Impeachment II over, most Senate Republican refuse to convict, give Trump a new free pass on high crimes and misdemeanors

Trump Impeachment II is now over. A distinct majority of the Republicans in the House and the Senate were unwilling to hold their Leader Trump responsible for even the most serious kinds of misconduct in office. The long bipartisan consensus on not holding Republican Presidents and their administrations formally accountable for even criminal conduct has at least been breached. And that's progress.

But now it's critical for federal and state officials to conduct genuinely professional, independent investigations of the Trump Administration's misconduct. John Dean puts it this way:

While I have been sharing thoughts on CNN about impeachment I have not tweeted until now. The Republican Party has confirmed they are, as I reported in my last book, the authoritarian party. They are Un-American and dangerous. We must all hope Trump is jailed for his many crimes!

— John W. Dean (@JohnWDean) February 14, 2021

We found out during the impeachment trial that the lynch mob on January 6 was very close to getting Mike Pence, although I'm sure his Secret Service detail would have put up a serious fight. Pence had the second "nuclear football" with him that contains the nuclear launch codes. The insurrectionists couldn't have used it to launch any missiles. But that would have still been one of the worst security breaches ever. (Barbara Starr and Caroline Kelly, Military officials were unaware of potential danger to Pence's 'nuclear football' during Capitol riot 02/12/2021)

Washington Sen. Patty Murray gave a memorable interview on her experience during the Capitol insurrection on January 6, Sen. Patty Murray recounts her narrow escape from a violent mob inside the U.S. Capitol 02/13/2021:

Heather Cox Richardson described the revelations from Friday in her 01/12/2021 Facebook post. She also calls out this important point about how Trump's legal team used the trial to promote his central political Big Lie:

... Trump’s lawyers refused to say that he lost the election. Trump’s big lie, the lie that has driven his attack on our democracy, is that the outcome of the 2020 election was rigged and that, in reality, he won it in a landslide. There is no merit to this argument. It has been dismissed by state election boards across the country and by our courts, including the Supreme Court. But he continues to refuse to concede the election, fueling a movement that threatens to create a long-term domestic insurgency. His lawyers today endorsed that position.

Jamie Gangel et al report in New details about Trump-McCarthy shouting match show Trump refused to call off the rioters CNN 02/13/2020 on new evidence produced showing even more clearly that Trump new what dangers Members of Congress were in during the insurrection and deliberately refused to send aid, clearly citing with the attackers he had organized and directly incited.

Cenk Uygur gives his take on the story in Breaking: Trump Would Not Call Off the Rioters! TYT 02/12/2021

The facts that came out this past week made me realize that the coup came a lot closer to succeeding than I had thought. It was still a clown coup because it was run by malicious clowns. And it's still true what Timothy Snyder wrote afterwards, that the Orange Clown failed to get enough of the right people to do the wrong thing for it to succeed.

But if the mob had succeeded in murdering Mike Pence and maybe a few Members of Congress - and if they had managed to take possession of Pence's nuclear football - that could have been an excuse for declaring martial law and shutting down Congress to prevent the formal certification of the Presidential election. I thought it was especially chilling what Patty Murray said in her PBS interview embedded above, that the mob outside her office door were chanting "Kill the Infidels!"

That thing came close to being more a bloodbath than it was. The lynch mob was able to engage in continuous fighting with the Capitol police for at least a couple of hours, and there was obviously a very clear plan to withhold outside assistance.

Also, hearing and seeing more details about how bad the situation in the Capitol was, how tactically coordinated much of it was, and how close they came to killing Members of Congress, I'm wondering again: Haven't we spent nearly 20 years waging a "Global War on Terror"? I'm old enough to remember when advocates for the Iraq War said that we have to fight Them over there so we won't have to fight Them over here.

And after all that, a bunch of Rambo wannabes were able to stage the January 6 occupation of the US Capitol? And prowl around inside for hours chanting "Hang Mike Pence!" and "Kill the Infidels!"?

There is something really wrong with this picture.

We can always hope, and there was at least a slim theoretical possibility that enough Republicans would vote to convict to make it official. Depending on how involved some of them may have been with planning or coordinating the event, some of the Senators might have decided to vote for conviction as a way to mitigate possible criminal charges against them.

But the fact is that a Republican like Kevin McCarthy even after his now-infamous call with Trump during the Capitol raid still went down to Mar-O-Lago to kiss the Leader's ring. That doesn't look like even a normal sense of physical self-preservation to me, much less integrity or responsibility. And that is clearly the dominant position among Congressional Republicans, as both impeachments of Trump have shown.

But to be fair, they also know they do face a non-trivial risk of being assassinated by a Trump cult follower if they come out openly against him. It's not an excuse for them, as the Senate Republican votes to convict illustrate. But it's part of the grim reality of Trumpified national politics in the US:

Experts take a closer look at the January 6 insurrectionists

Robert Pape, author of the important study of suicide bombers, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (2005) and Keven Ruby have an analysis of Capitol attackers in the January 6 insurrection, The Capitol Rioters Aren’t Like Other Extremists The Atlantic 02/02/2021.

They present the data in this PowerPoint, The Face of American Insurrection: Right-Wing Organizations Evolving into a Violent Mass Movement 01/28/2021.

Dave Neiwert discusses their article in Profile of Capitol siege arrestees indicates pro-Trump extremists increasingly middle-class, older Daily Kos 02/04/2021. One of his main takeaways is how this shows the ongoing radicalization of the Republican Party and the mainstreaming of more ideas and attitudes from the violent radical right. As Pape and Ruby put it:

[A] closer look at the people suspected of taking part in the Capitol riot suggests a different and potentially far more dangerous problem: a new kind of violent mass movement in which more “normal” Trump supporters —middle-class and, in many cases, middle-aged people without obvious ties to the far right—joined with extremists in an attempt to overturn a presidential election.

Neiwert notes, "Compared to far-right extremists who have been arrested for their involvement in previous acts of political violence (such as the 2017 Charlottesville riots), many of the people arrested for their roles in the Capitol siege have a great deal to lose."

From the experience of the 1920s and 1930s, it has been widely assumed conventionally that fascist movement was particularly attractive to a petit bourgeois/middle class base, i.e, shopkeepers, small business owners, farmers. The data on which Pape and Ruby report seem to be consistent with that understanding, although we should be careful not to over-generalize from that. As they write in The Atlantic, "Unlike the stereotypical extremist, many of the alleged participants in the Capitol riot have a lot to lose. They work as CEOs, shop owners, doctors, lawyers, IT specialists, and accountants."

For instance, the PowerPoint includes these two bullet points:

Overall, the Biden counties versus the Trump counties that produced insurrectionists are more unemployed, more mixed race, and far more big city.

Telling example is Dallas County, Texas – which produced 4 insurrectionists and had a vote for Trump at 33%, unemployment is just at the national average, and 67% white.

The fact that an urban area with high unemployment may be more likely to produce violent rightwing insurrectionists does not mean that the participants are themselves unemployed or suffering from significant material "economic anxiety", to use the now-notorious lazy journalistic phrase. But it also does not mean that the economic conditions (or "anxieties") in the places where they live had no contributing effect to their political alignments and actions.

The value of this kind of factual database is that it allows people to look at the complexities of causation and prevention, or Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) to use a risk-management term, based on solid data of a significant incident of political violence.

The PowerPoint also notes, "the more Trump voters in a county – even in counties Biden won – the greater likelihood that county would send an insurrectionist to the US Capitol. This is because there are twice as many people who live in Biden counties compared to those who live in Trump counties." I would take from this that while it's an important data point, it does not necessarily mean that violent seditionist sentiment is relatively weaker in Trump majority areas. It may just reflect that is a place where there are just more people available as a pool from which to draw.

Dave Neiwert provides a review with links to more detailed reports of public events that foreshadowed the January 6 development, and warns: "All of these events set the stage for the January 6 insurrection. Its aftermath, as both the violence and the nature of the people who participated clearly demonstrate, almost certainly foretell a sustained, violent insurgency against not just the Biden administration but democracy itself for the foreseeable future."

