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US election 2020 thread

Another good piece from Seymour, this time talking about the influence of social media etc on the rioters

Is the media right to call this a 'coup'? It isn't utterly without foundation - but we're talking fantasy putschism here, at least for now. We're talking a performance coup based on delusion, and enabled by armed police. That doesn't make it less dangerous. Delusional politics often wins. However, in the highly distributed organising of the event, there was never any realistic apprehension among the scumroots of the kind of force that would be necessary to overthrow a powerful bourgeois democracy.

Rather than a 'coup', let me call this an armed shitstorm. That captures both its amateurism and fantasy politics, and its definite edge of danger and innovation. The social industry, through which this event was organised, is a centrifuge, a cultural accelerator, generating new forms of politicisation along the lines of culture war. Through its relentless logic of aggregation, it discovers receptive audiences for conspiracism, far-right propaganda and disinfotainment. It doesn't make far right content addictive - the pervasive mental distress of late capitalism does that - but it generates user engagement by automatically matching this content to audience. The spectacular growth of far-right enclaves over the last few years would be impossible without it.

The social industry also adds another dimension, an apocalyptic temporality in which users are always collectively accelerating towards the latest climax, the latest showdown, new shocks that might engender unworldly confidence in miraculous possibility. Hence, the shitstorm. As I wrote in The Twittering Machine, we had seen the 'meatspace troll' in the form of lone wolf murderers and their manifestos, sparks of violence flying off the cultural infernos of the social industry, but "the armed shitstorm" was every bit as much a "material possibility of the medium". That is what we've seen a version of here.

For weeks before yesterday's action in the capitol building, Trump's online activists were calling for him to #CrossTheRubicon on 6th January. This is a reference to Caesar entering Rome and, after a civil war, making himself dictator with popular support. It was all over Facebook's "Stop the Steal" groups, 4Chan's "politically incorrect" threads (almost all 4Chan rubicon content has been deleted), gamer forums, Reddit's conspiracy threads, far right Twitter, YouTube's "red pill" channels, and QAnon groups. It was echoed by the head of the Arizona Republican party.

They were begging Trump to impose a dictatorship. Issue executive orders, they said, it's past time. Invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807, invoke Executive Order 13848, deploy the military and National Guards to put down the communists and the Antifa. Remove all traitors. The nation is under attack from left-wing terrorists. Patriots, bring your guns. The legal strategies have failed, the milquetoast conservatives have sold out, McConnell has betrayed us, Pence has betrayed us, it's time for a revolution. Trump is going to cross the Rubicon, and we the people are going to support him with force. "Do not let them disarm someone without stacking bodies." For QAnon, this was a sign that "The Storm" - the day of reckoning in which there would be a round up of leftists, liberals, Democrats, Satanists and so on, and martial law declared - was coming. For the Proud Boys, it meant, as Enrique Tarrio put it, that the "standby order has been rescinded." They really believed that if Trump declared a coup, the army, the police and the majority of people would back him. All that talk of "civil war" which has been percolating away for years, and particularly since the Black Lives Matter protests began, was to culminate yesterday with Trump's seizure of power. If these people weren't so dangerous, one might pity them their illusions.

Yet, of course, these illusions are not baseless. The army rank and file do indeed support Trump, and a freikorpsish element are disproportionately to be found in the militias, the boogaloo Nazis and the QAnons. The cops do indeed love Trump, and it is no coincidence that it was a Police Federation president who was the first to defend yesterday's action. Nor that DC cops allowed the ingress to happen, as cops have allowed other capitol buildings to be stormed by gun-toting reactionaries many times before. More to the point, they had ample reason to believe that Trump might indeed be tempted to #CrossTheRubicon. Trump had done everything he could to mount some sort of shambolic 'soft coup', from calling militias out on election day to trying to incite local officials to overturn the election results once his vexatious legal challenges were running out of steam. The idea of a hard coup had been openly backed by Trump's grotesque public outriders, Sidney Powell and General Flynn, who had already called for martial law to stop the election. Both of these individuals, who are tight with QAnon, have been in Oval Office meetings with Trump recently. It is entirely plausible that Trump discussed fantasy coup options with them. Vanity Fair reports that White House officials were warned not to speak to Trump, to minimise their liability to prosecution if they were made complicit with his 'coup'. Several ex-Pentagon officials publicly warned Trump against attempting a military coup, suggesting that these rumours of his intentions were being taken seriously.

Nonetheless, whatever objective basis the anons might have had for believing that Trump was going to attempt a wildly improbable coup, their hopes crystallised around something entirely unobjective. They believed that Trump could defy what they regarded as the diabolical power of the swamp, of the cabal, of the Satanists and paedophiles and communists, because of their highly eroticised fantasy of him as an indomitable, indestructible, messianic blond Aryan muscleman of the sort that Ben Garrison's cartoons describe. The strange sexual charisma of Donald Trump was an essential part of the plausibility of the rubicon narrative. "The erotic power of a foul monster," as Philip Roth writes of Richard III's seduction of Lady Anne. In that respect, the humbling of Trump, the fact that he was forced after the debacle to deliver a robotic teleprompter speech accepting that there would be an orderly transition of power, would have been profoundly demoralising to the anons. And yet, they have also had this formative experience, which participants found to be so profoundly empowering, and over which they joyously claimed victory.

