Not to pick on the left, though. Splits and arguments among groups that are closely aligned on policy preferences is part of politics. The slaveowner and classical liberal theorist James Madison discussed that very phenomenon in Federalist #10. Groups and parties with little or no effective political power are also very prone to factionalism, because they have limited resources or rewards to hand out, like actual political offices or paid staffing opportunities that are available to larger parties.
That's certainly true on the radical right, most of which at the moment seems to be enthusiastically pro-Trump. Tina Nguyen and Mark Scott's report, Right-wing extremist chatter spreads on new platforms as threat of political violence ramps up Politico 01/12/2021, gives a sense of the fractious nature of the multiple groups trying to organize protests in support of Trump's ludicrous but deadly clown coup.
David Neiwert also remarks:
One the factors ameliorating the ability of the radical right to gain traction in the USA is the reality that, as a movement, it is almost entirely comprised of paranoid, volatile, egotistical people who eventually all hate each others' guts.https://t.co/FevDtnayRO
— David Neiwert (@DavidNeiwert) January 15, 2021
One of the post-January 6 controversies on the progressive left is over the required response to the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol. Part of what conscientious civil libertarians and people on the left do in the political conversation is try to step back from the moment to ask how different actors will exploit it.
Security agencies will always use a crisis to ask for more money. And they will always use a crisis to ask for greater leeway in how they go about their jobs. So, yes, it's part of the job of Members of Congress and responsible citizens to scrutinize such proposals carefully to the extent they can. That's basic to democracy, civil liberties, and the rule of law.
So we have discussions going on right now like this one on the Left Reckoning podcast featuring Matt Lech, David Griscomb, and Daniel Bessner, The War On Division? 01/16/2021, in which they raise legitimate concerns about how the "security state" will exploit this. Justice in the US and in many other countries is far too often "blind int he right eye" in that police and security agencies attract people with an authoritarian bent of mind. In the US, police agencies are often less alert to threats from white protesters or activists than they are toward those of color.
So we need to listen to the people who are raising these concerns.
Where I have a different perspective than the three participants on that podcast and some others on the left is that I think they may not fully appreciate the very real problem represented by the violent radical right and how badly law-enforcement in the US has neglected (and sometimes encouraged) it. And part of the problem is that violent far right groups like the Oath Keepers have been actively recruiting among police agencies and infiltrating law enforcement.
So this is an issue where people on the left should be able to walk and talk at the same time. The democratic framework for responding to the January 6 insurrection is one that can be elaborated in a similar way from a liberal perspective or a Marxist one or as something in between. For that matter, a conservative argument could be made in much the same way, although as the political theorist Corey Robin has been reminding us for years, what American Republicans call "conservatism" is very often reactionary ideology which is more interested in wrecking major elements of democracy and the rule of law rather than actually conserving it.
That case is this. The US has a liberal-democratic government with regular free elections based on the principle of universal suffrage. (A bourgeois-democratic government, if one prefers a more classical term,) The courts operate with real independence. It's a system based on a monopoly capitalist economy, which includes extreme social inequality that itself drastically limits the formal equality of citizens as political actors and serious de facto (and de jure!) corruption in the political system due to the role of big money political donors. And the rule of law is severely mitigated by a drastic carceral orientation that gives the US more ordinary prisoners than any other country in the world. In absolute numbers, not just proportional. And there are some serious democratic deficits in the current Constitution, including: the manner of electing the President through an Electoral College; the strongly undemocratic current structure of the US Senate; the lack of a Constitutional provision for the equality of women. And there is real though un-Constitutional voter suppression in many states largely based on race and ethnicity.
But there are regular, competitive elections with broad access to the vote, illustrated in 2020 by the highest turnout of eligible voters in the US since 1908. And even taking 1860 into account, until 2021 we have always had a peaceful transfer of power at the Presidential level. And despite the lynch mob invading the Capitol building at Trump's immediate incitement, the transfer of power to Joe Biden is still happening day after tomorrow.
There is no remotely feasible way that a successful coup by Trump would lead to a desirable outcome from any kind of serious left or center-left perspective. The closest hopeful analogy in that scenario would be a political general strike like the one that successfully blocked the Kapp Putsch in Germany in 1920. But even that scenario - which would require a general strike in a country with a relatively weak organized labor movement on a scale not seen since the work stoppages by freed slaves after the Emancipation Proclamation during the Civil War - would wind up in the best case with a restoration of the 2020 election results with a Democratic Administration in the White House.
The Capitol riot and Trump's clown coup attempt more generally has plenty of relevant predecessors in US history: the Aaron Burr conspiracy; the pro-British secessionist movement among Northeastern Federalists during the War of 1812-15; the slaveowners' invasion of Kansas Territory; the Confederate treason that caused the Civil War; the overthrow of democratic governments in the South by force and violence that ended Reconstruction; mass lynching incidents like the Tulsa race massacre of 1921; and, the Liberty League plot against FDR's Administration.
In all those cases, the "left" position at the time, and endorsed by most left historical interpretations, was to side against the rightwing insurrectionists and for the Constitutional government. One might argue that Bleeding Kansas was an exception, because the national government then dominated by very proslavery administrations supported and encouraged the violent proslavery groups in Kansas. The antislavery movement sympathized with and some directly engaged in the guerrilla war between the pro- and antislavery forces, the most famous participant in the latter being Captain John Brown. But the goal of the antislavery side was to incorporate Kansas Territory as a state under the American Constitution but without slavery.