The PowerPoint presentation also includes these cautionary observations:

Timothy Snyder on the trajectory of Trumpism (2 of 2): The Big Lie and the strategic perspective of the Party of Trump

"Post-truth is pre-fascism," writes Timothy Snyder, "and Trump has been our post-truth president." (The American Abyss New York Times Magazine 01/09/2021)

More details are coming out about the specifics of the January 6 storming of the Capitol at the direct, immediate incitement of Donald Trump himself. PBS Frontline has a documentary called Trump's American Carnage that take that riot as a starting point.

Frontline also is posting long segments of some of the interviews they did for the program. This is one that focuses on the kinds of concerns on which Snyder focuses. It's with Olivia Troye, someone I don't recall having heard of before, who was a homeland security and counterterrorism adviser to VP Mike Pence.

She was there in a professional capacity, not as a political adviser, and left Pence's staff in August 2020. This one was done after January 6 but before Biden's Inauguration. She talks quite a bit about the Capitol riot and Trump's encouragement and direct incitement.

She seems to have an impressively nuanced and realistic view of Pence himself. Toward the end (45:00 ff), she's asked about Pence's situation when he was in the Capitol and the lynch mob was coming for him. "I can't imagine what it must be like to have stood by someone unwaveringly, and been in this environment for four years, fully knowing how dangerous this man [Trump] can be. 'Cause we've seen this, repeatedly, and it leads to his own life [Pence's] being put directly in danger by this individual [Trump]. Right? You have the President basically setting up the Vice President of our country in a situation where he puts his [Pence's] life in danger.]."

And, speaking from her professional experience in counterterrorism, "And I have no doubt that the threat level on the Vice President [Pence] will remain high. 'Cause these people are not gonna forget." And at the end, she says, "You can't have unity if you don't have accountability." Olivia Troye is currently part of the Republican Accountability Project.

Snyder talks about how the Big Lie that Trump established around the blatantly false claim that Biden won the Presidential election through election fraud. The Big Lie is something historically associated in particular with the Hitler movement. Snyder describes that infamous Big Lie as:

... Hitlerian anti-Semitism: the claims that Jews ran the world, Jews were responsible for ideas that poisoned German minds, Jews stabbed Germany in the back during the First World War. Intriguingly, [Hannah] Arendt thought big lies work only in lonely minds; their coherence substitutes for experience and companionship.

In November 2020, reaching millions of lonely minds through social media, Trump told a lie that was dangerously ambitious: that he had won an election that in fact he had lost. This lie was big in every pertinent respect: not as big as “Jews run the world,” but big enough. The significance of the matter at hand was great: the right to rule the most powerful country in the world and the efficacy and trustworthiness of its succession procedures. The level of mendacity was profound. The claim was not only wrong, but it was also made in bad faith, amid unreliable sources. It challenged not just evidence but logic: Just how could (and why would) an election have been rigged against a Republican president but not against Republican senators and representatives? Trump had to speak, absurdly, of a “Rigged (for President) Election.” [my emphasis]

But this Big Lie isn't just a professional-wrestling gimmick that Donald Trump came up with. It's one that the Republican Party in general have been working on for four decades. It's just now graduated from the concept that the Democratic Party is illegitimate to the notion that democratic elections are illegitimate. And the rule-of-law system along with it.

Snyder gives us a sobering reminder of how far along Trump got with his actual plan. And the role that Trump's own lack of knowledge of politics and government and his own laziness played in its failure. On the storming of the Capitol, he writes, "It is hard to think of a comparable insurrectionary moment, when a building of great significance was seized, that involved so much milling around." In other words, "for all his lawsuits and entreaties and threats to public officials, [Trump] could not engineer a situation that ended with the right people doing the wrong thing."

But it did provide a real-world example of how close it could come. The two groups of Republicans that Snyder calls the Gamers and the Breakers have a template for a coup that they can broadly share. And did broadly share in 2020-1.

If Trump remains present in American political life, he will surely repeat his big lie incessantly. Hawley and Cruz and the other breakers share responsibility for where this leads. Cruz and Hawley seem to be running for president. Yet what does it mean to be a candidate for office and denounce voting? If you claim that the other side has cheated, and your supporters believe you, they will expect you to cheat yourself. By defending Trump’s big lie on Jan. 6, they set a precedent: A Republican presidential candidate who loses an election should be appointed anyway by Congress. Republicans in the future, at least breaker candidates for president, will presumably have a Plan A, to win and win, and a Plan B, to lose and win. No fraud is necessary; only allegations that there are allegations of fraud. Truth is to be replaced by spectacle, facts by faith.

Trump’s coup attempt of 2020-21, like other failed coup attempts, is a warning for those who care about the rule of law and a lesson for those who do not. His pre-fascism revealed a possibility for American politics. For a coup to work in 2024, the breakers will require something that Trump never quite had: an angry minority, organized for nationwide violence, ready to add intimidation to an election. Four years of amplifying a big lie just might get them this. To claim that the other side stole an election is to promise to steal one yourself. It is also to claim that the other side deserves to be punished. [my emphasis]

Mark Sumner has an insightful Twitter thread on this process that has played out to this point in the Republican Party. He goes back to what Ronald Reagan called the 11th Commandment, that Republicans shouldn't criticize other Republicans, which as he puts it, "erected a wall on the Republican left, but placed not a single barrier to the right. It meant there was never any internal testing of ideas. There was no competition to challenge and refine claims. No effort to call out extreme views. ..." (01/30/2021)

The Twitter format forces painting in broad strokes. So of course we could point out that the Republican Party at times over those four decades have called out the more extreme views of characters like David Duke and Pat Buchanan. But Sumer describes the basic trend very well. David Duke may have been too bitter a pill for country club Republicans to swallow. But Rush Limbaugh wasn't. Nor Alex Jones.

So, he writes, "Josh Hawley opposing votes certified by PA’s GOP legislature is the future of the Republican Party." And Hawley is by no means the only one ready to keep operating on Trump's coup template: A Slap in The Face to Voters': GOP Bill Would Allow AZ Legislature to Overturn Election The Choice 01/30/2021.

Snyder also centers the white supremacy element in the current Republican drive against democracy. "In the past half century, since the Civil Rights Act, Republicans have become a predominantly white party interested — as Trump openly declared — in keeping the number of voters, and particularly the number of Black voters, as low as possible." And he says of the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, "At bottom, the fantasy of fraud is that of a crime committed by Black people against white people."

Snyder uses the f-word (fascism) without jumping into the thornbush of academic definition. He writes of using the history of fascism to understand Trumpism, "One comfortable position has been to label any such effort as a direct comparison and then to treat such comparisons as taboo. More productively, the philosopher Jason Stanley has treated fascism as a phenomenon, as a series of patterns that can be observed not only in interwar Europe but beyond it." Mussolini actually called his politics Fascism - it's where we get the word for that brand of politics - and Hitler modeled his takeover of power after Mussolini's. So we can observe similarities without having to quibble about the precise definition.

Snyder in this article uses the word "cult" only in the context of a "martyrdom cult" the authoritarian governing party in Poland currently uses. But understanding cults does shed light on how the current Trumpian Big Lie functions:

Thanks to technological capacity and personal talent, Donald Trump lied at a pace perhaps unmatched by any other leader in history. For the most part these were small lies, and their main effect was cumulative. To believe in all of them was to accept the authority of a single man, because to believe in all of them was to disbelieve everything else. Once such personal authority was established, the president could treat everyone else as the liars; he even had the power to turn someone from a trusted adviser into a dishonest scoundrel with a single tweet. Yet so long as he was unable to enforce some truly big lie, some fantasy that created an alternative reality where people could live and die, his pre-fascism fell short of the thing itself. [my emphasis]

In the more narrow sociological-clinical sense of cult, like Jim Jones' People's Temple, or the UFO cult Heaven's Gate, or the Branch Davidians, that doesn't describe the complexity of the current authoritarianism in the Republican Party. But there is a cultish aspect in Trump following.

Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, calls the Trumpified Republican Party "a one-man cult." (Rep. Jayapal: GOP Isn't A Party Of Principle. It's A Cult MSNBC/The 11th Hour 01/30/2021)

Steven Hassan, an authority on cults and author of The Cult of Trump (2019), spoke earlier this month with Kati Couric on this subject, Former Cult Follower Describes How President Trump Has Created a Cult Following (a sloppy YouTube title!) 01/13/2021:

I'll end by going back once again to what Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein wrote in their 2012 book, It's Even Worse Than It Looks:

[H]owever awkward it may be for the traditional press and nonpartisan analysts to acknowledge, one of the two major parties, the Republican Party, has become an insurgent outlier- ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

Trump is no longer President. But the Republican Party is still a Trumpian party. And it is still on the trajectory that took it from 2012 to becoming the Party of Trump. In 2020, the Republican National Committee (RNC) didn't even bother to adopt a new party platform. They just issued a one-page resolution stating, "RESOLVED, That the Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda." It really is the Party of Trump.

