Who we are

 

"This is not who we are." - quote from too many talking heads

I am disconcerted and dismayed by the events from yesterday as a seditious crowd of Trump supporters overwhelmed security forces and invaded the Capitol Building (frankly, with the assistance of DCPD looking the other way apparently). However, I’m not surprised.

I’ve already essayed the impact of Movement Conservatism and its evolution elsewhere here and I’m not going to repeat that. Were this another country we were watching from afar, many of us would be clucking and tsk-tsking about how come they can’t get it together.

There really isn’t much to say about yesterday’s insurgency/attempted coup; it was foreseen. The President himself had given plenty of notices that he wasn’t going to go quietly. That he’d mobilize his loyalists should surprise no one.

If I am surprised, it’s at the abetment by law enforcement; but even at that, it’s not “I’m shocked, I tell you!” surprise. It’s more “Spock raising an eyebrow before saying: ‘Fascinating, Captain” surprise. The dereliction of duty should be filed along with any other charges that may come from this being filed against the mob (and one hopes, their supporters in both Congress and the Senate).

I’m not going to hold out too much hope that we will see much in the way of censure, litigation, arrests, or indictments. A number of Trump’s circle are bailing, Pence and McConnell have made appropriate noises like they care (they don’t; they really don’t), and as for the mob? Well, ask yourself this: there were protests at Trump’s inauguration. There was no rioting. No one died. The Capitol Building wasn’t laid siege to.

What the greater concern is: we need to face up and recognize that this is who we are. We are a nation based on competing ideologies, on a behavioral and ideological dialectic. While I detest the two-party system and while I may expectorate on the Democrats as well as the Republicans, it is often for different reasons. But there is no denying that what happened yesterday is not an aberration; it is the logical culmination of centuries of repression, the ugliness of white male machismo that touts its toughness while being adolescent performative, and the result of manipulation by those in power under the guise of legislative representation.

As for the future, I doubt that we will see much change, really. The incoming administration has a low bar to rise to in terms of optics. In terms of substance, while I hope that some progressive movement forward occurs, I’m hesitant to think that will be the case. I’ll have more to say about the Biden presidency in a day or two.

Americans have a historically short attention span and no sense of history. No president – let me stress this – no president has ever fulfilled the promise of “America”. Some have come close, some have risen to the occasion at various moments of history; some have even enacted legislation that benefitted a large majority of the country’s population (to the exclusion of others); and more than a couple have fallen extremely short of the mark. The current occupant on his way out is the obvious nadir.

There are calls to invoke the 25^th Amendment and/or for impeachment. This strikes me as sane, if only to bring Trump to brook, to close his valve. He’s still in too dangerous position to be left to his own devices and has shown what he will do as he grows more desperate. He owes a lot of people money, he’s under investigation by the state of New York, and my guess is that he may owe more than money to people one doesn’t want to owe that way. Even if were to be pardoned, he still has a world of legal trouble that he can no longer run from. In any case, he won’t go quietly and will be a noise machine for a good while yet. If the media ignores him, this would be best; however, I doubt they will, thus enabling a platform for his persistent followers to air their nonsense and as political pawns for whomever in power decides that they’re useful for gaining or holding onto office.

I linked to this story above, but I want to point a huge issue out. Mick Mulvaney states:

“We didn’t sign up for what you saw last night,” Mulvaney said. “We signed up for making America great again, we signed up for lower taxes and less regulation. The president has a long list of successes that we can be proud of.”

“But all of that went away yesterday, and I think you’re right to ask the question as to ‘how did it happen?’” Mulvaney told CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin.

Mulvaney added that Trump was “not the same as he was eight months ago.”

All of this is nonsense. Depending on who you ask, America was never great or was actually doing fine before Trump, the president’s long list of successes is very much in the eye of the beholder (tax cuts for the rich, gutting social services, attacking Social Security and Medicare, dismantling the Department of Education, and rollbacks of environmental protections and other deregulation, are not, to my mind, “successes” one should be proud of), but as for Trump not being the same as he was eight months ago? Nonsense. He might be worse, but he’s very much the same.

The issue is that we might well be very much the same, too, the electoral results notwithstanding.