1
With the second Impeachment trial underway, our country now has a chance to put some of the worst features of the Trump era behind us. But how safe are we? Can we transcend the threats implicit in the January 6 storming of the Capitol? The shock is still reverberating. What can we glean from a closer examination of it?

First, only by good luck did the country dodge a real bullet. Had the insurrectionists been only a little better organized and competent, they could clearly have done quite terrible damage, including murdering key leaders. But as it was, they only got in through the complacency, as well perhaps as sheer stupidity, unthinking racism, or malevolence of the (now former) House and Senate Sergeants at Arms and the leaders of the Capitol and DC Police. (I, for one, without access to any special intelligence reports, was quite fearful the night before. Why weren’t they?)

The invaders, carefully and repeatedly invited and incited by Trump himself and a few of his close associates, were a mixed crew of “the rebellious, the devout, the bored and the bitter”—as The New Yorker (1/18/21, p. 15) described them. Some small groups among them seemed to have definite and disturbing intentions, but there was little coherence even among those who had planned in advance. (A few, at least, were so ignorant of American political arrangements they thought that just sitting in the deserted chairs of Congress members would permit them to start governing on the spot. Imagine trying this even at your local city council meeting room, emptying it out—say—by bringing in a skunk.)

I haven’t seen any careful count of how much of the crowd actually entered the Capitol, but my guess from watching the videos is no more than a thousand. The total attendance at Trump’s rally was probably under 20,000; these were people from all over the country who had heeded his weeks-long anguished call to “Stop the Steal” at the last possible moment. Twenty thousand out of three-hundred-and-thirty million, amounts to less than one person in ten thousand. Even if we assume that each person in attendance at the larger rally was backed by a hundred others, it’s still a nearly negligible group. This indicates that despite his mastery of attention, Trump was losing the attention competition, overall.

A further striking aspect of those now being arrested and charged by the FBI and other agencies is the very arbitrariness of the cause they happen to have chosen most recently. Some are veterans of Occupy Wall Street, others of UFO searches, and so on with similar miscellany. They needed a cause to feel connected at all, and somehow Trump’s fraudulent claims about the election having been stolen turned out to be it—this time. Overwhelmingly, they were men, plenty of whom did seem to live in what amounted to “their mothers’ basements.” Even the Ku Klux Klan members of old were often much more “solid citizens.” The strange commingling of a few Jews with the equally few visible admirers of Hitler only accentuates how lacking in coherence they seem to be. One group call themselves “the Proud Boys,” but “Lost Boys” or “Eternal Boys” might be more accurate. They don’t want to—or can’t—grow up. Trump’s inherent, flamboyant, spoiled, ignorant, and bratty childishness—rather than any of his specific policies—may be what most strongly attracted them.

It is right to blame the insurrection in large part on the current workings of what I have long called the Attention Economy—social media and the multiple algorithms that led the suggestible or gullible down garden paths of misinformation, conspiracy theorizing and bizarre hopes.

But one consequence of that genesis deserves more thought. It is that each path quickly and endlessly subdivides into proliferating Facebook groups, Twitter hashtags, sub-Reddits, and the like. Rather than a unified movement or even a simple mob, each of the thousand or so invaders of the Capitol probably identified most closely with different ones among the hundreds of more specialized sub-groupings. True, there was a common theme of keeping Trump in office, but just as Trump himself, throughout his public life, was changeable and various almost from sentence to sentence or Tweet to Tweet, so his supporters probably each had their own sense of what Trumpism was and therefore of what they were at the Capitol to do or uphold.

True as it is that the Capitol invasion wouldn’t have occurred if the top security officers had had even moderate sense or awareness, the mob’s own lack of unity doomed their attempt as well. Of course there were some with murderous intent and others who came close to locating vulnerable office-holders or staffers, but they were not in any sort of over-all coordination. The killed and injured police were attacked viciously but extremely crudely, as if in an out-of-control bar fight free-for-all.

