The Flimsy Foundation of the American Democracy
The United States of America or what was once known by this name is still trying to put together what happened and make sense out of 1/6/2020, and the reason for this is not that it is difficult to realize what happened, but because it makes sense in multiple frameworks simultaneously. For some, it is an excess of patriotism that led heroes on storming the building where a certification of the election that they believed to be fraudulent was taking place, for others, a group of disgruntled teenagers wandered into the Capitol (and carried tasers, weapons, and handcuffs with them), for the third, an army of resurrectionists led by Donald Trump attempted the coup set to be repeated on the 20th of January, when the ceremony of inauguration of incoming President Biden will take place. It has been called a “riot,” a “coup,” “coup attempt,” “failed coup attempt,” successful breach of security, training before the main event, and an act of domestic terrorism supported from inside the Capitol and by Republican elected officials on all levels.
Yet for the third, the society of spectacle generated yet another performance in which the public hanging of journalists was about to take place live-streamed on national and world TV. Donald Trump produced a reality show The Coup streamlined by live television, starring himself. I’ve no doubt that lots of people around the world would watch the hanging of the USA officials on live tv with great enthusiasm. Note that some of these interpretations are not mutually exclusive. The pieces are just being picked, and they will be picked throughout decades and centuries, with every action of every figurante acquiring more significance. The majority of people on earth of course would barely pay attention, as they did it at the time of the events, but a dominant narrative taught in schools will eventually figure itself out. Of course, it will be a different narrative in each country.
Not only does the event make sense in a multiplicity of narratives, each of which one could pick, consider, reject, and adopt later again, but the scenarios of what is to follow are bifurcating with equally head-spinning speed. For an observer, it is difficult to decide what is doom-mongering, catastrophizing, and being paranoid on the brink of the mania, and what will prove itself to be exactly correct.
I have observed the coup as it unfolds streamed live because on 1/6/2021 I decided to watch live the Congress certifying the state certifications of the election. The startled voice of the journalist when the mob entered the building and the translation of what was to be a debate was interrupted, were, for me, intertwined with the exclamations of a female writers’ group chat. One of them typed: “I think I am going to vomit,” and another: “It is not a coup, but it feels like a coup.” That things evoke strong bodily reactions and can “feel like a coup” are the features that point at the presence of affect — the depth that is beyond emotions swirling on its surface. Inclined to dismiss these emotions, I have admitted to grinning: to me, the spectacle was evocative of laughter but not in a good sense. Laughter can be a reaction that goes beyond finding something amusing. The violence has not quite erupted on my particular screen, but it was clear that somebody is going to get hurt and likely killed, and amending myself in the eyes of my friends I typed that I do not want Americans to get their teeth knocked out, “of course.”
Turned out there were not only Americans in that group but several Russian nationals as well. One, a woman not speaking English, said “she did not enter anything,” and my question as an anthropologist receiving some linguistic preparation is, how does the foreigner going somewhere where everyone is going, at the bid of the outgoing USA President, knows that she is not supposed to be there? The conspiracy theories long romanticizing Russians though call for a more elaborate interpretation, but here, I am mentioning this as a way to portray the reality of the coup breaking into multiple fragments.
And there were lots of fragments seemingly telling one about the USA security practices, failures of communication, misunderstandings, and misinterpretations, which likewise could be the pinnacles of smooth communication, deep understandings, and precise interpretations revealing the planning of it in advance. (Reminder four other Capitols were stormed on the same day).
A video shows a Congressperson exiting a secured door mindlessly (let’s suppose), probably high on one of those speeches. As he exits, a Trump supporter enters the building and beckons his friends. They enter not sure where they are or where to go. A security breach is detected on video. A militarized guard appears from behind the corner and beats them receiving a hit on the head.
A video shows a journalist nearly lynched on the gallows.
A video shows a policeman opening the fence to Trump supporters.
The end goals of the swarm could have been many: destroying the certifications sitting in beautiful chests having arrived from the states, taking hostages or murdering members of Congress, halting certification at gunpoint, forcing a performance of certification “certifying” Trump’s win.
I had many communications in these several days, like, I suppose, the most, and heard Americans talking agitatedly to each other on the streets about it, which is rarely a site in an overly policed neighborhood where I reside.
I had a somewhat bizarre conversation with my father over a messenger, in which he asked whether I am okay, and I said, yes. “Few people are so ‘lucky’ as to see this kind of events in two different countries,” he typed. When the Russian White House was burned, in 1993, in a standoff between “democratic” President Yeltsin and an elected Parliament, I was 12 and remember pictures on television. In an effort to instill some weird sense of normality into my father, I replied that the country thankfully has an elected president and an elected parliament — that was before a big part of the Republicans of the elected parliament solidarized with terrorists by refusing to affirm the legality of the election that has taken place thereby placing their own presence there into question and breaching the USA Constitution which deems insurrectionists unfit to govern: “No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same” (14th Amendment).
The country has an elected President and Parliament, I typed, and I also told him that these things are not without precedents (thinking how weird this new normality indeed appears to be) — recalling the portrait of antimaxers antivaxxers Trumpists storming the Capitol successfully once before when an armed mob was smugly permitted by law enforcement to enter the Michigan statehouse in May. Some of those mobbers participated in the events of 1/6/2020: some, walking in with the crowd, and at least one that I know of, being the newly elected members of House of Representatives, following Trump’s tweet “Liberate Michigan.”
Trump’s Twitter account is now suspended. It is an unusual and interesting experience: to be on Twitter that does not have older Trump. But the questions remain: why is this so easy to storm the USA Capitols? Perhaps the reason why the reproduction of such cultural form as storming of a Capitol is easy and growing in scope and numbers is that terrorism lies at the foundation of the USA as a state. The USA primary law and state foundation, The Constitution, is a document written by a bunch of white men, slave owners, guided by their sense of cultural superiority and misplaced ideas of freedom. It is almost never in conversation, that freedom is evoked, responsibility of any kind is also evoked — a peculiar trait of the American culture.
The people who laid the ground for what unfolds today have been valorized as “pioneers” and “founders” while plunging the land that never belonged to them and does not belong now, enslaving, displacing, and “civilizing” people using race as a guiding governing principle. Maybe this is why the USA is a failed project. No matter how elaborate the building of the rules, ceremonies, rites of passage, protocols, and regulations is, it is standing on this dubious foundation, a monument to white supremacy that contains multiple loopholes and contradictions and favors certain actors, that most of them considered to be sacred, with reverence instilled in schools, and yet will break when the gain of the political moment dictate so.
