029 The Erickson Report for January 7 to 19, Page One: On January 6
So - that happened.
In the weeks following the November election, I
told you
it's not over
and as evidence I pointed to the
increasingly violent rhetoric of the right, rhetoric more recently supplemented by such as Louie “I put the Gomer in”
Gohmert
openly calling
for violence in the streets and insane-even-for-Trumpworld lawyer Lin Wood
threatening Mike NotWorthAFarthing
with execution
if he didn't go along with Tweetie-pie's plan to simply ignore the results of
the election and install pro-Trump “alternate elector” slates when it came time
for Congress to certify the election.
In the wake of that and Tweetie-pie screeching "fraud fraud fraud" like a
deranged myna bird, the events of January 6 should have come as no surprise.
In
fact, it shouldn't have required events since the election to make it be no
surprise; it should have been no surprise from a year ago.
In January 2020, in discussing Tweetie-pie's tendency, drive, urge, whatever you care to call
it, towards extreme authoritarian, one-person rule, I cited cases where he
ignored or at least seriously considered ignoring the law, the Constitution, or
the Supreme Court.
He even [I said,] defies the idea of leaving office, because apparently those
constitutional limits don't or at least shouldn't apply to him any more than
any other ones do.
I then cited five occasions in the previous year on which he had said he would
remain in office for from 10 to 20 to 25 years and once even said "Maybe we'll
have to give that a shot," the "that" in this case being president for
life.People insisted he was just joking, that it was just "something to trigger
the libs." But, I concluded,
[s]orry, when you go to the same well at least five times, that's not a joke.
That's something you're thinking about.
That again was a year ago - and I was hardly the first. Other voices had been
rasing the same warning; some from even before he was elected.
We
knew. We had to know. And those who didn't know damn well should have known.
Tweetie-pie
lived on, thrived on, built his power on, relied on, stoking the kind of
unfocused rage burning in what became his supporters and pointing that rage in
directions that worked to his benefit.
And his used his skill - give
the devil his due - his skill in manipulating that anger to cow his opponents
among the GOPpers, who for four years shuffled and mumbled and tugged at their
forelock and kissed the ring, so great was their dread at the horrible prospect
of being primaried by his legion of fanatics - or, put another way, their fear
of losing their jobs and hobbling their personal ambitions.
We knew.
We had to know. They knew. They had to know. And those who didn't know damn well
should have known.
In the days leading up to January 6, former
national security adviser Mike Flynn
predicted
that millions of people would show up for Tweetie-pie's rally even as a
pro-Tweetie-pie message board was
stuffed with posts
about an intention to be, a plan to be, violent.
One planning
graphic showed a map of streets around Congress that rioters wanted to obstruct
to "block Dems and RINOs” from even getting to the Capitol building. One of the
hottest topics on that board was how protesters can bring guns to DC - which
would be illegal. Others talked about breaking into federal buildings or
attacking any law enforcement that would get in their way. One popular comment
predicted "literal war" for January 6 and "we’ll storm offices and physically
remove and even kill all the D.C. traitors and reclaim the country.”
We
knew. We had to know. Law enforcement knew. They had to know. And those who
didn't know damn well should have known.
Which raises a question lots
of people have asked: Why was there so little security? Why was law enforcement
so unprepared? Why did it take so long to organize a response? Why weren't they
ready?
There have been a lot of varied answers ranging from wholesale
screw-ups to deliberate official interference that hindered a response from
agencies such as the national guard and Homeland Security, even to outright law
enforcement collusion with the terrorists.
But one answer needs to be
considered seriously because even if it isn't the whole answer, it undoubtedly
is part of it: the fact that the rioters were white.
Because even
though they talked about violence, even though they came, a significant number
of them, armed, even though they had been primed for, even incited to, violence
by their glorious leader at a rally immediately before, until the mob actually
started coming through the windows and over the walls, they just didn't seem
that threatening. Because they were white. And, apparently, rioting was seen as
something that - well, that white people just don't do.
I never
thought I'd applaud something Claire McCaskill said, but while she wasn't the
only, she was the first one I heard say we should imagine what the reaction
would be if those were black faces in that crowd instead of white ones.
That's
not just speculation: Not only do we have the physical evidence, the pictures,
the videos, of how cops treated Black Lives Matter protests over the summer, how
dramatically it contrasted with the leniency shown the insurrectionists at the
capitol, there have been
psychological studies
that have found that people, especially - not exclusively, but especially -
white people, perceive black men to be
more menacing, more dangerous, more capable of inflicting harm, than a white man of about
the same age, height, weight, and build.