2

Fear gets attention from all parts of the political spectrum. Four major ones on the more progressive side I favor have gained currency as a result of the raid on the Capitol:

1) A growing fascist movement seeing the raid as an example to learn from for future, more successful and better planned coup attempts;

2) Trumpists memorializing the raid and their dead in it as a beacon that will help them grow;

3) Connected with that, Trump’s supposedly stolen election, combined with the raid, as a sense of being historically wronged on a par with the notion of “The Lost Cause” of the Confederacy which underlay decades of justifying Jim Crow white rule in the South;

4)The idea that Trump would have been far more dangerous if more disciplined, as a successor like Cruz or Hawley or Cotton might turn out to be.

Evidence certainly exists to justify all four fears, but it can be dangerous to exaggerate that evidence if it diverts attention from positive efforts to improve our society. Certainly Trump’s period in power coincided with the rise of autocracy in previously democratic countries ranging from Hungary to the Philippines to Poland, as well as the nationalistic Brexit movement in England and anti-immigrant movements elsewhere in Europe. Except for England, and along with pre-Hitler Germany, none of these countries had anything like the century-long history of accepted transitions from party to party and other accouterments of constitutionalism—however far from ideal—that the US has known.

Hitler, for instance, took over a country filled with wounded veterans and other survivors of a very destructive war that had ended fifteen years earlier in recriminations, revolts and military putsches—plus a gigantic war debt imposed by the victors. The Weimar Republic—the first elected leadership the still-young nation of Germany had known—had not even been around quite those fifteen years, and like the rest of the world had stumbled into the Great Depression. (In future, I plan to discuss how democracy itself can be viewed as seemingly a means for average people getting attention along with where its weaknesses in that regard lie. )

Second, and likewise, the casualties and likely punishments of the Capitol raiders bear no comparison to the deaths, injuries, destruction and economic ruin that that the South had brought upon itself in the Civil War, which in distorted memory fed the notion of an illustrious “Lost Cause.” While it is true that many Republicans respond to polls by indicating their belief that Trump lost unfairly, many Democrats felt the same in 2000, some in 2004, and many in 2016, without staging anything resembling what Trump egged on his supporters to do. Disappointed as those Republicans might be, there is no reason to take for grated that many will take up a “Lost Cause” mentality.

Third, if the brief interlude in which that motley crowd took the Capitol is to serve as some sort of inspiration for a future raid planned better, it is also true that it serves as an indication that better defensive planning—easily achievable—is now required for Congress.

Finally, a “more disciplined” successor to Trump would be unlikely to succeed without Trump’s peculiar sort of charisma. His endless lying without caring, his endless stream of insults and invective against even would-be allies, along with his years of highly successful self-mythifying as a self-made billionaire who could succeed at anything—those were what brought him to power.

Whatever else can be said of Trump, he is sui generis, and a “more disciplined” version is quite unlikely to come along, if possible at all. Recall also that Trump, despite his incredible success at connecting with certain audiences, still significantly lost the popular vote in 2016, winning three swing states by extremely narrow margins, after the Hillary Clinton campaign made the mistake of not having her go late to those states; similar mistakes by Democrats are unlikely to occur any time soon. In 2020, Democrats hugely increased their presidential vote despite having been been hampered by adherence to social distancing far more than Republican campaigners let themselves be.

3

This brings us back to January 6, and the Republican Senators and Representatives who insisted on the most nebulous of grounds on questioning the electoral outcomes in the states—and only those—that changed sides between 2016 and 2020

Except for a few crazies such as Congressman Gohmert, they could hardly have believed their own objections. By most accounts, they were just performing for the sake of future primary voters in their districts or —if with Presidential ambitions—the whole country.

Were they correct in assuming that this is the path to further power? The received wisdom is that the non-Presidential party gains in midterm elections, so the Republicans probably think that winning their next primary is the key step to regained influence.

Further current “wisdom” is that the GOP is now Trump’s party, eager to follow wherever he chooses to lead. Evidently, however, Republican office holders at the state level, along with Republican-appointed judges at all levels do not seem quite so much beholden. Even many of Trump’s own appointees, like Barr or Pence himself, when it came to a clear choice between following the law or following Trump, in the end chose the law.