Timothy Snyder on the trajectory of Trumpism (1 of 2): "Gamers" and "Breakers"

Confirmed: There is no looming GOP "reckoning" over Trump, and there will never will be, no matter how many times naïve news outlets suggest otherwise.

For five years, the press has gotten this story wrong. Why? Today's Republican Party represents an unwieldy challenge for news outlets. It spent the winter wantonly trying to invalidate election results, while simultaneously endangering the masses during a public healthy crisis by deliberately misinforming Americans about the Covid-19 pandemic. It has also taken no disciplinary action against a new Congresswoman who previously supported the killing of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

Yet the press remains committed to portraying the GOP as a mainstream, center-right entity. That's why it keeps botching the "reckoning" story — reporters assume there is a Republican breaking point with Trump and the politics of hate and revenge he represents. But there never is.

- Eric Boehlert, Memo to media: the GOP's Trump "reckoning" is never coming Press Run 01/29/2021

I mentioned recently the Republican ritual of distancing themselves from previous Republican Presidents and failed Republican Presidential candidates.

But that is happening now only to a very limited extent. And it's getting a lot of pushback from the majority Republicans. (Nick Reynolds, Wyoming Capitol crowd cheers on Gaetz, seeks replacement for Cheney Casper Star-Tribune 01/28/2021)

That disavowal ritual has been part of the continuous radicalization of the Republican Party over the last four decades. It's not because the radicalization process has stopped. Nomiki Konst and her two guests in this clip looks at a recent comment by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the topic, AOC: GOP Is Full-On White Supremacist Party 01/29/2021:

Frank Luntz, who now calls himself a former Republican pollster, suggests in this long interview that Trumpism reflects the political radicalization of the Republican base. "These are not your parents' Republicans." (Trump's American Carnage: Frank Luntz (interview) PBS Frontline)

Part of the restraint on criticizing Trump is surely a horse-race one. Trump is still around, he has a fanatical following in the Republican base, and he is still eligible to run for President in 2024.

But Timothy Snyder's essay earlier this month offers a useful way to look at divisions within the Republican Party post-Capitol-riot, The American Abyss New York Times Magazine 01/09/2021. He sees today's Republican Party as an alliance between two political mentalities, which he labels the "gamers" and the "breakers". I might have picked Players and Destroyers, as the labels, but he doesn't.

In his schema, Mitch McConnell is emblematic of the Gamers and Trump of the Breakers. But he does not see this as a difference in basic policies and goal. Or even in their commitment to democracy, at least not in the sense of popular rule. Those he calls the Gamers are "concerned above all with gaming the system to maintain power, taking full advantage of constitutional obscurities, gerrymandering and dark money to win elections with a minority of motivated voters."

In other words, gaming major undemocratic elements of the system like the Electoral College, the structure of the Senate, and Supreme Court elimination of controls on campaign donations and of civil rights legislation to prevent disenfranchisement of voters based on race, to maintain dominant national power even when they cannot win a majority of votes nationally. "They have no interest in the collapse of the peculiar form of representation that allows their minority party disproportionate control of government." They want to maintain the forms of democracy and Constitutional government, in other words, even while they cheat the democratic system.

Wisconsin is one of the Gamers' success stories. "In 2012, the first election with the new [severely gerrymandered legislative districts] in place, Republicans won less than half the votes, but conquered 60 of the state’s 99 assembly seats. The Republicans grew their majority in 2014 and 2016, despite earning just over 50% of the statewide vote." (Sam Levine, Wisconsin: the state where American democracy went to die The Guardian 04/10/2020; my emphasis).

Snyder writes:

In the four decades since the election of Ronald Reagan, Republicans have overcome the tension between the gamers and the breakers by governing in opposition to government, or by calling elections a revolution (the Tea Party), or by claiming to oppose elites. The breakers, in this arrangement, provide cover for the gamers, putting forth an ideology that distracts from the basic reality that government under Republicans is not made smaller butsimply diverted to serve a handful of interests.

At first, Trump seemed like a threat to this balance. His lack of experience in politics and his open racism made hima very uncomfortable figure for the party; his habit of continually telling lies was initially found by prominent Republicans to be uncouth. Yet after he won the presidency, his particular skills as a breaker seemed to create a tremendous opportunity for the gamers. Led by the gamer in chief, McConnell, they secured hundreds of federal judges and tax cuts for the rich.

Trump was unlike other breakers in that he seemed to have no ideology. His objection to institutions was that they might constrain him personally. He intended to break the system to serve himself — and this is partly why he has failed. Trump is a charismatic politician and inspires devotion not only among voters but among a surprising number of lawmakers, but he has no vision that is greater than himself or what his admirers project upon him. In this respect his pre-fascism fell short of fascism: His vision never went further than a mirror. He arrived at a trulybig lie not from any view of the world but from the reality that he might lose something. [my emphasis]

In other words, Snyder is agreeing with those who have been commenting that we got lucky in that Trump was too stupid to actually pull off a coup. And I think this is right, although we are finding out more all the time about how close he actually came, and we will know a lot more eventually.

But Trump didn't just talk and practice "revolutionary" symbolism. He actually wanted to "revolutionize" the system. Or more clearly, to use pseudo-revolutionary rhetoric and posturing to stage an actual authoritarian coup. Here is some of the putschist rhetoric from the Transcript of Trump's January 6 incitement speech (U.S. News/AP; my emphasis in bold), all part of a long speech in which he recounted fabricated tales of voter fraud and repeatedly invoked the names of Barack Obama and Stacey Abrams, both African-American politicians his white supremacist base despite. I'm including a longish selection, to give some context to Snyder's observation that given Trump's message, the storming of the Capitol "did make a kind of sense: If the election really had been stolen, as senators and congressmen were themselves suggesting, then how could Congress be allowed to move forward?" (my italics)

Trump, January 6:

The media is the biggest problem we have as far as I’m concerned, single biggest problem. The fake news and the Big tech. ...

All of us here today do not want to see our election victory stolen by emboldened radical-left Democrats, which is what they’re doing. And stolen by the fake news media. That’s what they’ve done and what they’re doing. We will never give up, we will never concede. It doesn’t happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved. ...

And by the way, does anybody believe that Joe had 80 million votes? Does anybody believe that? He had 80 million computer votes. It’s a disgrace. There’s never been anything like that. You could take third-world countries. Just take a look. Take third-world countries. Their elections are more honest than what we’ve been going through in this country. It’s a disgrace. It’s a disgrace. ...

We don’t have a free and fair press. Our media is not free, it’s not fair. It suppresses thought, it suppresses speech and it’s become the enemy of the people. It’s become the enemy of the people. It’s the biggest problem we have in this country. ...

We’re gathered together in the heart of our nation’s capital for one very, very basic and simple reason: To save our democracy. ...

For years, Democrats have gotten away with election fraud and weak Republicans. And that’s what they are. There’s so many weak Republicans. And we have great ones. Jim Jordan and some of these guys, they’re out there fighting. The House guys are fighting. But it’s, it’s incredible. ...

Many of the Republicans, I helped them get in, I helped them get elected. I helped Mitch get elected. I helped. I could name 24 of them, let’s say, I won’t bore you with it. And then all of a sudden you have something like this. It’s like, “Oh gee, maybe I’ll talk to the president sometime later.” No, it’s amazing.

They’re weak Republicans, they’re pathetic Republicans and that’s what happens. ...

But we look at the facts and our election was so corrupt that in the history of this country we’ve never seen anything like it. You can go all the way back. ...

Republicans are, Republicans are constantly fighting like a boxer with his hands tied behind his back. It’s like a boxer. And we want to be so nice. We want to be so respectful of everybody, including bad people. And we’re going to have to fight much harder. ...

Now, it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. And after this, we’re going to walk down, and I’ll be there with you, we’re going to walk down, we’re going to walk down.

Anyone you want, but I think right here, we’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them.

Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong. We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated, lawfully slated. ...