There was never any immediate risk to the hallowed halls, the blessed constitution, the sacred bonds of love that bind a nation, and all of that sinister crap. That is not where the danger lies. The danger lies in the fact that tens of millions of Americans who backed this action evidently want what it stands for, hunger for it, believe in the rectitude of force to achieve it. This moment, which participants called a 'revolution', will become a myth and a meme. Something to learn from and repeat. Something to nourish future struggles. And martyred Trump, as they undoubtedly see it, will become a motivational figure in himself, a figure of their heroic humiliation and betrayal, a figure to be avenged. We have not seen the last of the armed shitstorm.
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There is still a little part of my brain that's just amusing itself by thinking of other situations where you could apply The Dark Knight's very intelligent logic: "I notice that you seem to be quite upset at coming home to find me in bed with your wife. And yet I am reliably informed that you yourself do exactly the same thing on a regular basis. Could your double standards be any more glaring? I predict I'll now be insulted some more."
 
Smokeandsteam said:
Lind’s main argument identifies, correctly, the period as one of Gramscian morbidity as America enters a 5th decade of the neo-liberal order. He wants his side to get its head around that crisis rather than flogging the dead horse of the old order and assuming that all will be well once Biden and co get to work in trying to reconstruct a politics that led America to where it is now.

As a piece of analysis and polemic it stands in stark contrast with the hysterical (it’s a FASCIST putsch) or hilarious (the direct equivalence drawn between Wednesday and Pearl Harbour by a quivering Jon Sopel for example) dribble that liberals have offered up by way of analysis.

As for the paragraph you’ve highlighted Lind’s argument is that both Wednesday and the summer are contextually located within that crisis. He’s right
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Nope. None of that made any sense.
 
Smokeandsteam said:
Lind’s main argument identifies, correctly, the period as one of Gramscian morbidity as America enters a 5th decade of the neo-liberal order. He wants his side to get its head around that crisis rather than flogging the dead horse of the old order and assuming that all will be well once Biden and co get to work in trying to reconstruct a politics that led America to where it is now.

As a piece of analysis and polemic it stands in stark contrast with the hysterical (it’s a FASCIST putsch) or hilarious (the direct equivalence drawn between Wednesday and Pearl Harbour by a quivering Jon Sopel for example) dribble that liberals have offered up by way of analysis.

As for the paragraph you’ve highlighted Lind’s argument is that both Wednesday and the summer are contextually located within that crisis. He’s right
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He is right that they are contextually located within that crisis (bit of an obvious point, mind you, I would think - how could they not be?), but the unrest of the summer - BLM, etc - was not orchestrated by either party. It's a movement that exists despite the Democrats, not because of them. Democrats belatedly endorsed it, but so did England's Premier League. Doesn't mean BLM was orchestrated by football administrators.
 
There’s got to be lawyers talking about conspiracy to sedition charges, haven’t seen anything since the tweets showing that the events of the day fit the legal definition perfectly.
 
ska invita said:
I don't understand your post...what is 6/1, what do you mean about ballots out of where?
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What happened on the day of the formal acceptance of the Electoral college votes - you remember the one several people died as a result of seizing the Captol building, the day pipe bombs were found near both the Democrat and Republican offices, several people were arrested on firearms charges and the President tweet called the VP gutless and VP tweeted something about his view of the constitutional limitations of his position, that 6/1.
 
brogdale said:
True, but the huge issue for the party left behind in the smoking ruins of the Trump bunker is the large chunk of his (former) base that believed the hype; I know the figure will decline over time, but a gut reaction of 45% of Republican voters...just wow.

View attachment 247732
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I'm equally at 'wow' in terms of the size of that group, though as you say, where it all goes next is the interesting bit. At one level we have a situation where it is bound to fragment. Trump has gone and certainly reduced his ability to be the king in exile for these people (with the 'betrayal' video). If the cops and FBI do go in hard, tracking down as many as they can of the invaders, that could also go in different directions. A lot of the movement will shit themselves, while others will go even further into the bunker. I don't rule out the odd armed loon having a shoot out when the FBI come calling. But ultimately, the conditions that created these people are not going away, from the distrust of government, economic conditions or endemic racism. They might end up with a new leader/figurehead, though they may end up just focused on something specific. For example, they'll be watching every move Kamala Harris makes.
 
The completely unsurprising backstory to the video that he hated having to make (was persuaded it was his best chance of avoiding the even greater ignominy of being removed from office, and therefore not being able to do all the pardoning he has planned)
www.cnn.com

Trump tweets he is skipping Biden's inauguration

President Donald Trump said he would not attend his successor's swearing-in, a day after his top aides cajoled him into releasing a video conceding he would soon be departing office.
www.cnn.com www.cnn.com
 
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