively killed by Google and Amazon, supposedly because it had been used to plan the Capitol storm. This while the platforms that were by far the most used for that purpose, were Facebook and YouTube (owned by Google).
I admit to some gloating about Trump losing his megaphone. And it can’t be denied that there are many propagators of lies and hatred among the social media exiles. But if you want the state and the big companies to silence their opinions, don’t claim to be in favor of free speech. The concentration of power of the state and the high tech companies is much more dangerous than the ultra-right. Those who call themselves anti-capitalists and approve of what is happening now must realize that tomorrow they themselves could become the target of the measures being taken today, in the name of democracy, against the demonized right wing ‘insurgents’.
A false sense of relief
The relief that Trump is gone is palpable, but there is a danger that the focus on Trump will not just burnish Biden’s credentials and credibility, but also obscure the culpability of capitalism itself. Its imperatives will shape the Biden administration’s policies. That sense of relief that many now feel will help pursue capital its domestic and foreign policy goals; and Biden will execute those goals more intelligently than Trump did. An intelligent steward of capitalism is no less dangerous, indeed more dangerous, than an incompetent one.
Those who dream that the Biden government will be a step to a more peaceful world will be in for a rude awakening. The deepening of capitalism’s crisis, the impoverishement it entails, will continue to foment social conflicts, the scarcity of profit will inflame inter-imperialist tensions. The main threat to the power of US capital is China, that focus doesn’t change from Trump to Biden. But confronting China will require mobilizing allies in Europe and Asia, in contrast to the Trumpian America first, and most of the time America alone, vision of foreign policy. The renewal of American commitment to global alliances and renewed American participation in multilateral agreements and agencies, will put real teeth in the global alliance to confront Beijing. Trump’s foreign policy was heavily based on rhetoric, but Biden’s foreign policy may very well be more confrontational in reality.
Despite its toothy smile, its incense for racial equality and green technology, its support for LGBTQ-rights and the ‘MeToo’ movement, the Biden government has to be seen for what it is: an agent of capital, determined to maintain and protect its system of exploitation against all threats. Wrestling a crisis for which its has no solution, and wrestling a working class that longs for a better world.
Sander
1/15
1The woman who got a bullet in her head was a military vet, deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Sad irony: on her Facebook-page, she had called for the return of firing squads. More sad irony in the other deaths: a woman carrying the “Gadsden flag”, which features the words “Don’t Tread on Me”, was trampled by the crowd. A man tasered himself accidently in the balls and had a fatal heart-attack.