The American people do not believe the corrupt, fake news anymore. They have ruined their reputation. But you know, it used to be that they’d argue with me. I’d fight. So I’d fight, they’d fight, I’d fight, they’d fight. Pop pop. You’d believe me, you’d believe them. Somebody comes out. You know, they had their point of view, I had my point of view, but you’d have an argument.

Now what they do is they go silent. It’s called suppression and that’s what happens in a communist country. That’s what they do, they suppress. You don’t fight with them anymore. Unless it’s a bad story. They have a little bad story about me, they make it 10 times worse and it’s a major headline. ...

Today, for the sake of our democracy, for the sake of our Constitution, and for the sake of our children, we lay out the case for the entire world to hear. You want to hear it?

(Audience responds: “Yeah”)

In every single swing state, local officials, state officials, almost all Democrats, made illegal and unconstitutional changes to election procedures without the mandated approvals by the state legislatures.

That these changes paved a way for fraud on a scale never seen before. ...

I’ve been telling these Republicans, get rid of Section 230. And for some reason, Mitch and the group, they don’t want to put it in there and they don’t realize that that’s going to be the end of the Republican Party as we know it, but it’s never going to be the end of us. Never. Let them get out. Let, let the weak ones get out. This is a time for strength.

They also want to indoctrinate your children in school by teaching them things that aren’t so. They want to indoctrinate your children. It’s all part of the comprehensive assault on our democracy, and the American people are finally standing up and saying no. This crowd is, again, a testament to it. ...

The radical left knows ...exactly what they’re doing. They’re ruthless and it’s time that somebody did something about it. ...

As this enormous crowd shows, we have truth and justice on our side. We have a deep and enduring love for America in our hearts. We love our country. ...

We have overwhelming pride in this great country and we have it deep in our souls. Together, we are determined to defend and preserve government of the people, by the people and for the people. ...

And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore. ...

Reports on January 5 Meeting at Trump International Hotel, Washington

Seth Baramson has been digging into a January 5 meeting between various senior players on the Trump team, likely including Trump himself, the day before the Trump-incited lynch mob invaded the Capitol building. A meeting which is presumably getting the kind of legal scrutiny it appears to deserve.

Abramson's research takes off from this report: Aaron Sanderford, Charles Herbster, who may run for Nebraska governor, was at Trump rally before Capitol violence Omaha World-Herald 01/06/2021; updated 01/27/2021.

Here's a piece by David Badash summarizing the story, Viral video renews interest in report Trump sons held pre-Capitol coup meeting to ‘pressure’ lawmakers Raw Story 01/27/2021

And here are four of Abramson's reports, in reverse chronological order.

Seth Abramson, January 5 Meeting at Trump International Hotel Could Hold the Key to the January 6 Insurrection Proof 01/26/2021

Seth Abramson, More Revelations About Secretive January 5 War Council at Trump International Hotel Proof 01/27/2021

Seth Abramson, What Michael Flynn and Alex Jones Were Doing on the Eve of Insurrection, and Why It Matters Proof 01/29/2021

Seth Abramson, Breaking: U.S. Senators, Trump Family Members, and Top Trump Lieutenants Met in Trump's Private Residence on January 5 with Man Who Has Endorsed Violent Sedition Proof 01/29/2021

A documentary on the Capitol riot

Mehdi Hasan has a documentar report on the Capitol insurrection of three weeks ago, Capitol Crimes: Inside the Insurrection 01/28/2021:

Dave Neiwert gives us an idea of the direction far-right terrorism will go over the next few months (Far right reeling from Capitol siege consequences, so it returns to ‘leaderless resistance’ tactics Daily Kos 01/27/2021):

Radical-right organizing works in cycles: There’s an initial buildup and recruitment phase, followed by preplanned direct action in escalating levels of violence, eventually resulting in an explosion of public violence that exposes them both to public approbation and prosecution by authorities. These bursts of violence tend to scatter their forces as they dissolve into factional squabbling. At this point, they begin to reorganize under a “leaderless resistance” strategy deploying small action cells and “lone wolf” terrorists, and begin rebuilding. Lather, rinse, repeat.

The most recent far-right explosion of violence—the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol—has had its predictable effect, particularly due to the stern law-enforcement response involving multiple arrests of participants as well as the subsequent bans on their presence in social media, dispersing their organizers and followers to the far dark reaches of the internet and inspiring internecine warfare. Moreover, as Ben Makuch reports for Vice, white-supremacist ideologues are now responding by preparing a fresh round of domestic terrorism deploying both paramilitary “action squads” and unaffiliated extremists capable of extreme violence.

He goes on to explain how this approach reinforces the media narrative of rightwing terrorist acts as being "isolated incidents," when often they are very much part of a broader network of fanaticism and hatred. When in reality, when the media report "that such events are committed by 'lone wolves,' without any recognition that such a designation actually indicates the opposite of an 'isolated' event."

Part of the larger political environment for the radical right is the Christian Right movement. While most of their leaders and ministers don't directly promote violence, they often do promote an apocalyptic attitude toward polices (the claimed war on Christianity), an anti-science bias (creationism), and general moral fanaticism, especially around abortion. And the obscure theology of Christian Reconstruction has played a major role in the formation of today's Radical Right.

As Chrissy Stroop notes (Where Were They Radicalized? Religion Dispatches 01/19/2021):

As I like to say, however, the Christian Right has been doing “alternative facts” since before it was cool. It would be remiss of us to approach the “where were they radicalized” question without addressing how the Christian schooling and homeschooling movement, along with many white churches and other evangelical, LDS, and ‘trad’ Catholic institutions, fostered the subcultures that created the demand for hyper-partisan “news” outlets like Fox News.

Any serious answer to the question of radicalization will have to address Christian nationalism’s own longstanding (dis)information and political ecosystem, taking into account the feedback loops between it; overt white supremacist and right-wing extremist groups; elite right-wing lobbies like the Council for National Policy; digital technology; and the rise of talk radio and right-wing cable “news.”

Law enforcement needs to take far-right terrorism more seriously - but not with a failed "War on Terror" framework

"A War on Terror modeled after the post-9/11 response would probably be not just ineffective but disastrous," writes Dave Neiwert. (As Biden tries to tackle white-supremacist terrorism, he should steer clear of any ‘War on Terror’ Daily Kos 01/22/2021)

Dave has been an advocate for more serious attention to the problems of far-right terrorism for years. But as he explains again in this piece, even after years of far-right, non-Islamic terrorism being far more of a problem than "radical Islamic terrorism," to use one of the Republicans' favorite magic conjuring phrases, law enforcement is still plagued by the problem of being blind in the right eye, not least because some in law enforcement as active sympathizers of the far right. And, of course, the obvious white racism in law enforcement nationwide means that many of them are unlikely to regard the white supremacy that is a core orientation for the far right.

This piece draws heavily on two other recent articles: Spencer Ackerman's Biden Taps a War on Terror Veteran to Stop White Supremacists Daily Beast 01/21/2021 and No, We Do Not Need New Anti-Terrorism Laws to Combat Right-Wing Extremists 01/11/2021.

What they all stress is that the central problem of fighting far-right terrorism has not been the lack of laws, but the lack of focus on the problem. Bayoumi writes:

While the USA Patriot Act did redefine terrorism to include its domestic variety, it did not create a specific set of penalties for such acts. Instead, prosecutors can use many of the broad terrorism laws that are on the books to prosecute acts of domestic terror (the majority of which have been committed by far-right actors). The problem is, they simply don’t. (my emphasis)

The milieu of domestic white-supremacist terrorism is very different from that of Islamist terrorism, including the nature of foreign connections that may be involved. To use Democrats' current favorite foreign enemy Russia as an example, Russia does encourage and subsidize far-right movements and groups in foreign countries, but aren't so likely to subsidize radical Islamic jihadist groups. Although our common terminology that distinguishes "far-right" from "Islamic" terrorism is a bit murky, because in terms of political ideology, jihadist Islamism can also legitimately be described as far right in terms of its authoritarianism and cultural politics.

For that matter, if there actually are far-left terrorist groups active in the US (if there are any, they are staying well concealed!), that would also be a distinct political and cultural environment than those of white-supremacist far-right or violent Islamist groups.