At the same time, black boys
are persistently perceived as older than they are. Recall the case of Tamir
Rice, the 12-year-old child shot down by two Cleveland cops in 2014. The cops
said they thought he was 20.
Which means in turn that what happened
on January 6, why the police were so unready, so easily overwhelmed, is at least
partly due to structural racism, that sort of racism that infects our society to
the point it literally shapes our perceptions of physical reality.
And
it's a racism that underlies Tweetie-pie's political base and therefore his
political power. Like the old joke that you don't have to be crazy to work here
but it helps, you don't have to be a thoroughgoing racist to support Tweetie-pie
- but it sure as hell helps.
Which actually relates to other part of
January 6, the Congressional certification of the Electoral College vote and
specifically the objections raised to some states' votes.
Because the
moves of Sens. Josh "Creepy-crawly" Hawley and Ted Ooze were about precisely
that: political power. Even as half of the GOPper senators who were going to
join their vapid useless stunt dropped out, shamed into silence by the terrorist
MAGA attack on the Capitol, the two of them persisted in two of the planned five
or six objections: Arizona, which had already started debate when the attack
happened, and Pennsylvania, for some reason the focus of the anti-voting rights
conspirators' concerns.
The thing is, they knew the effort - assuming
this theater of the absurd deserves the description - they knew it would fail,
that it had no chance, because for an objection to be upheld, it had to be
upheld by both the Senate and the House and no one,
no one, thought that
was going to happen. They knew Trump was on the way out.
Which in
turn was the point: He's on the way out which means his supporters, depending on
what he thinks will turn the biggest profit for him, might be up for grabs. So
the point was not to win - it was to say you did it, the better to position
yourself at the true heir to the throne, the better to wrap yourself in the
mantle of Tweetie-pie's chosen one.
For Senators Howler and Ooze,
it's about their personal ambitions, ambitions that make them willing to push
the lies, push the "we wuz robbed" meme, to embrace the dangerous delusions and
fetid fantasies that have come to mark what it means to be a GOPper, to provoke
the divisions and distrust even with the results of that having just driven them
into hiding from a mob, a mob that may temporarily go back into hiding but which
is not going away. If you get nothing else from all this, get this: Despite the
certification, despite Tweetie-pie finally pledging a peaceful transition in
what reminded several of a hostage video, this still isn't over. And it won't be
over on January 20 - and Sens Howler and Ooze not only know it, they're counting
on it.
Put simply, the whole objection theater was just a means of
advancing their own powerlust and they don't care what they burn down in its
pursuit.
Which means, ultimately, that it's about what it's always
about for the right wing: power. Political, social, and economic power.
So
much so that I can't even call what the two of them and the rest of the bozos,
bastards, buffoons, and bosses who are their fellow travelers are about with
their voter intimidation, their voter suppression, their voter ID laws, voter
purges, and frothings about non-existent voter fraud, I can't even call it
antidemocratic, because in a true way democracy has nothing to do with it. If
the trappings, if the functioning, of democracy works to keep them in power,
they are fine with it. If they doesn't, they will toss it away in a heartbeat.
It's not that they're antidemocratic, it's that they don't give a flying damn
about democracy one way or the other. They care about power, about power and the
benefits they gain from having it.
Of course it is about the
practical benefits that such power brings, the wealth, the riches, the lifestyle
- which means again of course, that part of the drive is pure greed, pure "me
first."
 |
Josh Hawley Ted Cruz
|
But it's more: It's also about the sublime feeling of being
in control of the destiny of others, of being able to feel and in a practical
sense to be superior to others, to be able to regard yourself as not just over
others, but
better than them, superior not just in position or status,
but in the very essence of self. To be able to feel "I'm better than you."
And
the way you maintain that sort of power is, bluntly, by suckering the rubes,
that mass of people to who you so enjoy feeling superior, exactly the way
Tweetie-pie has so skillfully suckered his followers: Convince them that you are
ripping them off for their own benefit, trick them, deceive them, manipulate
them any way you can, into acting contrary to their own interests and instead
advancing yours, never forgetting that facts matter less than feelings, that
perception doesn't just overrule reality, it defines reality.
As an
example of the result,
a study
released the very end of 2020 showed
a significant percentage of GOPper voters
don't know what positions the party they're voting for holds, falsely believing
it supports protecting people with pre-existing healthcare conditions, expanding
medicaid, and a $15 minimum wage and opposes allowing mining debris to be dumped
into streams, which were the four issues used in the study.
