2021 and Beyond

An interesting few weeks.

If you had asked me before the election if there was a chance that thousands of disaffected Trump supporters would attempt to storm the Capitol, I would have said yes. If you had asked me the likelihood they would penetrate security and enter the building, I would have said almost nil. This was based on presumptions about the ability of the various arms of the security apparatus working well both individually and together. Even as I type that out, I recognize that the past few decades have not exactly been a rousing endorsement of support for that assumption.

If it were not for the bloodshed, I would be tempted to file this away as more a Mathias Rust-type incident than the British burning of Washington D.C. in 1814. The looming symbols of power are rarely so well protected as we think against the bizarre one-off events that history throws at them. The pictures of the crowd that stormed the Capitol showed what appeared to be a bunch of Waco cosplayers and alien abductees decked out in the latest polyester patriot-wear, intermixed with a Saturday afternoon Wal-Mart crowd. As such I have a hard time believing that if their attack had been planned rather than incited by the President, that they could have held onto the Capitol for longer than the 4 hours they did. Cartoonish and utterly ineffective, they could not have played the part of the unruly, uneducated mob better if they had been paid to do so. The symbolism will live on, although one hopes for more immediate repercussions both for the insurrectionists and for those who directly and indirectly egged them on.

Of course, people died. One Capitol Police officer, killed in the line of duty. One protestor (or more accurately, insurrectionist), shot by police, but ultimately killed by the lies fed to her by a megalomaniacal demagogue. He should be buried at Arlington; it should be made clear to the public that she (an Air Force veteran) never can be. Three others died of medical emergencies during the chaos.

Almost universally, the storming of the Capitol has been compared to the widespread Black Lives Matter riots over the summer in that black protestors and their allies were far more rigorously (and sometimes brutally) contained. I don’t think it bears much scrutiny – there is too much symbolism at work in D.C. and the he-said-she-said regarding who did or did not request National Guard support during the vote certification is already well underway. In particular, Trump himself wields so much power in the stationing of forces in and around D.C. that the fix was in (as evidenced by the fact that Pence, not Trump, took charge of the developing security response). It is still a fair question – if the situation was reversed, and President Hillary Clinton had been urging a crowd of mostly black supporters, some of whom were armed, to “stop the steal” and unleashed them towards the Capitol, would the outcome have been different? Quite likely. Would the set pieces have been different? Hard to say, but I think not.

I’ve been reading a book of essays by Darryl Pinckney, including one on the Million Man March (many hundreds of thousands of people) which has been a timely contrast to the events at the Capitol (thousands of people, perhaps tens of thousands in rally stage). If nothing else, it is nice to see a reminder that large, peaceful marches can – and should – be taken for granted in the nation’s capital, and that its symbolism will, over the span of history, be seen as positive. There might be another stain on that reputation as of today, but we are not perfect, and part of the beauty of our system is that when the worst happens, we can hold fast, take the strain, and then come to grips to fix the problem.

Behind the Million Man March was Louis Farrakhan, a man who – to this day – is clearly bent on self-promotion and using any means necessary to make sure his star is in the ascension, even (or perhaps particularly) if is at the cost of denigrating specific groups. Behind the Save America Rally to Storm the Capitol was Donald Trump, the same kind of man. The former gathered together a group of historically trampled people (black men) who were being relegated the stereotype status of criminals and consigned to slums and prisons. Pinckney’s essay separates Farrakhan’s efforts and history from the larger messages to be found in the March for black men. Can we do the same with Trump and his insurrectionists? Some parallels are not to be found – the peaceful assembly of the Marchers directly repudiated the image some Americans held of them, and was one event among many to carry a decades old message, racial equality, forwards. From the start, Trump’s rally was built on a platform of outright lies and wishful thinking that used anger as its motivating force, and reinforces the negative image many already had of them. More to the point, Trump could hardly have less in common with the group of people attending his rally, save perhaps their affection for Donald J. Trump. If the Save America Rally had stayed peaceful, however, could we have found any message there? Certainly, that people will believe the lies told to them by people in power – or as part of the old adage has it, “You can fool some of the people all of the time”. But I wonder, as the country at large waits to see if this is the end of Trumpism, if there is enough of a single, underlying cause to sustain that terrible elan.

Later in his book of essays, Pinckney writes about his experiences on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri in the aftermath of the killing of Michael Brown. In the company of a minister who has taken a leadership role among the protestors, months after the event itself but as protest continued, he records the minister repeating words of Dr. King – “Riots are the voice of the unheard.” That might be, unpleasant as it is, the answer to the question. To apply Dr. King’s words to a group of violent white people (and I have yet to see a single picture of a person of color storming the Capitol) makes my stomach and face twist at this apparently gross inversion. My first instinct is to dig into the difference between a riot and an insurrection. That quickly leads nowhere, however, as the legal screws are continually being tightened and loosened on this very topic in different ways at different times in different places. The questions is why they did what they did, not what to call it, because if we try to know why maybe we can try to cut through the noise and understand if we should expect to see more of it.