But the nearly 20-year-long War on Terror has been almost exclusively focused in practice on Islamist groups. And in the real world, there is a lot of ideological and organizational inertia to do more of what they've been doing in the past. As Bayoumi puts it:

[A] terrorism double standard exists. And the double standard is deeply entrenched both in our laws and in our broader culture. Left unexamined, this same double standard feeds off of its own bigoted limitations and assumptions and grows like yeast in a warm oven. One result of this is the discourse we’re now all familiar with: White guy shooters get labeled as angry or desperate or losers, while Muslim shooters are defined as terrorists. The former are examined as troubled individuals. The latter no longer belong to humanity.

Ackerman's report focused on a key Biden appointee, Russ Travers, as deputy Homeland Security adviser in the White House. Travers "has marinated in the War on Terror," he writes.

But some worry that it will be natural—indeed, human—for Travers to apply his post-9/11 experience to far-right and white-supremacist terror. That would be a disaster, they warn, both for the Constitution and for success. With debate underway amongst Democrats over new domestic terrorism statutes, the path Biden chooses is likely to define his early tenure as president.

“War-on-terrorism tactics aren't the solution to our current problems. In many ways, they are a cause of them,” said Michael German, a retired FBI special agent who arrested white supremacists in the 1990s, and who spoke generically and not about Travers particularly.

Dave Neiwert makes the following key pointss: (1) US law-enforcment needs to take far-right domestic terrorism much more seriously; (2) there is a vigorous legal framework already in place to investigate and prosecute far-right terrorist groups, though the statutes on domestic terrorism may be murky in some ways; (3) the central problem is that white supremacist attitudes are deeply ingrained in law enforcement agencies, a bias that strongly favors permissive treatment for far-right criminals; and, (4) "the War on Terror has in fact failed."

I don't know if there may be some changes to the law that might be needed to combat the kind of insurrectionist groups behind the January 6 Capitol riot. But it's the responsibility of our representatives in Congress to scrutinize laws carefully for necessity, effectiveness, and protection of civil liberties and due process. Congress and the Biden-Harris Administration should definitely not use this as an opportunity to pass a wishlist of new measures without regard to the actual problems.

And, new laws or not, what Dave Neiwert writes here is critically important:

It’s not credible to expect our national law-enforcement apparatus to respond effectively to far-right domestic terrorism when its ranks are full of people sympathetic to their cause. So any effective solution to dealing with the spread of domestic terrorism will necessarily be wrapped up in the similarly major issue of larger police reform, which should probably begin with a focused effort on weeding out extremists within their ranks.

It also should emphasize providing training for officers to recognize, investigate, and prevent both hate crimes and domestic-terrorist acts — which has long been recognized as a significant factor in the ongoing problem of under-enforcement of hate-crimes laws. In the process, it is likely to create forces that are more attuned to the challenges facing communities of color and vulnerable minorities.

In general, an effective response to domestic terrorism will need to emphasize a ground-level response that engages local and state forces in the work, rather than placing the enforcement eggs in a top-heavy federal apparatus that responds slowly to conditions on the ground and usually becomes bureaucratically calcified in very little time. A War on Terror modeled after the post-9/11 response would probably be not just ineffective but disastrous. [my emphasis]

He also cites these two articles by Michael German, both prior to the Capitol attack: Why New Laws Aren't Needed to Take Domestic Terrorism More Seriously Just Security 12/14/2020 and Hidden in Plain Sight: Racism, White Supremacy, and Far-Right Militancy in Law Enforcement Brennan Center 08/27/2020.

Biden's speech: unity vs. solving real problems

Biden's Inaugural Speech was a dramatic example of the challenge of the President acting in both of his Presidential roles, head of state and head of government. And here we saw some of the tension between those two roles. And we also see the balancing act the new President was doing between two essential roles: reassuring those who did not vote for him while straightforwardly condemning the violent if clownish coup attempt by his predecessor.

In the many democracies that have separate heads of state and heads of government, likr the Queen of England and the Prime Minister, it is customary for public messages by the head of state that go beyond routine declarations of holidays or acknowledgment of dramatic tragedies to appeal for unity and support of the established government.

A recent example came in Austria after the deadly mass-shooting terrorist attacks by an Islamist terrorist in November 2020. The President and head of state Alexander Van der Bellen dclared that, "In the center of Vienna in the middle of our republic a cowardly terrorist attack on the heart of our society took place." But he declared that hate will never be stronger "than our society", and the "our liberal democracy" faced a threat from terrorists who deeply hate it. He expressed "our deep sympathy for all the injured who in these hours are fighting for their lives. Our tears flow for everyone in our midst who lost their lives."

Sebastian Kurz, the Chancellor and head of government, also expressed his sympathy for the victims and denounced the terrorists. But even in his early reaction, he stressed more policy-oriented framing, emphasizing his determination to catch the bad guys and declared melodramatically is was a "fight between civilization and barbarism," which fits with Kurz' usual political alarmism against Muslim immigrants. The President's and Chancellor's statements were complimentary, but with different inflections reflected their official roles. (Quotes from: Kurz und Van der Bellen sprachen zum Terroranschlag in Wien Standard/APA 03.11.2020; my translatoins from the German)

The official transcript of Biden's speech is available on the White House website, Inaugural Address by President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. The transcript has about 100 paragraph breaks, so I'm doing my own breaks in the quotations here.

The calls for unity are very characteristic for a President in the head of state role:

History, faith, and reason show the way, the way of unity. We can see each other not as adversaries but as neighbors. We can treat each other with dignity and respect. We can join forces, stop the shouting, and lower the temperature. For without unity, there is no peace, only bitterness and fury. No progress, only exhausting outrage. No nation, only a state of chaos. This is our historic moment of crisis and challenge, and unity is the path forward. And, we must meet this moment as the United States of America.

But there are also political goals that the Biden-Harris Administration has set for itself prior to the Inauguration. And they are goals that some people favor, and others oppose. Which means there can't be complete unity around those. There will be winners and losers in some way or another when substantive policies are enacted. Even last year' replacement of the Mississippi state flag with it's Confederate imagery - a important but literally symbolic decision - had winners and losers, because white supremacist fans of sedition opposed it with some amount of passion.

Biden made some acknowledgment of this: "Our history has been a constant struggle between the American ideal that we are all created equal and the harsh, ugly reality that racism, nativism, fear, and demonization have long torn us apart. The battle is perennial. Victory is never assured." (my emphasis)

That notion is straight out of Madison's Federalist #10. Unity around support for a democratic system and the rule of law does not mean that politics and policy disagreements end. It means that everyone agrees that those are the rules under which those battles will be fought.

One of the most familiar examples of group unity occurs in the early days of wars. The liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. observed that every war is popular during the first 30 days. The economist John Kenneth Galbraith pointed out in The Culture of Contentment (1992):

Almost any military venture receives strong popular approval in the short run; the citizenry rallies to the flag and to the forces engaged in combat. The strategy and technology of the new war evoke admiration and applause. This reaction is related not to economics or politics but more deeply to anthropology. As in ancient times, when the drums sound in the distant forest, there is an assured tribal response. It is the rallying beat of the drums, not the virtue of the cause, that is the vital mobilizing force.

He follows immediately, "But this does not last." The philosopher William James famously wrote an antiwar essay about "the moral equivalent of war," in which he hoped that the kind of concentrated energy that countries bring to a war effort could be duplicated for more peaceful ends. But despite the mobilization talents that countries can show during wartime, the feelings of patriotic national unity among the general population that facilitate such collective efforts are fundamentally also based on fear and hatred.

And as we saw during the invasion of the Capitol building January 6 by a howling white supremacist lynch mob, fear and hatred can bring other results than national unity among a people. In practice, even in those patriotic National Unity moments, zealots are quick to find enemies among the home team, as well. Just ask the members of the band formerly known as the Dixie Chicks.

In the "constant struggle" comment quoted above, Biden explicitly acknowledged that perfect unity on political matters is just not possible, although an authoritarian government can create a semblance of it.

And he wouldn't have been doing his job as head of government or head of state if he hadn't taken note of the violent insurrection of January 6 aimed at throwing out the democratic vote for the President, an action that which resulted in five deaths. Not explicitly acknowledging that event that happened exactly two weeks before in the same place he had just taken the Presidential oath of office would have been downright bizarre. As he did in this passage:

Through a crucible for the ages America has been tested anew and America has risen to the challenge. Today, we celebrate the triumph not of a candidate, but of a cause, the cause of democracy. The will of the people has been heard and the will of the people has been heeded. We have learned again that democracy is precious. Democracy is fragile. And at this hour, my friends, democracy has prevailed.