But
turning voters into suckers for power is nothing new. This didn't start with
Tweetie-pie. Forty years ago, after Reagan was elected in 1980, I called his win
"the ultimate triumph of image over substance." That was demonstrated clearly in
1984, when he ran for re-election against Walter Mondale. During that campaign,
a survey asked people how they felt about a variety of issues. Over and over,
clear majorities supported policy positions that were in line with the Mondale
campaign, not the Reagan one. Over and over, clear majorities of those very same
people, when asked who they were voting for, said Reagan.
Which was
not, ultimately, for what he said or for what he proposed to do or had done, but
because of the way he made them feel.
How do you do that? How do you
keep the rubes in line? How do you get them to feel the way you want them to?
You could always just lie to them, of course, but the main weapon is fear, as it
always has been.
Fear, a particular sort of fear, defines the right
wing. The thing that psychologically unites conservatives across categories of
age, biological sex, economic class, even race, is fear of change. You know the
common experience that as people get older, they often get more conservative.
That's because as we age, we have greater difficulty in adjusting to change and
so more fearful of having to deal with it.
Fear of change has been
used to drive opposition to any number of movements for social progress from
feminism to LGBTQ rights, civil rights, economic justice, climate change, and
more. It's never expressed that way, of course, not directly, rather it's a
matter of insisting that "if we do this, all these horrible things will occur"
even if they were fantasies and then letting people's imaginations do the work.
Early on in the computer industry, Microsoft used just that tactic as a means to
crush a rival. The company called it "FUD," creating "fear, uncertainty, and
doubt."
But the go-to weapon for manipulation here remains, as it so
often has been, racism. The difference at the present moment is that the feared
change is real and inevitable: The US is on track to within a few decades
becoming what's called a majority minority country. That is, more than 50% of
the population will be comprised of a combination of blacks, Hispanics, Asians,
and other non-white residents. Whites will still be the biggest single group,
but unlike today, they will not be a majority and, unlike today, it will be not
merely misleading or incomplete to think of the US as a white nation, but
flat-out wrong.
That is a concept that all too many white people find
frightening and even if they don't know the demographic facts they can sense the
trend in everything the see around them, the feeling of "It's all changing, it's
all different, it's not the country I grew up in!" And it's not. And it won't be
- but that won't stop people from wanting it to be.
What's important
to realize now is that all those people you hear ranting about the intention to
"take back our country," they mean it in a very literal psychological sense.
Probably our most basic, even primal, social fear is the fear of the "other,"
the "not us." Racism, xenophobia, sexism, religious bigotry, homophobia,
bigotries of all sorts have that common denominator: the target is "not us." The
variant is who constitutes "us" in different cases. So the unspoken answer to
the question "take the country back from who" is "take it back from the 'other,'
from the 'not us.'"
But that very same prospect of majority minority
creates a problem for the economic, social, and political elites that dominate
our society, for the very people who look to exploit our fear of the "not us" to
maintain their control.
That problem is it means that the
functionings of democracy can no longer be trusted to keep them in power because
over time fewer and fewer people are wedded to that "way it used to be" life
where being white was the default meaning of "us" and part of the default
definition of "American."
All the attempts at voter suppression, all
the gerrymandering, are attempts to hold off that day but as events in Georgia
showed, those efforts have reached the point of diminishing returns and in the
easily foreseeable future will no longer be enough as they are overwhelmed by
demographic reality.
So we have the move to greater, harsher, more
extreme, lengths such as we have seen this time, including raising possibilities
of a military coup, of violence in the streets, of just ignoring the
Constitution and federal law altogether, even of civil war, prospects raised to
legitimize them, to make them common currency, ultimately to make them less
fearful then the ever-looming prospect of the "not us" and so easier to
implement when the trappings of democracy no longer serve.
The elites may not have invented those possibilities, they may have originated
and in some cases undoubtedly did originate in the paranoid swamps of the
fringes of the Internet, but those elites, those powerful political, economic,
and particularly media forces, did pick up on those possibilities, treated them
respectfully and so amplified them, then fed them back to those same fringes
even as at the same time they pushed them into a wider audience.
This
is not to say there is a conscious, organized conspiracy to this end or some
sort of Illuminati-style cabal working off a timetable, but it is how the
process of moving such ideas from outlandish to everyday, from fringe to
mainstream, works in practice - and who it benefits.
And
it's exactly how we wind up with a mob of armed domestic terrorist
insurrectionist yahoos storming the Capitol in the fervid belief they are
"taking back" "their" country as, according to a Newsweek poll,
45% of GOPpers
cheered them on.
This is not over. And it won't be for a long
time.
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