To go back to Dr. King’s words, what did the insurrectionists think wasn’t being heard? The “truth” behind all their lies, presumably. All the groups that made up that crowd – and I’m curious to see who they were as more are rounded up and charged – are girded in ignorance. A diet of repeated lies poisoned them against the Constitution and the law. But why were they so willing to listen? Presumably, despair and possibility of release from it. It wasn’t surprising to me to see quite a number of religious icons at Trump’s rally and the ensuing scenes of violence, as evangelicals have been among his most loyal supporters. No wonder, perhaps, because the stories are fundamentally the same – invisible, implacable forces of evil (the devil/the deep state) are at work on society, but only the righteous who open their eyes to the truth (Jesus/Trump) and spread the word about it can eventually gain salvation (heaven/Trump 2020 and ensuing changes). Evidence is besides the point, this is a test of faith. Of ideological purity. The physical world may press upon you with its facts and figures, its logic and reason, all of which can make you despair. But there is a greater reward in the future, if only you can hold on to that faith, a reward that will change everything and grant you true, eternal happiness. Ecstasy. For the true believers in the mob who weren’t evangelical, the pattern still works – the various conspiracy theorists and hate groups all have their own truths the world can prove to be wrong, which the deep, abiding faith of that community must overcome to reach the promised land where their truth wins out and they bask in eternal praise among the righteous.

Why the despair that drove them to these beliefs and communities in the first place? All of a sudden, we’re back in 2016. Old stories about the rust belt, the loss of middle class jobs, stagnant real wages, and infrastructure and education systems struggling to keep pace. To be sure, there are (and always will be) individuals among the insurrectionists for whom all this reasoning is irrelevant because they want power. They want to be set over other people, and are happy to do it within the law, but when they feel the law has stopped this from happening then the law be damned. Already there are plenty of commentators seizing on the racial angle of this, but I think they might have the wrong end of the stick, at least in part. I read, years ago, a fascinating study done by a group of economists to how wealth determines preferences about equality. (I’ve always though the answer to that question is summed up in the quote by, I believe, John Taylor, or perhaps Calhoun – “I am an aristocrat – I love liberty, I hate equality.”) The economists gave participants in the experiment different amounts of money, something like a few dollars up to a few hundred. They then asked people about redistributive policies for this little “society” they had built. Interestingly, the group that was most firmly against redistribution to partially correct the unequal wealth distribution was not the richest group, but in fact the second poorest (I believe the study divided them into quintiles.) The given explanation was that if redistribution was enacted, the poorest group would be lifted up and now be equal to the second-poorest group. That is, no longer would the almost-poor be able to say to themselves that they were still a cut above the truly impoverished, now they would be their equals at the very bottom of the wealth ladder. They attached value to not being at the bottom, to the extent of valuing that relative position at the expense of a policy that would increase their absolute wealth. Fascinating.

Before the coronavirus pandemic shut the world down, the groups that, in my mind, Trump supporters most despise were doing their best ever economically. The headlines were (understandably) about the many outrages and injustices still being perpetrated, but on average that gap between this bottom group of people of color and those one step above them – I suspect whites with high school educations in areas with few to no public services or safety nets – had narrowed. As the middle class was hollowed out and people plunged into the economic abyss, they saw racing up to meet them the groups that for decades or even centuries they had told themselves, that they knew in their bones, were their “inferiors.” No longer. All the disinvestment that took the wind out of the middle class over the decades put them on equal footing with that lowest qunitile, and that was that. Whether inspired by deeply perverted belief systems or in response to human behavior heuristics, and unable to put a policy in place to sufficiently reverse it (despite Trump-era policies), this group built a vein of anger and resentment ready to be tapped.

How can that vein be bled dry? It probably can’t, other than ensuring that we starve this cohort of new entrants. Public education, job training, and stronger social safety nets can all divert younger Americans from a potential future as a rioter. Trump is disgusting in part because of his naked opportunism and willingness to tap into an anger he does not fully understand, but there are plenty of other politicians who will do it. Moreover, both parties have their hand in the terrible policy mix that has produced the remarkably awful outcomes of the past 40 years (although it’s hard not to view Reaganism as the first and worst mover). There are simply too many Americans for us not to have militia members with bizarre ideologies waiting in the woods for the apocalypse. There will always be prophets and conspiracy-theorists. The internet has, undoubtedly, made it easier for that one strange local to band together with like-minded fellows around the world rather than locally, which gives them numbers and impetus they would never have otherwise had. But setting these poor souls to one side, the best antidote is to look to our schools and ourselves, and do the hard work necessary to understand why we should be lifting one another up, working together, listening to one another, and holding our public servants to the highest standard.

I don’t know whether the Biden inauguration will draw more violence – I hope not – but I do hope it provides more than a return to normalcy. We must be clear-eyed about the past to build a better future, and uncompromising to improve our country. Criminal justice reform is a hot policy area, and much of the conversation is around how the punishments don’t work, but more to the point criminalizing activity that is almost impossible for its perpetrators to escape from (the “school-to-prison pipeline”) because of societal structures is insane. An insurrectionist is not a drug dealer, but as the wheels of justice begin to turn I believe it is worth asking how we could have helped those who did not attack the Capitol, but share many beliefs with those who did, five, ten, or twenty-five years ago. How could we have helped them see through the lies, avoid the despair? Grinning while we slam the door to their prison cell will be satisfying in the moment, but we aren’t closing the door to the larger problems, and I fear that those problems are becoming too large to easily correct.