The Failure of the American Project
1/6/2021 was a 9/11 of this generation; Americans simply may not have grown into the realization of it yet.
Funding, defunding, seating, unseating, trifles of the electoral process, opinions, analysis: it is all irrelevant. The project of the USA is over, symbolically and effectively.
The Capitol, the main temple of democracy throughout the world, we have been told, was defiled and befouled by a bunch of white people of assorted trades. They hold ordinary professions: they are teachers, lawyers, and even elected officials. At least one House of Representatives participated in the siege that was broadcast all over the world.
The individual clad in horns and fur was occupying the sacred cradle of the USA power; he represented nothing less than the complete and utter failure of the United States project in the eyes of the world. The conversation is not merely about reputational losses. The breach is not merely of the feeble fence guarding the building. (The fence was opened by the police). The intrusion is not merely into the rooms.
The organized throughout the last five and more years, in the tradition that was never significantly interrupted, far-right terrorists and white supremacists besieged the citadel of the USA power with the full approval of some of the sitting members of Congress. The Confederate rag that never defiled the interiors was carried inside with the full consent of the forces that were elected to prevent this from happening. These individuals pissed on carpets and chairs and shit onto the most reverently upheld symbols of the USA power. They erected a scaffold with a noose on Capitol Hill, a symbol of execution with a palpable in the USA explicit racist reference.
The horn-wearing, the fur-clad, the MAGA-hat-sporting crowd from inside and outside of the Capitol wanted one thing: the dismissal of the electoral process that was subject to intense scrutiny to install the unelected figure — not for the next four years because such formalities as terms go out of the window swiftly with the cardinal interruption of what Talia Lavin called “the fragile ceremonies of democracy.” Not for the next four years but for however many years, based on the unsustained and baseless belief supported by no evidence that pledges that outgoing president Trump was cheated out of victory that in reality he never scored.
Instead of disabusing their electors, members of Congress, the upper chamber of the USA Parliament, Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley continued to insist, throughout the process of certification results, that their duty is to entertain these claims. This is wrong; their duty was to update their constituents on the reality that is: namely that the USA has a duly elected President and Vice President, and that President is Biden, and Vice President is Kamala Harris. All that, while refusing to certify the result of the free and fair election certified by the states. They refused to do so while others joked and cackled and a dead body of a woman was still cooling down meters from where the performance was taking place.
Let me be clear: there is no evidence whatsoever to support the claim of a “rigged election.” This cannot be repeated enough. Trump’s lawyer lost 62 cases in various courts including some of the Supreme Court, despite Trump having stuffed the courts with “conservative justices” including the Supreme Court where he placed a fringed anti-abortion extremist and casual racist Amy Coney Barret with the approval of Congress against tradition that precludes the installment of justices by the sitting president so close to the election. Biden won the election by the landslide: he had 81 mln votes which is 51.4% and has gotten 306 Electoral College votes, with Trump trailing far behind at 46.9% with 74 mln votes and 232 Electoral votes.
And yet, Senators Tom Cruz and Josh Haley, with five other members of Congress, as well as the majority of the Republicans in the House of Representatives deemed it acceptable to object to the certification of the election results hours after the mob incited by the Trump, Trump’s “large adult son,” and Trump’s lawyer Rudi Guliani, by the Senators, and by the totality of the American neoliberal establishment, entered the Capitol. Not even a ritual resistance was offered by law enforcement, and millions observed around the world saw the striking discrepancy of the treatment of the white insurrectionists compared to the recent and memorable violent treatment of the Black Lives Matter protesters by the police.
At the Black Lives Matter movement gatherings, the peaceful protesters exercising the right of the free assembly were routinely maced and beaten, shot, and teargassed. The USA police fire rubber bullets into the faces of protesters; it is cynically framed as “less-than-lethal” weaponry. Shooting rubber bullets is one of the tactics of intimidation and terror designed to assert the state monopoly on violence. As a result, dozens of people lost their eyes.
During the Black Lives Matter protests, there was much outcry in the neoliberal ecosystems if goods were stolen from stores and malls or windows and doors broken.
By contrast, in the storm of the Capitol yesterday, the Trumpist mobs were invited by police officers; on one occasion, there is a video of a police officer opening the gate to let the crowd pass. The police used the tactics of peaceful de-escalation that it refused to use during the Black Lives Matter protests. The National Guard was not immediately dispatched despite the request from the Mayor of Washington D.C.
One would be forced to conclude that Walmart is the true site of the American power, the sacral champer of the government the despoilment of which is what angers the American elites if one was not aware of the racial currents and undercurrents of the American society.
The crucial Democratic votes that delivered the victory for President Biden, of which he is yet to prove himself worthy, came from Black voters — in Michigan, Missouri, Pennsylvania, and, crucially, Georgia that on the same date sent two Democratic Senators — Ossoff and Reverend Warnock — to Congress over the Republican incumbents.
But the event that we witnessed is not an unprecedented attempt to disenfranchise Black voters. It is a series of blueprints for the Republicans who send a clear message that they will not, from here, going forward, accept the reality of the elections. When they are in the majority, they will have the power to do so. The foundation of American democracy — belief in the election, in the importance of the truth and justice, in the democratic process, institutions upholding the law and order — is not just shuttered; it is gone.