And probably the most important part of the speech: "And here we stand, just days after a riotous mob thought they could use violence to silence the will of the people, to stop the work of our democracy, and to drive us from this sacred ground. That did not happen. It will never happen. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not ever."

The radical Republicans, "respectable" and otherwise, won't stop their obstruction and even violent opposition yet. But if Biden hadn't made some explicit statement about stopping them like that one, they would have taken that as a blatant surrender.

Since Biden did single out the seditionists the way he did, even his less enthusiastic supporters aren't much inclined to grump about the "unity" rhetoric and the absence of explicit references to policy goals.

But this passage also shows that in the current situation, vague rhetoric about "unity" fits uncomfortably with the problems he identifies in this passage, that I believe is the first time an American President has explicitly referred to "white supremacy":

A cry for racial justice some 400 years in the making moves us. The dream of justice for all will be deferred no longer. A cry for survival comes from the planet itself. A cry that can’t be any more desperate or any more clear. And now, a rise in political extremism, white supremacy, domestic terrorism that we must confront and we will defeat. To overcome these challenges – to restore the soul and to secure the future of America – requires more than words. It requires that most elusive of things in a democracy:

Unity.

Unity. [my emphasis]

But since a large number of Republican voters and office holders are enthusiastic supporters of white supremacy, though at least some of them are careful not to use the term in polite company, it will take more than a vague commitment to "unity" to deal with such a deeply entrenched social pathology.

Near the end, Biden emphasized how drastically far from unity the Capitol insurrection was, "We met the moment. That democracy and hope, truth and justice, did not die on our watch but thrived." (my emphasis)

A similar tension comes in his reference to the Emancipation Proclamation:

In another January in Washington, on New Year’s Day 1863, Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. When he put pen to paper, the President said, “If my name ever goes down into history it will be for this act and my whole soul is in it.” My whole soul is in it. Today, on this January day, my whole soul is in this: Bringing America together. Uniting our people. And uniting our nation.

And he follows that with references to various policy goals.

Now, I'm totally on board with unity in the sense of the Emancipation Proclamation. But we should remember how the Emancipation Proclamation facilitated unity. It was a wartime measure. It abolished slavery on the territory of the military enemy. Preserving slavery was the fundamental cause for which the other side was fighting. It was an approach to pursuing unity by completely rejecting the social institution to which the enemy was totally committed.

And it was an effective measure. Once news spread in the Confederacy about the Proclamation, slaves began to desert their owners and their plantations. That not only dealt a hammer blow to the Confederate economy. It also gave the Union army a large number of black recruits whose participation in the war had an immediate military and psychological effect on the Confederate enemy. And it took more than two additional years of actual war to end the Confederacy and make emancipation permanent.

Also, in the terms used at the time, the Emancipation Proclamation turned the war from a conventional war (aimed at defeating the enemy armies) to a revolutionary war (aimed at overturning the social order of the enemy, as in the post-French Revolution wars against conservative countries from Switzerland to Russia).

So there's something very contradictory in the full Hegelian sense about the notion of unity in the spirit of the Emancipation Proclamation!

One grumble: the reference to American Exceptionalism become more problematic to me as time goes on. For instance, from the speech: "We look ahead in our uniquely American way – restless, bold, optimistic – and set our sights on the nation we know we can be and we must be."

Only Americans are restless, bold, or optimistic? This is silly and embarrassing.

I'll end by noticing that Biden's speech makes use of American history as a kind of "mythical" vision, a story of progress through struggle among Americans ourselves toward greater amounts of freedom, equality, and justice. This is an aspirational, value-based, inspirational narrative of history in the Enlightenment spirit of history as progress to higher levels.

It's not entirely compatible with academic history. But it's not something that politics can't completely do away with either. And it can also be reality-based. A lot of it isn't. But I don't think the left or the center can afford to leave that kind of historical-political narrative building to the right. Because the right ain't gonna stop doing it.

The US left, the January 6 Capitol riot, and the threat from far-right terrorists (2 of 2)

This is second of two posts on the far right threat in the aftermath of the Capitol riot of January 6.

Daryl Johnson has been sounding the alarm about violent rightwing terrorism from within the government and in the public.

He talks about his own experience and how he view the current threat in this interview with Michael Moore, Ep. 154: How To Stop The Coup Klux Klan (feat. Daryl Johnson) | Rumble 01/14/2021

In this interview, Johnson also addresses the problem He Saw the Storm Coming Slate 01/14/2021 (Podcast) Transcript here.

The interviewer, Mary Harris, gives a quick roundup of Johnson's experience at the Department of Homeland Security during the Obama-Biden Administration:

I wanted to talk to Daryl about what took place [on Wednesday, January 6], because in some ways he predicted this, not the details, but the coming wave of anti-government sentiment and where it could lead. Back in 2009, a report he wrote about the risks of right wing extremism got leaked to conservative media. It was the beginning of the end for his career at Homeland Security. But with each passing year, Darrell’s work seems more prescient. Since leaving the federal government. Darrell has tried to avoid the darker corners of the Internet. He knows what’s lurking in there. But this week he’s gone back just a little to see what the groups he used to monitor are saying. It turns out they are already creating their own narrative about what went down on Wednesday.

Jonathan Stevenson looks at Trump’s Lingering Menace New York Review of Books 01/09/2021, making this observation on Trump's position during the Capitol invasion:

Trump’s tactical forbearance does not absolve him. Quickly calling in the National Guard to aid the undermanned police and prevent the siege would have been a legitimate, non-political use of military force designed to preclude illegal interference with the political process. Instead, the administration appears to have ensured that the Pentagon was disposed to be non-responsive, leaving the pro-Trump protesters greater freedom of action.

In less that 24 hours from when I am writing this, Joe Biden will be inaugurated President, so these following two article about the danger that Trump as a lame-duck President has posed will (hopefully!) be out of date: Susan Matthews, It’s Almost Over. That’s the Problem. Slate 01/09/2021; Abigail Esman and Dahlia Lithwick, from three weeks before the January 6 invasion of the Capitol, America Is Attempting to Exit an Abusive Relationship Slate 12/15/2020

Dahlia Lithwick also has a good piece on Republican diversionary whining in connection with the Capitol attack,(Republicans Still Don’t Get It Slate 01/13/2021):

It is, quite frankly, beyond belief that the very same people who could have died in the United States Capitol just last week have somehow persuaded themselves that they’ve in fact experienced a more acute First Amendment injury than even insurrection itself—and that any effort to impose liability for the property destruction, terror, and death that resulted from the storming of the government is a monstrous encroachment on their right to talk. [emphasis in original]

German left and center-left takes on the Capitol riot

Following up on yesterday’s post about what a "left" view of the Capitol riot and its impolications means, I thought I would take a look at some particularly left views from Germany. The translations from the German shown below in brackets are mine.

Starting with a center-left view from the German Social Democratic, the longtime junior partner in Angela Merkel's governing coalition, we have „Das passiert, wenn Populisten Macht bekommen“ 07.01.2021:

Ein bewaffneter, rechter Mob, aufgestachelt vom amtierenden Präsidenten Trump, hat in den USA das Parlament gestürmt. Die SPD verurteilt den Angriff auf das Schärfste. Auch hierzulande gefährden rechte Populisten die Demokratie. Geben wir Hass, Hetze und Lügen keine Chance! Verteidigen wir unsere Demokratie – gemeinsam.

Der gewaltsame Sturm von Trump-Anhängern auf das US-Kapitol erschüttert Amerika und die Welt. „Das ist ein unerträglicher Anschlag auf die Demokratie. Präsident Trump hat das Land tief gespalten - nun zeigt sich, wie sehr“, warnt Vizekanzler Olaf Scholz vor den Folgen von Populismus.

Das gewaltsame Eindringen des rechten Mobs in das US-Parlament sei „bedrückend“ und „erschreckend“, sagte Scholz am Donnerstag im „ntv Frühstart“. Der abgewählte US-Präsident Trump trage die Verantwortung für das, was am Kapitol geschehen sei, da er viele Menschen „aufgestachelt und auch nicht zurückgehalten“ habe. „Das ist ganz klar etwas, was man erlebt, wenn Populisten Macht bekommen.“ Sein Nachfolger, der künftige US-Präsident Joe Biden, habe eine schwere Aufgabe vor sich, die Amerikanerinnen und Amerikaner wieder zusammenzuführen.