Trump’s choices of whom to pardon made one thing clear: aside from his aiders and abettors, the most unusual and significant group he pardoned were white-collar embezzlers on a phenomenal scale. He well might identify with them, for it seems he too has pursued many underhanded and probably illegal ways to gain money—such as too large a share of his father’s wealth, tax free. This is a problem for the Republican Party since many influential and key financial supporters of Republican candidates traditionally have chosen that party because they perceive it as less likely to take away their fortunes. No matter how much they may rail against regulation, they favor law-abiding because it favors them, on the whole. Trump supporters now have two strikes against them in that department. And a sizable portion of ordinary Republican or independent voters don’t want to be at the mercy of either lawless politicians or just plain thieves.

So the would-be pacifiers of the pro-Trump voters will have to hope the public remembers their specious objections to the electoral-vote count while also forgetting that the law-abiding were against that. It won’t be easy, especially if the upholders of legality find themselves primaried for it in the same elections. In a few heavily Republican districts, the Trumpists may carry this off. But elsewhere Republican efforts at dominance may have been a little too clever. In many Republican-controlled states, many districts have been artfully gerrymandered to maximize Republican legislative seats. That entailed spreading out the voters they relied on so that many districts had just enough Republican votes to win, normally. The new normal may well be that they lose.

The Republican Party has climbed back into occasional control after its decisive defeat during the New Deal by increasingly using every possible flaw in the Constitution to keep in power without representing a majority. The loopholes it has exploited include: very careful gerrymandering; winning the electoral but not the popular vote for President; the fact that each state, no matter how small its population, gets two Senators and at least three electoral votes; denying statehood to DC and probably Puerto Rico; trying to suppress minority votes; packing the federal court system and then using it to overturn limits on campaign financing as well as the pre-approval requirements of the Voting Rights Act; overturning the Fairness doctrine for broadcasters on free-speech grounds; etc. Even with all this, the GOP has only gained power by cultivating racists and white supremacists. It has done so ever since Nixon’s “Southern Strategy.” It has also sought the support of misogynists since the second-wave women’s movement began. Similarly with extreme evangelical “Christians” during the whole post-Nixon period.

But this questionable Constitutionalism requires at a minimum a certain broad adherence to the Constitution itself. Trump was uninterested in such adherence unless he could read it as making him dictator. If the rest of his party goes along with that, they lose any basis for their own power. Somehow or other the minority they represent will be crushed, as a strong movement to revitalize, democratize and generally update the Constitution gains in the wake of its tearing up. Only a very tiny (if dangerous) minority among that minority have any ambition to resort to arms to hold on.

Of course, it’s still possible that swing voters might go Republican if Democrats can’t get anything done and can’t get out the message that their difficulties result from Republicans’ blocking worthwhile actions. But if the next election takes place, as it almost certainly will, in the shadow of vicious Republican infighting, the Democrats’ labors will be easier.

4

In addition to his shoutouts to white supremacists, misogynists and the like, Trump has skillfully used a growing opposition to meritocracy.

In practice, an easy adherence to the notion that the college-educated are superior as managers, thinkers, or whatever consistently humiliates the less educated and undercuts their standing, achievements, and self images. In an intensifying attention economy, one way to fight back against the pain of being ignored is to seek an audience for views—the wilder the better—that the “correctly” educated would never espouse. Trump had only to re-Tweet some of these, even as he made up others himself. To win over some of his voters, Democrats ought to go beyond pocketbook issues by recognizing skills and life experiences that are all too easy to shun. This is now happening—a little.

It is said that the best way for America to be unified is to be engaged in a war seen as righteous. Might something less military suffice? Can we mobilize against Trump’s attack on democracy and for Biden’s deep commitment to unity? It would be a struggle for increasing equality and ending barriers of many kinds. We could actually be unified by the sense that together we must fight for unity, equity, and diversity—along with opposing climate change and the pandemic, which affect us all. Recruitment for this goal among Republicans may not be easy, but disgust at the insurrection will certainly help.