Describing the Debacle at the Capitol: Notes for the Left
What happened at the U.S. Capitol? A riot? An attempted coup? An unruly protest? An act of terror? Since the far-right blitz of the Capitol Building, observers have struggled to find the precise words to describe the incident.
How one characterizes the events in Washington, D.C. matters. Language shapes awareness. Amid the extreme political confusion of our time, getting the terminology right is one way to achieve clarity.
But the task of the left is not just to interpret the world; we must radicalize consciousness, too. It is vital that we expose the false narratives that have framed elite responses to the assault on the Capitol.
This is especially so because the more polished, rational wing of the ruling class is poised to capitalize on the widespread revulsion generated by the Washington fiasco. The Nancy Pelosi-Chuck Schumer faction of the U.S. plutocracy will use the latest eruption of violent political reaction to burnish Biden’s image as redeemer of the Republic. As hardcore Trumpism grows more barbaric, it becomes easier to promote the resumption of coolheaded neoliberalism as the key to restoring democracy and rule of law.
Oppression with a refined, cosmopolitan face, however, is hardly a real alternative to crude white supremacy. Leftists must show that the dismantling of racist institutions — from policing and mass incarceration to militarism and capitalism itself — is the only true answer to the antihumanism of the extreme right.
We might begin by skewering the rhetoric of indignation used by defenders of the status quo. Whatever happened at the Capitol the other day, what did NOT occur was the rupture of a fundamentally democratic order. The mantra of the respectable political establishment during and after the Capitol onslaught was, “This is not who we are.” Yet there were clear parallels between the right-wing belligerents and many of their ostensible opponents.
The far-right mob and the forces of policing that presumably were charged with keeping them at bay occupy the same continuum of repressive ideology and practice. Both bodies of armed men (and they are overwhelmingly men) use patriotic duty or the defense of the homeland as justifications for unleashing white supremacist violence. Both clothe their authoritarian tendencies in discourses of patriotism and American exceptionalism. And by striving to suppress worker power and popular antiracism, both the civilian goons of the far right and the official forces of the U.S. security state facilitate the capitalist domination of the planet and its exploited social classes.
The community of interest between white nationalist gangsterism and law enforcement is one reason the raiders of the Capitol were able to all but waltz into the seat of the United States Congress.
In no true sense, however, did the right-wing marauders disrupt the “peaceful” transfer of power or violate a “democratic process.” The permanent condition of U.S. empire is war on the poorest and most vulnerable populations, both at home and abroad. Meanwhile entrenched racial and economic disparities — the result of decades of attacks on even the mildest programs of social redistribution — continue to warp our society. The swarms at the Capitol were despicable, to be sure. But they could not have fractured a just social contract that simply does not exist.
So how should we characterize the mobs at the Capitol? I am reluctant to call them “rioters.” Historically, “riot” is a word used to disparage the spontaneous, mass uprisings of poor communities that seek the reallocation of social resources. Yet the assault on the Capitol was hardly a rank-and-file rebellion. From all appearances, it was a bourgeois counterrevolution fueled by conspiracy theories and racial grievances and executed, for the most part, by paunchy, financially stable bullies. This is not what Mao had in mind when he spoke of a “people’s army.”
Nor would I describe the Capitol invaders as “terrorists,” though raw coercion certainly was among their goals. For Westerners, the term “terrorism” conjures images of distant racial Others. References to “American terrorists” foreignize an exuberant violence that we ought to recognize as homegrown.
For similar reasons, we should reject tropes designed to exoticize the chaos in Washington. Commentators who suggested that the mayhem belonged in “a banana republic” rather than in the bosom of the “free world” managed to resurrect Cold War fantasies even as they exhibited the same deep-seated racism that drove the right-wingers up Capitol Hill.
There is little chance that the Capitol siege will diminish “America’s standing in the world,” as some observers have lamented. Let’s face it: U.S. bombs, drones and ceaseless interventions accomplished that years ago. Today the “shithole countries” of the globe gape at Washington in amused contempt.
Labeling the debacle at the Capitol an “attempted coup” is probably equally inaccurate. Doing so, in any case, rather glorifies what was actually a depressingly sordid affair. One doubts that as they made their way to the nation’s capital, many of the far-right aggressors had any coherent plans for seizing power. Subversion, intimidation and the assertion of a swaggering, hypermasculine whiteness were their principal aims. We should not dignify their rampage by declaring it an “insurgency.”
In the end, “fascist” is the best designation for the right-wing pillagers of the Capitol. They are fundamentalists who see themselves as restorers of white nationalist integrity. They are the toxic byproduct of our pathologically racist, misogynistic and xenophobic culture. They are the spiritual heirs of the settlers and adventurers who have always gleefully slaughtered in the name of white supremacist conquest. Their chants of “USA! USA!” perfectly conveyed the homicidal logic of superpatriotism. The theorist Aimé Césaire warned generations ago that the spectacular violence performed in the colonial periphery inevitably returns to the mother country.
Though the sacking of the Capitol was farcical in many ways, its perpetrators should not be reduced to mere memes. They are dangerous. They exemplify the toxicity of America’s slowly imploding empire. And their entitled belligerence threatens to overshadow the suffering of the truly oppressed.
Indeed, the chaos in Washington immediately eclipsed the sickening news that no Kenosha, Wisconsin police officers will face charges for shooting Jacob Blake, a black man, seven times in front of his children. Even as the far-right intruders romped inside the Capitol, scores of uninsured or underinsured Americans lay stricken with covid. Many more lost their jobs or continued to mount grim struggles for survival amid a disintegrating economy.
The left must recognize this juxtaposition — the revelry of white nationalists and the quiet anguish of millions of precarious people — as the natural result of unfettered capitalism. We should not let outrage at the antics in Washington spawn an insidious counter-patriotism or rehabilitate the myth of noble policing. The reaffirmation of constitutionalism and loyalty to the flag are hardly viable social responses to the groundswell of political reaction.
The storming of the Capitol is yet another sign of the nation’s cultural and intellectual rot. But it also represents an opportunity for the left. We should renew our drive for genuine democracy. We should demonstrate, urgently and consistently, that neither the savagery of the far right nor the illusions of liberal restoration can meaningfully address the crises we face, from climate catastrophe to spiraling unemployment to the social evisceration caused by the pandemic. Only popular movements for racial and economic transformation can replenish us amid the disorientation and vulgarity of the time.