Auch Bundesaußenminister Heiko Maas verurteilte den Angriff auf die Demokratie: „Wir sehen auf der ganzen Welt was passiert, wenn radikale Populisten an die Macht kommen. Demokratie stirbt, wenn rohe Gewalt den anderen mundtot macht, wenn blanker Hass alle Grenzen von Anstand und Respekt sprengt.“

[An armed rightwing mob, incited by the current President Trump, stormed the Congress in the U.S.. The SPD condemns the attack in the strongest terms. Even here {in Germany} the rightwing populists are also a danger to democracy. Let us not give hatred, incitement and lies a chance! Let us defend our democracy – together.

The violent storming of the US Capitol by Trump supporters is shaking America and the world. "This is an intolerable attack on democracy. President Trump has deeply divided the country - now it shows how much," warns Vice-Chancellor Olaf Scholz about the consequences of populism.

The right-wing mob's violent intrusion into the US Capitol is "depressing" and "terrifying," Scholz said Thursday on the {program} ntv Frühstart." President-elect Trump bears responsibility for what happened on Capitol Hill, saying he had "incited and also didn’t hold back" many people. "This is clearly something that you experience when populists get power." His successor, the future US President Joe Biden, has a difficult task ahead of him to reunite the Americans.] (my emphasis)

Moritz Wichmann did an editorial for Neues Deutschland dated 07.01.2021, the day after the Capitol invasion, Kapitol-Erstürmung muss Konsequenzen haben. (The Storming of the Capitol Must Have Consequences).

Neues Deutschland (ND) is editorially close to the German Left Party, which itself is partly a “post-communist” successor party to the former East German ruling party, which was run by Communists but whose name was the Socialist Unity Party (SED, from the German initials). From its founding in 1946 to 1989, Neues Deutschland was the official party paper of the SED.

So it's safe to say that Neues Deutschland represents a distinctly left position.

Wichmann wrote (my emphasis):

Donald Trump geht mit einem großen Knall. Er fordert die fanatischsten Teile seiner Anhängerschaft mit seinen Tweets und seiner Videobotschaft vom Mittwochnachmittag nur unwillig auf, sich zurückzuziehen, äußert vor allem Verständnis für sie und gießt weiter Öl ins Feuer. Die Erstürmung des Kapitols in Washington DC ist faschistoid – noch ist unklar, wie spontan sie war – und eine weitere Eskalation der trumpschen Normbrüche, vor allem aber muss sie Konsequenzen haben.

In diesem Sinne hat der Tabubruch, der zu gezogenen Pistolen durch Sicherheitskräfte vorm Plenarsaal, verwüsteten Abgeordnetenbüros und vier Toten führte, aber auch etwas positives: Er zwingt Abgeordnete bei Demokraten und Republikanern, Minister der Trump-Regierung und auch Joe Biden, Position zu beziehen. Einige Demokraten wird das Geschehen hoffentlich genug radikalisieren, damit die Partei endlich mehr Rückgrat entwickelt, nicht nur gegen den bisher größten Tabubruch von Trump und den Trumpisten. Vermutlich jedoch werden Linksliberale und Linke im Land wie schon beim Straßenwahlkampf 2018 und 2020 den Großteil der »Arbeit« machen müssen. ...

Die Geschichte lehrt: Appeasement gegenüber dem Faschismus funktioniert nicht. Schon vor der Kapitol-Erstürmung hatte das moderate Parteiestablishment um Joe Biden immer wieder suggeriert, eher nicht gegen die vielen Verbrechen von Trump und seinen Anhängern vorgehen zu wollen. Stattdessen wolle man lieber »in die Zukunft schauen«. Das wird nun schwieriger, weil der Druck »etwa zu tun« nun deutlich größer sein wird. Fortgesetzte Eliten-Straflosigkeit - wie die nach dem Irakkrieg für Mitarbeiter der Bush-Administration und für Banker nach der Finanzkrise 2008/2009 - ist nicht nur in den USA ein großes Problem und wird nur noch schlimmere Exzesse begünstigen.

[Donald Trump is leaving with a big bang. With his tweets and his video message on Wednesday afternoon, he only reluctantly calls on the most fanatical parts of his followers to withdraw, expressing sympathy for them and continuing to pour oil on the fire. The storming of the Capitol in Washington DC is fascistoid – it is still unclear how spontaneous it was – and a further escalation of the Trumpian breaking of norms, but above all it must have consequences.

In this sense, the taboo that led to guns being drawn by security forces in the chamber, ransacked congressional offices, and four deaths also brings something positive: It forces Democratic and Republican lawmakers, Trump administration Cabinet Secretaries, and even Joe Biden to take a stand. Hopefully the event will radicalize some Democrats enough for the party to finally develop more backbone, and not just against the biggest taboo-breaking of Trump and the Trumpists to date [i.e., the Capitol riot]. Presumably, however, left-liberals and leftists in the country will have to do the majority of the "work," as they did in the 2018 and 2020 road elections. ...

History teaches that appeasement against fascism does not work. Even before the Capitol, the moderate party establishment around Joe Biden had repeatedly suggested that it would not take action against the many crimes committed by Trump and his supporters. Instead, one would rather "look to the future". This will now be more difficult, because the pressure to "do something" will now be much greater. Continued elite impunity - such as post-Iraq war for Bush administration staff and bankers after the 2008-2009 financial crisis - is a major problem not only in the US, and will only encourage worse excesses.]  (my emphasis)

No talk here about how the Democratic establishment is exaggerating the significance of the Capitol riot in order to further expand the power of the security agencies. On the contrary, Wichmann warns, "History teaches that appeasement against fascism does not work."

But he also does it without flacking for Democratic timidity. Or pretending that everyone can go back to brunch now because Joe Biden is becoming President.

The Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung is a foundation that is also politically aligned with the Left Party. This column by Andreas Günther, head of their New York office, also treats the storming of the Capitol as a very serious event, Die Spitze des Eisbergs 11.01.2021:

Vor dem Hintergrund der Geschehnisse allerdings verblasst die Frage, ob es sich um einen «richtigen» Putschversuch gehandelt hat, beinahe zur Nebensache. Fakt ist: Ein amtierender Präsident hat über Monate das Vertrauen in die demokratischen Verfahren untergraben und sich geweigert, ein anderes Ergebnis als seinen Sieg anzuerkennen, obwohl er und seine Unterstützer*innen keine Belege für Fälschung oder auch nur schwerwiegende Unregelmäßigkeiten beibringen zu konnten. Er hat gewählte Verantwortliche unter Druck gesetzt, das Wahlergebnis zu seinen Gunsten zu verändern oder zu umgehen, und hat sie aufs Übelste diffamiert, wenn sie ihm nicht folgten. Fakt ist auch: Dieser Mann hat die Stimmen von gut 74 Millionen oder 46,8 Prozent der teilnehmenden Wahlberechtigten bekommen. Fast drei Viertel von ihnen waren noch Ende November der Meinung, er habe die Wahl gewonnen. Tausende kamen an jenem Mittwoch nach Washington, um ihn in seinem Kampf gegen das Wahlergebnis zu unterstützen. Hunderte drangen schließlich in das Kapitol ein. Darunter waren bekannte Rechtsextremisten, Gruppen wie die Proud Boys, Oath Keepers und QAnon-Anhänger. Für die Legende, linke Aktivist*innen hätten die Übergriffe angezettelt, gibt es keine Beweise.

Und immer noch 45 Prozent der republikanischen Wähler*innen halten den Angriff auf das Kapitol für gerechtfertigt. Allerdings haben auch 43 Prozent von ihnen einen gegenteiligen Standpunkt, ebenso wie 71 Prozent aller registrierten Wahlberechtigten.

[Against the background of what happened, however, the question of whether it was a "real" coup attempt almost a side issue. The fact is that for months, a sitting president has undermined confidence in democratic procedures and refused to acknowledge a result other than his victory, even though he and his supporters have been unable to provide evidence of forgery or even serious irregularities. He has pressured elected officials to change or circumvent the election result in his favor, and has defamed them in the worst possible way if they did not follow him. The fact is that this man received the votes of just over 74 million, or 46.8 percent, of the eligible voters. Nearly three-quarters of them thought he had won the election by the end of November. Thousands came to Washington that Wednesday to support him in his fight against the election result. Hundreds eventually invaded the Capitol. Among them were well-known right-wing extremists, groups such as the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and QAnon supporters. There is no evidence for the legend that left-wing activists instigated the attacks.

