Anyone shocked by the US Capitol attack has ignored an awful lot of warning signs
Perhaps the most powerful shocks, the most painful surprises, are the ones that we saw coming yet refused to believe would happen. Our ability to fear something and, at the same time, assume it will never occur is one aspect of human nature that seems particularly ill-suited to our continued wellbeing and survival.
Throughout the 6 January attack on the US Capitol, as journalists and politicians expressed their stunned astonishment, one couldn’t help wondering: hadn’t they heard about the hundreds of people, some of them armed, who stormed the Michigan state capitol building in April, objecting to Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s stay-athome order? Had they forgotten that a young woman was killed during the August 2017 Unite the Right march in Charlottesville, Virginia – a neo-Nazi event that Donald Trump declined to unequivocally condemn? Had their interns not been keeping up with – and informing their bosses about – the popular Twitter feeds and Facebook pages of far-right hate groups and extremist conspiracy theorists? Had no one explained that the Proud Boys’ T-shirt insignia – 6MWE – means “Six Million [Jews] Weren’t Enough”?
During the assault on the Capitol, as I listened to the panic and horror in the voices of the journalists who, until now, had reported on Donald Trump with something closer to detached disapproval, I wondered: is this what it takes to finally make them understand who this man is – and what he wants for our country? What did they think he meant when he tweeted about the gathering planned for 6 January: “Be there. It will be wild.”
Even as the “wild” rioters were scaling the walls of the Capitol, some news media persisted in calling them “protesters” and “demonstrators”. These insurgents were far more than that. Images of politicians sheltering in “safe locations” in the Capitol complex reminded me of how, on 13 November 2015, my son – whose band was playing at the Trianon theater in Paris that evening – sheltered backstage while jihadis murdered 89 people at the Bataclan auditorium, a few blocks away.
The difference between protesters and terrorists is critical. Demonstrators are expressing their response to a policy, an event or a series of events – systemic racism, for example. But terrorists plot violent mayhem, rehearse, fail, come up with a new plan, try again and again until they succeed. We all recall that the destruction of the World Trade Center was preceded by a 1993 attempt to bomb the WTC parking garage. The attack on the Michigan state capitol and the Charlottesville march were rehearsals for what transpired in DC last week.
Donald Trump is clearly responsible for the 6 January attack. His speech to the crowd that day was an incitement to violence. But it would be a mistake to imagine that the fury and lawlessness of his supporters will disappear when he retires to Mar-a-Lago, goes to jail or begins campaigning for the 2024 presidential election. It’s important to recall that Trump has been the accelerant but not the fuel, not the kindling that has allowed the flames of hatred and bigotry, of anti-democratic rightwing fanaticism to blaze as brightly as they do now.
Many of us have a film clip or photo, taken on 6 January, that most haunts us. A friend posted an image of some thugs trying to burn a heap of costly equipment – cameras, recorders, microphones – abandoned, during the rout, by Associated Press reporters. But the image I find most troubling is a short video clip of a dozen or so rioters idly wandering the Senate floor, picking up papers from the senators’ desk, then strolling on.
If these Trump loyalists believe – as they kept chanting – that the duly-elected, soon-to-be Biden-Harris administration is not their government, it’s not only because their president told them so. And the framed portraits, the statuary, the gleaming chandeliers they saw in the Capitol building were unlikely to change their minds. The interlopers on the Senate floor looked less triumphant than bewildered, and their bewilderment is not unrelated to the sources of their rage: the massive income inequality, the epidemic unemployment, the opioid and Covid pandemics, the sense of being excluded and forgotten that helps inspire xenophobia, racism, sexism and violence. The rapid decline of our public educational system and the rise of far-right media are not unrelated; among the things that education gives us is the ability to think, to distinguish the truth from the lie, to process and evaluate the information we’re given.
These are the problems and the perils that the Biden-Harris administration will have to deal with, and which all the palliative talk about unity, reconciliation, and “working across the aisle” is not going to come remotely