In the third part of his analysis of the forces leading up to the violence on the 6 January, Anthony Barnett traces the dual revolutions on the right, and now on the left
Given the role of the spectacle in the American imaginary, it is fitting that two events watched live around the world have bookended the final two decades of the era when market values dominated politics. The first was the levelling of the Twin Towers. The second, the storming and occupation of the Capitol.
Both were forms of ‘propaganda of the deed’. Both were initiated by cunning, fascistic narcissists – Osama bin Laden and Donald Trump – each of whom apparently spent hours watching TV. Both were taboo-busting shocks played out on US landmarks; one destroyed, the other desecrated.
Threads of violence and frustration link 9/11 to 6 January 2021. The connections are symbolised by 35-year-old Ashli Babbitt, a veteran of 14 years’ service in the US Air Force, who did tours of duty in Afghanistan and Iraq. During that time she earned 12 medals and ribbons, including the Global War on Terrorism Service Medal, the Iraq Campaign Medal, the Air Force Expeditionary Service Ribbon with Gold Border and the Global War on Terrorism Expeditionary Medal.
Babbitt was a former Obama supporter who switched her support to Trump in 2016. (“I think Obama did great things,” she tweeted three years ago. “I voted for him!.. and I voted for Trump. I could not vote for Hillary.”) By 2020, she was branding her tweets with QAnon conspiracy slogans. In January this year, Babbitt flew from her home in San Diego, California, to Washington, tweeting: “Nothing will stop us… The storm is here and is descending upon DC in less than 24 hours.” She joined the ‘Stop the Steal’ rally outside the White House, watched her president speak, then marched on the Capitol with her fellow believers. As she tried to scramble over a makeshift barricade that blocked the glass doors to the Speaker’s Lobby entrance of the House of Representatives, a lieutenant in the Capitol police shot her dead.
In effect, Babbitt recycled bin Laden. Like him, she was trained by the US, served in Afghanistan, turned against American power, declared that a storm would fall upon it – and was killed.
The Double Earthquake
The assault on Capitol Hill has unleashed a double earthquake that will transform politics around the world. Unlike the flights that brought down the Twin Towers on 9/11, these twin shocks did not come as a complete surprise: they have been building up over the course of Trump’s first term.
The first quake is on the right. When Trump won the presidency in 2016, the desire of the traditional power structures was that he would be tamed by office. But he refused to bed down. He continuously fired staff who crossed him, was blatantly corrupt, abandoned any pretence of support for human rights, recklessly trashed the principles of environmental safeguards and prepared to turn the US into a fortress of authoritarianism directed by his family.
For four years the political establishment, for want of a better term, hoped it would not get any worse. When he lost the election in November they were relieved: surely he and his supporters would now play by the rules. Instead, Trump escalated; he repudiated the legitimacy of the process and told his supporters to “fight like hell” and “take back our country” in a process that culminated in the Capitol insurrection. It was bad enough that Trump was personally willing to use force to retain the presidency. The bigger shock is that a majority of the Republican Party, its legislators and activists, supported him and still do. The threat of Trumpism is embedded and can’t be defeated by traditional election manoeuvres.
The second earthquake is on the left. For decades, far longer than the period in which it underestimated Trump, the same political establishment marginalised egalitarian, democratic opposition to its policies and privileges, along with calls for climate action. The nature of its rule was to support finance and corporate capital, ameliorate the inequities and pollution where it felt it could – but always from above, to ensure its continued capacity to manipulate opinion and control outcomes.
Ashli Babbitt has now become a heroine of this unmeasurable discontent. Reportedly, a fifth of those arrested for the Capitol Hill insurrection were military veterans, of wars that were so misconceived as to be futile.
Confronted by the audacity of Trump’s far-right presidency, it crumbled. None of its usual mechanisms of control were able to contain him and his followers, now that social media meant he could cultivate, organise and inflame opinion in the wide-open frontiers of cyberspace, while Rupert Murdoch provided a bully pulpit on Fox News. Only a popular mobilisation on the left, unwilling to demonstrate allegiance to the core power structures and determined to link up issues of the environment, race, gender, human rights and economic fairness, provided the necessary countervailing effort to frustrate Trumpism – for the moment.