And still, 45 percent of Republican voters think the attack on the Capitol is justified. However, 43 percent of them also have the opposite view, as do 71 percent of all registered voters.] (my emphasis)

Another left-leaning German paper, Der Freitag, has also carried a series of articles taking the Capitol riot seriously as a very significant political event: 

• Konrad Ege, Trumps Ende, Bidens Chance 07.01.2021
• Konrad Ege, Verzweiflungstäter Trump 08.01.2021
• Lutz Herden, In Sichtweite 08.01.2021
• Konrad Ege, Ende der Vorstellung 12.01.2021
• Wolfgang Michal, Alles ist möglich 14.01.2021
• Konrad Ege, Obamas Fehler darf er nicht wiederholen 17.01.2021

In the "Ende der Vorstellung" piece, Ege writes:

Akteure im weit rechten Spektrum freuten sich wohl über „ihren Erfolg“, das Establishment unter die Schreibtische gejagt zu haben. Doch die Erstürmer des Parlaments haben sich verkalkuliert. Vielen US-Amerikanern ist das Gebäude ein Heiligtum. Es repräsentiert die vermeintliche Einzigartigkeit der Nation. Schulabschlussklassen besuchen das Kapitol, um die patriotischen Gemälde und die Statuen der Helden zu bestaunen.

Die Fotos von ungehobelten Gesellen mit ihren verwegenen Aufmachungen haben erschreckt. Wahnwitzig war die Idee, ein paar hundert dieser Männer könnten Bidens Wahl rückgängig machen. Trump hatte zum Marsch aufgefordert und den Kapitolstürmern versichert, sie seien etwas Besonders.

Manche Kapitol-Angreifer kamen mit der Fahne der konföderierten Südstaaten, die vor mehr als 150 Jahren die Institution Sklaverei verteidigt und den Bürgerkrieg verloren haben. Impeachment oder keines: Die trumpistische Bewegung verschwindet nicht. Aus Niederlagen können machtvolle Opfermythen werden.

[Figures on the far right were probably pleased with "their success" in chasing the establishment under the desks. But the stormers of the Capitol have miscalculated. For many Americans, the building is a holy place. It represents the supposed uniqueness of the nation. Graduation classes visit the Capitol to marvel at patriotic paintings and statues of heroes.

The photos of boorish guys journeymen with their foolish get-ups were scary. The idea was insane that a few hundred of these men could undo Biden's election. Trump had called for the march and assured those storming the Capitol that they were special.

Some Capitol attackers came with the flag of the Confederate Southern states, which more than 150 years ago defended the institution of slavery and lost the Civil War. Impeachment or not: the Trumpist movement does not disappear. Powerful myths of victimhood can be made out of defeats.] (my emphasis)

Evaluating the "Stupid Coup" (Mark Danner) before Trump is out of office

Joe Conason (Uncovering The #MAGA Plot Against America National Memo 01/17/2021) writes bluntly about the need for accountability for Donald Trump, including for the January 6 assault on the Capitol building by a lynch mob directly incited by Trump himself:

The events of Jan. 6 represented the worst threat to democracy and the rule of law that we have seen in our lifetimes. The violent authoritarian impulse within the Republican right has metastasized under Trump into a potent and very dangerous force. Uncovering the roots of that threat and isolating its sponsors will be a lengthy and complicated process that will involve the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, state and local law enforcement, the attorney general of the District of Columbia, many committees of the House and Senate, and almost certainly a national investigative commission on the order of the 9/11 commission. And there will be trials.

The radicalization of the Republican Party is deep and wide, as Conason notes:

The support structure for the demonstration that turned into an insurrection ranged across the Trumpist movement, encompassing figures like Ginni Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, and Charlie Kirk, who runs the far-right college outfit Turning Point USA and boasts close ties with Donald Trump Jr. Both of them have tried to erase evidence of their organizing efforts.

Joe Conason is not new to these observations. He was warning explicitly about the radical politics and authoritarian tendencies in the Republican Party in his book Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth (2003) and It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush (2007). What we currently know as "Trumpism" did not being in the Republican Party with Donald Trump nomination for President in 2016.

Mark Danner also writes about the Capitol riot and its implications, which he witnessed firsthand in ‘Be Ready to Fight’ New York Review of Books 01/14/2021 (02/11/2021 issue). He gives this account of the rally before the assault on the Capitol:

“This isn’t their Republican Party anymore!” Don [Trump] Jr. roared. “This is Donald Trump’s Republican Party!” Preening like a rock star, he extended his hand-mic to the crowd to catch the answering roar. Did the Republicans now gathering at the Capitol hear it? Did Vice President Mike Pence, presiding over the electoral vote certification, hear it? For Don Jr. was shouting out a simple truth that for all its undeniability many in the party had never quite believed or managed to grasp in all its implications. Trump owned them. And as his owner’s prerogative he imposed an unstinting and singular loyalty: not loyalty mostly to him, with some prudently reserved for the Constitution and the law. No. Loyalty entirely to him. Today would be the day of choosing. [italics in original]

Danner quotes from Trump's speech, which may be the most infamous speech in the history of the Presidency:

We’re going to have to fight much harder. And Mike Pence is going to have to come through for us. And if he doesn’t that will be a sad day for our country…. We’re going to walk down, and I’ll be there with you, we’re going to walk down to the Capitol and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them. Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong. We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing…. We fight. We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.

Danner may be a bit too credulous on this point: "Trump reportedly had to be dissuaded from personally leading the march to the Capitol."

No, he didn't. He's a coward An obese, cowardly trust-fund baby who incites others to take physical risks and inflict physical harm on others but is obvious too plain yellow to take any such risk himself. Even though if he had joined the march, he at least would have had massive personal protection from the Secret Service.

But Danner is on the mark with this:

By refusing calls to intervene, he prolonged and protected the coup he had incited. Thankfully, Trump’s disordered, erratic mind has never been given to systematic planning. That he finally lost his bet on the sycophantic unscrupulousness of his vice-president had more to do with a handful of votes in the House of Representatives than with the vaunted truism that ours is “a country of laws, not of men.” Had the Republicans held a bare majority in the House, it is alarmingly easy to imagine the results of the presidential election being overturned.

As it is, the overwhelming majority of House Republicans, even after an attempted coup forced them to scurry abjectly for their lives—and left five people, including a police officer, dead—voted for exactly that, as did eight Republican senators. With his up-thrust fist, young Josh Hawley of Missouri will remain the poster boy of the coup. Both Hawley and Ted Cruz of Texas, highly credentialed lawyers out of Yale and Harvard respectively, like Pence discovered only belatedly that Trump was serious. Like the lowly innkeeper and everyone around him indulging Don Quixote’s conviction that he had arrived at a magical castle, they all humored the president about his chances to overturn the election. After all, as one “senior Republican official” asked a week after the vote, “What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time? No one seriously thinks the results will change.” For Hawley and Cruz, voting to overturn an election was merely a way to buff up their political résumés. What could be the downside?

He also makes a stab of thinking about how historians may view what he calls the "Stupid Coup" in the context of recent history:

Our future Suetonius will have work to do, describing these several decades in the life of the “indispensable” nation. The genocides of the 1990s, the “Supreme Court election” of 2000, the attacks of September 11, the war of choice in Iraq, the torture and endless drone assassinations of the “war on terror,” the economic collapse of 2008, the election of Donald Trump, the hundreds of thousands of dead in the Great Pandemic—and, finally, the Stupid Coup. Will Trump seem as striking and unusual to our historian as he does to us? Will he make more sense when viewed against the March on Rome or the Beer Hall Putsch? Or will Trump be seen as the beginning of something and not its ending? [my emphasis]

The US left, the January 6 Capitol riot, and the threat from far-right terrorists (1 of 2)

I find myself often tempted to use the walking-and-talking-at-the-same-time metaphor a lot, especially when talking about quarrels of the moment between liberals and progressives and the ever-popular hair-splitting on the progressive side of the dial.

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.

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.