The Counterpublic Papers vol. 6 no. 6

January 10, 2021

After Trump was elected I pointed out here that we were in two separate nations, one of them contiguous, one of them an archipelago. If I were to suggest a few recent works to understand this dynamic I’d point to Ashley Jardina’s White Identity Politics, Katherine Cramer’s The Politics of Resentment, the late Joel Olson’s The Abolition of White Democracy, and Daniel Hosang and Joe Lowndes Producers, Parasites, Patriots: Race and the New Right Wing Politics of Precarity. If you want to dig further I’d start with W. E. B. Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction.

I never believed that Trump’s election was a forgone conclusion after Obama’s victory—another way was possible. However I do think that Trump’s election and the way the Republican Party has swiftly devolved into a Lore and Odor political cult made possible by white nationalism. And the lack of a robust response to the 2008 economic depression made this more likely.

However, while I thought it’d be hard getting him to leave, I didn’t imagine the role American citizens themselves would play.

All the signs were there though.

Over the past month or so Trump replaced a number of individuals in the Pentagon with civilian Trump supporters, and it appears that one of the reasons insurrectionists were able to overrun the capitol building is because Trump supporters refused to send forces.

Trump friendly media was all too ready to amplify his call that the election was stolen.

With the creation of Parler people who sincerely believed the grand lie were given the venue to plot and plan together, for the first time given the opportunity to talk amongst themselves without having to take their ideas and expose them to truth claims.

And then we had political officials willing to seriously call the votes of individual states into question.

(As an aside there have been several incidents over the past two decades or so of black congressional representatives being unable to get into the Capitol Building with badges.)

I argued that the cold civil war we were in might become hot.

We’re now in the beginning of that stage. What does this mean? We’re all in the process of figuring that out, but alongside calls to defund the police I think we’re going to have to make calls to radically remake the police and other security forces, given infiltration.

We’re going to also have to aggressively target and remove individual Republican representatives, and then over time remove their capacity to govern. I don’t know how this works given the 74 million votes Trump received. Simplifying I see the civil war as having two components—one a simple “us” vs “them” that splits into metropolitan areas vs rural ones and overlaps with racial politics, but another a not-so-simple battle on the right between ”true believers” (people who really believe that Obama is a foreigner for example) and “RINOs” (Republicans in Name Only). More than one GOP political representative has been tarred with the “traitor” label over the past few days. I expect this to increase, and I expect the attacks to move from rhetorical to physical. Bombs were found at both the Republican and Democratic Party HQ. I expect this all to continue and to increase.      

As a result we’re going to have to turn into electoral and protest politics deeply rather than run away from it. It’s no hyperbole to suggest that we’re going to be in the struggle of our lives.

….

In the wake of the 2016 election a number of people have compared what happened in the US with the rise of Trump to other nations. A few years ago I shared a set of tweets from Dan Slater. I’ll share this again:

1. White racism cannot explain the entirety of the Trump phenomenon, George Packer and other smart critics of @tanehisicoates rightly argue.

2. But thinking COMPARATIVELY, almost a year after Trump's win, white Christian nationalism is the BEST explanation for why US stands apart.

3. Nowhere in Western Europe have nativist candidates gained Trump-like support. Despite similar woes of inequality and massive immigration.

4. So what makes US different? Any explanation must begin with slavery & religiosity, which make us stand completely apart from West Europe.

5. Only in US have race, Christianity, and patriotism fused into the kind of nativist cocktail that best explains Trump's RELATIVE success.

6. This suggests we should be comparing US to countries in EASTERN Europe where race, religion, nativism are fusing into 'populism' as well.

7. Poland and Hungary didn't have slavery. But they have white Christian nationalism rivaling our own. This shared ideology is prevailing.

8. Of course in US, white Christian nationalism gets a major assist from gerrymandering, voter suppression, and EC. It loses but still wins.

9. But focusing on ideology best explains WHAT is prevailing, and why US looks more like Poland & Hungary than France, Germany, or Britain.

10. Adding religion to race also helps explain the Poland/Hungary parallelism, and can make sense of the sexism that so clearly hurt Hillary

11. So yes, more than race explains Trump in US alone. But COMPARATIVELY, racial/religious identity/ideology is the core causal factor.

The image I’ll carry with me for the rest of my life will be the image of the person walking in the middle of the capitol building, strolling really, carrying the Confederate Flag. The Lost Cause is, at its base, a religious cause, with its own set of “truths” based on religious belief rather than fact. For these individuals Trump would appear to be a mixture of, not exactly Jesus, but the person who brings Jesus here, and Jefferson Davis.

….

You’d expect the American Political Science Association to have a fairly sophisticated response at the outset to last week’s events.

You’d be wrong.

Yesterday, a mob incited by the President of the United States overran the US Capitol in a violent insurrection. Those who forcibly entered the Capitol building and its offices struck at the heart of democratic principles in the United States, disrupting lawmaking and the peaceful transition of power that has served as a centerpiece of American democracy. By interrupting a largely ceremonial action on the false promise of overturning the results of a free and fair election, this mob led to the needless death and injury of Americans and posed an imminent threat to US lawmakers, their staffs, and the staff of the US Capitol building.

We are shocked, dismayed and disgusted at the events on Capitol Hill. As scholars of government and politics, we condemn President Trump and legislators who have continuously endorsed and disseminated falsehoods and misinformation, and who have worked to overturn the results of the Presidential election. The President has sown doubt and mistrust in the democratic process and the electoral process in the United States. Democracy is resilient but it is also fragile, and it is undermined by the actions of those elected legislators who repeat and amplify specious claims of electoral fraud.

Now the hard work of rebuilding our institutions and our democratic norms must start. We applaud the work of the House and Senate in completing their constitutional duties to certify the election results.  The efforts to begin reconciliation yesterday after order was restored are reflective of what public officials need to be doing to help rebuild confidence in our democratic institutions, including agreement by both sides to do better and work together to dismantle the systems and structures that lead to the harm. Political scientists stand ready to support the work of our elected officials to chart a path forward.

(Cutting and pasting because by the time you read this, it might have changed. In no small part because of card carrying political scientists taking them to task. With a bit of snark.)

….

Another book, but this one comes from left field.

Sometime last year Neal Stephenson released Fall: Or, Dodge in Hell. Set in the same universe as REAMDE (a contemporary speculative fiction thriller) but starting in the near future and ending about a century later, its central conceit is that the world has effectively staved off death and made it possible to live forever, virtually. While Stephenson usually has a hard problem landing his endings—he usually has so much plot development going on its hard to wrap everything up neatly—I have been reading his work for decades. But in this case I put the book down, in fact I don’t think I ever got to the central plot.

Because another central element is that the US has been split in two, with each country possessing its own truth regime. It wasn’t that I couldn’t understand such a phenomenon—not only is it painfully obvious now, but it’s been obvious to me for years. It was that he black boxed it—because he was telling a different story he didn’t explain it. I can now see how we could plausibly get to that point.

I think I’ll put it back on the reading list.

….

One final thing.

“This isn’t who we are.” You’ve likely heard and will continue to hear this.

That is a lie.

This isn’t all of who we are. But it’s a big part of it. If you’ve family members who’ve become part of the cult, now is probably a good time to begin the intervention.

It’s only going to get harder going forward.

In the words of my friend Baynard Woods, “much love and grim solidarity.”