Impeachment is just a start
By Ross Barkan
The last week has been a particularly deranged one for our young republic. On January 6th, the day Joe Biden’s victory was supposed to be certified in Congress, a mob incited by Donald Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol building. For the millions of Americans following the events live, the news arrived in fragments: Twitter video and fresh rumor and accounts called in from the chaos. Five would die, including an officer trying to defend the grounds. As a culminating spectacle of the Trump years, it was apropos—violent, absurd, and simultaneously deeply damaging and impotent. The vote, delayed some hours, was still certified. Biden will become president. Trump will become an ex-president, not another Putin or Xi or Erdogan or fuhrer or pharaoh. If this is incipient fascism in America, it is spectacle over substance, the bloody yowl of the conspiracy-mongerers, white nationalists, and the brain-poisoned sliver of those with little to occupy their time but fantasies of violence.
Trump was the accelerant, though not the source. Rage, distrust, and paranoia have long been features of the American scene. There has always been a grim comfort to a good conspiracy. Men in dimly-lit rooms determine events and systems and the right sort of thrust—the white knight hero, gallant and truth-aware—can undo them all, saving millions from tyranny. Catastrophe cannot be random. Existence cannot merely be chaos: it must be predetermined, rigged, the dark outcome only produced because the powerful made it that way. Americans of all political persuasions can be attracted to conspiracy. Oswald didn’t act alone. Elvis didn’t really die. September 11th was an inside job.
Of late, these forces have drawn in the disaffected right, the people drowning in social media at all hours of the day and night. Their very worst fears are reflected back upon them, twisted and amplified. Their native suspicion and confusion is broadened to the realm of the epic—they feel they are at war, always, and the battle, no matter how hopeless, must be fought now. It is the narrative-mind, the image-mind, a Manichean struggle of dark and light, fallen and saved. Divine intervention, like a vice president overturning the election results for the Dear Leader, can be possible. Their arc of their moral universe is not long at all, but it does bend toward their inverted justice. They believe Donald J. Trump will not leave them.
Now what? Many on the left believe 1/6 can be a new 9/11, as if cataclysms must always be sized up and relived for the benefit of new generations. The Nazi putsches have been invoked too. Trump will be impeached and there could be Senate Republicans who vote to convict this time. Trump, a sociopathic president, appears to have finally woken the most venal professional Republicans out of their slumber. Days until the end of his presidency, they’ve got religion—or at least understand they’ve got no use for him anymore. Banished by every social media company of consequence, Trump cannot tweet them into submission. It is hard to bet against his long-term hold on the Republican Party, even now, but he undeniably weaker than he has ever been, unable to cow the right-wing elite. His lunatic fantasy of a stolen election probably cost Mitch McConnell his Senate majority. In these next weeks, as Biden governs with Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, it’s all the Kentuckian will think about.