Look beyond the rioters and what do you see?
With the country still reeling from last week’s violent riot on Capitol Hill, and days after the snap second impeachment of Donald J. Trump, Americans are left with the same question unchanged since November 2016 - How did it all come to this? The answers have predictably come easy, if you listen to the media narrative coalescing this past week: The rioters staged a violent insurrection in direct assault against the government, the extreme and logical conclusion to Trump’s ‘big lie’ that Democrats stole the election and that the government itself is irreparably compromised. But, the country’s problems will not be resolved simply by delivering law and order to Trump’s red-meat crisis actors (The QAnon Shaman, it turns out, actually is an actor). The official response has been swift, and the full might of the police state has closed in on the iconic rioters— Buffalo Jake, the Pelosi Desk-Lounger and hunreds of others. But the brutes who ransacked the Capitol are all too easy to understand, straw boogeymen who distract us from seeing our deeper political crisis.
The Post-Trump Stranglehold
The red herring of the Capitol riot casts the event as a spasm of the “basket of deplorables”, a pastiche finale of brainwashed, misdirected rubes. But for all those people we watched storm the building, how many thousands stood back from a safe distance in the courtyard, respectable yet approving? How many more grinned into their Twitter screens as the spectacle played out? January 6, 2021 will forever conjure images of the ready-made barbarians of Trump’s America, while obscuring the country-club Republicans, suburban housewives, young men and women, and yes, non-white supporters, of a President who commands the support of 74 million Americans. What was most striking about the November 2020 election was not Biden’s victory, but its polarization despite near-unanimous mainstream disavowal of President Trump. After four chaotic, corrupt, and howling years, Trump increased his support from Black voters to historic highs and won the biggest share of the hispanic vote for a Republican in over a decade. Across the board, Trump increased his vote share in almost every demographic group except white men. And dropping any illusions of a stable “resistance-oriented” electorate, Americans voted out 12 Democrats in the House majority and left Speaker Pelosi with a precarious margin.
Even though today President Trump is set to leave office with a historically low 34% approval rating, with 54% of Americans calling for his removal, the numbers are starkly different for his partisans. Trump enjoys a soaring 80% approval rating among Republicans, with only 20% daring to call the Capitol riot a crisis for American democracy. These Republicans are not all clad in buffalo furs or LARPing the Confederacy. That is exactly why we should be troubled.
Healing is not a Strategy
As Joe Biden aims to heal the country, we cannot mistake rhetoric as a remedy for Trumpism. Only 25% of Republicans trust the results of the 2020 presidential election, and there will never be an argument or string of facts that will penetrate their deep attachment to Trump’s lies. As the historian Timothy Snyder argues, “post-truth is pre-fascism,” but truth will not undo post-truth and facts will not undo falsehoods— at least not alone. Lacking any political dimension, symbolic appeals to truth will remain a feature, not a solution, of the post-truth era.
The alienation and economic ruin that leads so many people, especially isolated young men, to nativism, racial resentment and the steps of the Capitol, is now commonplace in American life. “Deaths of despair”, the opioid crisis, alcoholism, and suicide have created a new mortality crisis for middle-aged white men and women. The birth rate is declining for young Americans too economically insecure to start families, which in turn fuels anti-immigrant sentiment. And for the first time, a generation of Americans will be less upwardly mobile than their parents, with many families unable to cover an unexpected $400 expense. These are the contours of America in the 21st century amid a global pandemic. If the rioters are the boorish vanguard of Trumpism, we can respond with the blunt tools of law and order, and symbolic pronouncements about democracy, knowing that it will not fix our problems.
There are no easy answers to the chimeras of resentment and desperation that lie beyond the faces of the Capitol Hill rioters, but our true challenge has always been political - to meet the rearguard of the Trump movement with a political vision that can uproot Trumpism and win power locally and nationally. Biden and a unified Democratic government can enact bread and butter progressive changes - like a living wage and universal healthcare - that can begin to make a difference for average Americans and begin to unravel the conditions of a post-truth era. Even though they are the ugly darlings of our attention, the rioters, like Trump himself, are a symptom of our American malaise.
John Aurelio is a freelance writer based in Brooklyn, NY. During the day, he works in the healthcare industry.
Instagram: @j.a.aurelius
Twitter: @jaurelio1
Cover Image: Apocalyptic Edit by Aidan Kahn, original photo by Ted Soqui for KCRW
Painting: "Le Suicide" by Édouard Manet