Joe Biden has said that he began to consider his run for the presidency in August 2017, when white power fascists buoyed by Trump’s success held a torchlight rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. In a striking opinion piece published in The Atlantic Biden denounced the racists and emphatically excoriated the President for lending them his endorsement. In the week following Charlottesville the far-right had organised a “free speech” rally in Boston. Tens of thousands of protesters, activists, feminists and anti-racists marched to oppose it. “In Boston”, Biden wrote, “we saw the truth of America: those with the courage to oppose hate far outnumber those who promote it.” For the first time in living memory, a successful presidential bid started out with a thank you to the progressive left.
It would not be the first time that such a campaign had borrowed left-wing energy, only to abandon it outside the portico of the White House. Had Trump proved to be just a maverick who eventually embraced business as usual, then Biden too would probably have followed the usual course. But now everyone can see that any return to elite business as usual opens the door for Trumpism to bounce back in. Without a popular counter-force, the far right will have its way.
To succeed, the Biden administration needs to work with the progressive left – and more importantly, is aware of this fact. “Progressives”, Biden’s chief of staff recently acknowledged, are now a “big part of our party”. When Biden addressed the nation from the Rose Garden to present his signature $1,9 trillion American Rescue Plan, he acknowledged at the start, “Bernie, stepping up and making the case why this was so transformational made a big difference in how a lot of people voted”.
The implications of this will be far reaching. For now, everything depends on developments within the US – and to understand their significance we must start with how it has come about.
The Origins of Trumpism
The link between 6 January and 9/11 personified by Babbitt was more than a random echo. The US responded to the levelling of the Twin Towers by occupying Afghanistan and then launching an insane, nationalist war on Iraq to demonstrate that its wounded hegemony was intact. To legitimate the aggression, the US – along with its close ally the UK – proclaimed, falsely, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, orchestrating a massive PR campaign to convince the public.
Deceit and deception are normal in great power politics, but this was an obliteration of fundamental domestic norms. It opened up a path that would lead to Trump’s mendacity. It leant validity to his assertion that the media disseminated fake news and the political system was rigged. As he pointed out on the campaign trail in 2016, he was part of it and he knew.
More important, however, the rigged system failed. The scale and intensity of support for Trump is rooted in the cumulative frustration of the American middle and lower middle classes, and their decades-long experience of income paralysis and increasing insecurity, accompanied by military stalemate. The occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq were unmatched logistic and martial achievements, deploying a colossal use of firepower, that nonetheless turned into drawn-out strategic defeats. In 2008, the combination of dishonesty and failure opened the way for Obama, whose initial opposition to the invasion of Iraq gave him the standing to seize the Democratic Party nomination from Hillary Clinton, who had supported it.
Only a popular mobilisation on the left, unwilling to demonstrate allegiance to the core power structures… provided the necessary countervailing effort to frustrate Trumpism.
As president, Obama decided that his role was not to cut America’s losses immediately, but to manage a withdrawal that preserved as much of Washington’s international influence as possible. The result was eight years of global mortification and only partial domestic change, despite the symbolic milestone of America electing its first black president.
Obama’s re-election in 2012 marked a turning point. Although he beat off his Republican challenger Mitt Romney, the Tea Party was on the rise, while Occupy had forced the issue of inequality into public consciousness. A chilling New Yorker account of America’s far-right elite, by Evan Osnos provides a revealing cameo. A wealthy Republican backer, Lee Hanley, felt there was a “deep frustration with the status quo” and commissioned a pollster to investigate further. The results recorded that the “level of discontent in this country was beyond anything measurable”.
Ashli Babbitt has now become a heroine of this unmeasurable discontent. Reportedly, a fifth of those arrested for the Capitol Hill insurrection were military veterans, of wars that were so misconceived as to be futile. Many more came from police forces around the US and other parts of the security apparatus that identify with the military and share in the frustration. After her 14 years of service, Babbitt started a business and went bust, ripped off by a loan company. The Washington Post reported that a high proportion of the individuals who took part in the assault have faced financial ruin: nearly 20% of those charged had previously gone bankrupt; a quarter “had been sued for money”, while one in five had “faced losing their home at one point”.
The mob that descended on Washington was no mobilisation of the poor, and many of them were down-the-line white supremacists. People flew or drove in from across the US, well-equipped and clothed for the winter weather. They were drawn from an increasingly insecure middle class, who had seen their businesses go bust a