This wasn’t a coup against our system. This is now our system.

When a mob sporting Confederate flags and QAnon signs heeds the President’s call to rampage the Capitol in the name of an absurd conspiracy theory, it’s obvious we’ve got some serious problems. But it’s already becoming almost equally clear that mainstream liberalism is incapable of recognizing what those problems actually are. So let’s clarify.

The problem isn’t that there was a failed coup. It’s that there was a successful demonstration of far right impunity.

Panic that there is a serious plot to stop the peaceful transfer of power from Donald Trump Biden is misguided. As Black liberation scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor tweeted during the action:

“It’s a coup in their minds but not in real life. The United States government cannot be sacked by a mob of angry white dudes….It is a shocking display of double standards, the rot of the GOP, and the utter racism of American police and those who direct them. This is desperation, not an actual plan to take power.”

But if there was no coup attempt, then there should also be no congratulations in order for a coup being averted, or praise for our institutions holding up under assault. Because what actually happened on Wednesday was that the lunatic or fascist (pick one, I don’t care for the moment) wing of the Republican Party was wildly successful in rubbing all of our faces in their ability to seemingly get away with anything.

Those who take solace in pointing out how how disorganized and incoherent the MAGA mob was are completely missing this point, which is that its profoundly intimidating and demoralizing that a few thousand asshats can disrupt and postpone a critical Congressional vote, while millions of anti-racist protesters can’t even get an indictment against a single Wisconsin cop who shot Jacob Blake seven times in the back.

Like the nearly 150 Republicans in Congress who voted to endorse the myth that Joe Biden stole the election, the protests weren’t a failed last gasp for the old administration. They were a successful first step towards undermining the already pathetically modest goals of the incoming one — by pushing the right wing Overton Window to make even acknowledging the facts of the election a bargaining chip. While the Democratic Party will continue to try to beat its most progressive members into obedient submission, Republicans denouncing the Capitol protesters will be back to calling them the silent majority tomorrow.

The problem isn’t that “This isn’t America” but that of course it is.

Most of the condemnations coming from politicians in both parties compared the violence in the Capitol violence to something we expect to see in “the Third World” or “banana republics” but — gasp! — never in the United States of America. This rhetoric is obviously racist and colonial garbage. It’s also just a mirror image of Trumpism.

Just as the President claims that those who disagree with him aren’t real Americans (and apparently aren’t “real” voters), too many progressives adopt the same strategy in reverse, claiming that racially fueled paranoia, hatred, and self-delusion on display at the Capitol protest somehow isn’t native to the soil of the the world’s leading producer and exporter of racist reaction.

White supremacists trying to undermine voting rights is obviously a fundamental part of our country’s history. Fortunately, so is the opposing fight for democracy and equality, but we can’t wage that fight if we continually deny our own history.

The reactions from politicians and media — chock full of unprecedented!s and un-American!s — serve both the most banal short term goals of clickbait and the most entrenched American ideology of erasing our history. They disorient us into paralysis rather than shocking us into action. (By the way, the knee jerk reaction from some of the online left — “you’re all making a big deal out of a handful of kooks” — is equally useless.)

When the initial shock is over, we still will start hearing that these unprecedented! and un-American! protests demand the same old failed solutions of American liberalism: in the face of this new existential threat the left needs to unite behind Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer.

Instead, we should recognize that the Capitol protests were a serious sign of the potential of a white nationalist movement deeply rooted in both American culture and an American political system where the left is relentlessly policed and surveilled both in the streets and in the halls of government, and the far right is given a long leash to wreck useful havoc.

The problem isn’t that protesters entered the Capitol. It’s that protesters entered the Capitol for an authoritarian conspiracy theory rather than $2000 monthly checks and Medicare for All.

Many headlines have described the MAGA crowd’s forcible entrance into the Senate chambers as a “breach”. That’s a chillingly Pentagonian verb for our media to instinctively reach for to describe a body of representative government being confronted by some angry members — yes including some violent ones — of those they supposedly represent.

A government that has left people without health care and stable food in the midst of a pandemic should be “breached” by angry mobs every single day. But of course we know that protesters demanding things like health care and pandemic relief — to say nothing of an end to racist police violence — would be met by far stronger police repression.

But in the coming days many liberals who should know better will for more increased and law enforcement policing against protests, which law enforcement will then use against left wing protesters with the full support — in spirit and perhaps in person — from the forces that broke into the Capitol.

But protest is our only way out of our mess. If most of us today are feeling intimidated and powerless, that’s because that was precisely the aim of the Capitol storming. Let’s remind ourselves that over the past four years the size of protests for immigrants, women, Muslims, and African Americans has dwarfed that of the protests against them. That there is vast support for redistributive policies like $2000 monthly pandemic checks, Medicare for All, and even the Green New Deal.

Let’s take strength from the fact that the entire reason the system is stacked against us is that our movement has the potential to show what a genuine popular uprising can achieve. But we’re going to need that strength to muster the resolve to take on the cancer of violent ignorance that will only grow stronger after this week.

Posted at Medium January 8, 2021