In the case of the Union rejecting the secession of the Southern slave states, there were a couple of German writers who were very pro-Union and wrote articles for the American press sympathetic to the Union, and later became important figures in the European left, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
In none of those cases did it mean that liberals and leftists were indifferent to the fact of repression against labor and the left, or because they thought the existing government agreed with them on all major issues of the day. It was that they were looking at who was fighting for what, and what realistic consequences could be expected from a rightwing victory.
So siding with the elected Biden-Harris Administration against Trump's malicious clown coup seems painfully obvious to me. It doesn't mean that we should ignore misuses of the threat, especially by people who want to undermine civil liberties. We definitely should be opposed to that. But in terms of the substance of the violent threat from the far right, the problem the last 15 years has been more that the left, the center, and law enforcement were underestimating that threat rather than overestimating it.
The day after the Capitol riot, Chris Hayes and Ta-Nehisi Coates discussed the incident in this podcast (the YouTube version is dated 01/17/2021), in which they discuss some of the broad political, Consitutional, and even class questions it raised: Why Is This Happening? - Ep 144.
That case is this. The US has a liberal-democratic government with regular free elections based on the principle of universal suffrage. (A bourgeois-democratic government, if one prefers a more classical term,) The courts operate with real independence. It's a system based on a monopoly capitalist economy, which includes extreme social inequality that itself drastically limits the formal equality of citizens as political actors and serious de facto (and de jure!) corruption in the political system due to the role of big money political donors. And the rule of law is severely mitigated by a drastic carceral orientation that gives the US more ordinary prisoners than any other country in the world. In absolute numbers, not just proportional. And there are some serious democratic deficits in the current Constitution, including: the manner of electing the President through an Electoral College; the strongly undemocratic current structure of the US Senate; the lack of a Constitutional provision for the equality of women. And there is real though un-Constitutional voter suppression in many states largely based on race and ethnicity.
But there are regular, competitive elections with broad access to the vote, illustrated in 2020 by the highest turnout of eligible voters in the US since 1908. And even taking 1860 into account, until 2021 we have always had a peaceful transfer of power at the Presidential level. And despite the lynch mob invading the Capitol building at Trump's immediate incitement, the transfer of power to Joe Biden is still happening day after tomorrow.
There is no remotely feasible way that a successful coup by Trump would lead to a desirable outcome from any kind of serious left or center-left perspective. The closest hopeful analogy in that scenario would be a political general strike like the one that successfully blocked the Kapp Putsch in Germany in 1920. But even that scenario - which would require a general strike in a country with a relatively weak organized labor movement on a scale not seen since the work stoppages by freed slaves after the Emancipation Proclamation during the Civil War - would wind up in the best case with a restoration of the 2020 election results with a Democratic Administration in the White House.
The Capitol riot and Trump's clown coup attempt more generally has plenty of relevant predecessors in US history: the Aaron Burr conspiracy; the pro-British secessionist movement among Northeastern Federalists during the War of 1812-15; the slaveowners' invasion of Kansas Territory; the Confederate treason that caused the Civil War; the overthrow of democratic governments in the South by force and violence that ended Reconstruction; mass lynching incidents like the Tulsa race massacre of 1921; and, the Liberty League plot against FDR's Administration.
In all those cases, the "left" position at the time, and endorsed by most left historical interpretations, was to side against the rightwing insurrectionists and for the Constitutional government. One might argue that Bleeding Kansas was an exception, because the national government then dominated by very proslavery administrations supported and encouraged the violent proslavery groups in Kansas. The antislavery movement sympathized with and some directly engaged in the guerrilla war between the pro- and antislavery forces, the most famous participant in the latter being Captain John Brown. But the goal of the antislavery side was to incorporate Kansas Territory as a state under the American Constitution but without slavery.
In the case of the Union rejecting the secession of the Southern slave states, there were a couple of German writers who were very pro-Union and wrote articles for the American press sympathetic to the Union, and later became important figures in the European left, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
In none of those cases did it mean that liberals and leftists were indifferent to the fact of repression against labor and the left, or because they thought the existing government agreed with them on all major issues of the day. It was that they were looking at who was fighting for what, and what realistic consequences could be expected from a rightwing victory.
So siding with the elected Biden-Harris Administration against Trump's malicious clown coup seems painfully obvious to me. It doesn't mean that we should ignore misuses of the threat, especially by people who want to undermine civil liberties. We definitely should be opposed to that. But in terms of the substance of the violent threat from the far right, the problem the last 15 years has been more that the left, the center, and law enforcement were underestimating that threat rather than overestimating it.
No liberals welcome in a Popular Front against ... a violent rightwing coup attempt against the US govt that featured a white supremacist lynch mob hunting down Members of Congress in the halls of the Capitol?!? https://t.co/P0Ykc1R9I4
— brucemillerca (@brucemillerca) January 18, 2021
The day after the Capitol riot, Chris Hayes and Ta-Nehisi Coates discussed the incident in this podcast (the YouTube version is dated 01/17/2021), in which they discuss some of the broad political, Consitutional, and even class questions it raised: Why Is This Happening? - Ep 144.
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