How The Meltdown Became An Insurrection
Police at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez)
January 6th is not an anomaly — it is part of a larger story.
by DAVID SIROTA
Today is the one-year anniversary of the January 6 riot, which was the violent crescendo of a generation-long meltdown that exploded in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.
Amid all the solid reporting about the details of that day — who plotted it, who participated in it, who supported it — the larger context of the mayhem is almost never mentioned, because to mention it is to raise uncomfortable questions about the roots of right-wing authoritarianism, and spotlight what kind of soil allows those roots to sprout into bloodshed.
The Republican Party is now a corporate-sponsored insurrection creeping through right-wing media, state legislatures, and Congress.
Democrats’ stunned, deer-in-headlights reaction to that insurrection’s January 6th riot — and the belated fears about the end of democracy — only underscore that they remain totally out of touch with the political environment their party was complicit in creating. Their shock also illustrates how oblivious they are to the erosion of democracy that’s been going on for a half century.
The Loss Of Faith In Government
At its core, the January 6th insurrection was the weaponized manifestation of virulent anti-government sentiment in a putatively democratic country where a majority has not trusted its own government for two decades, according to the Pew Research Center polls. That anti-government sentiment on display during last year’s riot wasn’t spontaneous — a quick trip back in time in a flux-capacitor-powered Delorean shows it was cultivated by both politics and reality over the last four decades.
Let’s remember: The ideological crusade against government has always been a part of American politics. But it really began coalescing in modern form in the late 1970s when conservative demagogues, moguls, and business interests began building a movement to demonize public institutions — and to insist as Ronald Reagan did that “the nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.’”
When these right-wing forces gained power, they enacted policies that turned their ideology into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Tax cuts for the wealthy starved government institutions of resources, and when those hobbled agencies then delivered worse services, Republican politicians cited those failures to justify even more budget-starving tax cuts, privatization, and deregulation.
Conservatives tilled this bumper crop of anti-government resentment in soil made fertile by a liberal establishment that was at the time discarding the proven political formula of Franklin Roosevelt. He became the Democratic Party’s most popular president because he understood that delivering economic gains for the working class is not merely good and moral policy, but also the only way to preserve democracy. As he said, a government that refuses to deliver those gains will create a population willing to “sacrifice liberty in the hope of getting something to eat” (and one of his first acts as president was quelling a potential insurrection by supporting help to aggrieved veterans).
In conjunction with Reagan’s ascent, more and more Democratic politicians abandoned this New Deal formula of delivering help to voters and then being rewarded in elections by those same voters. Instead, modern-day Democrats shoved aside a beleaguered labor movement in pursuit of corporate campaign cash, figuring they could help Republicans kick voters in the face, and then just try to buy reelection with corporate donors’ money.
The pillars of neoliberalism — tax cuts, corporate-written trade deals, financial deregulation, budget austerity, and privatization — soon became a bipartisan affair.
Bill Clinton, the first Democratic president after the Reagan era, proudly declared that “the era of big government is over,” and then launched a crusade to slash welfare, help capital crush unions, deregulate Wall Street, privatize government services, and pass the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) — the latter of which prompted culturally conservative working class voters to abandon the party in droves, according to new research.
George W. Bush picked up where Clinton left off, and then turned the volume up to 11 with the Iraq War — a disaster defined by such epic lies, mismanagement, and theft that it thoroughly discredited the entire political (and media) class. The Hurricane Katrina debacle further underscored the idea of government as unable — or worse, unwilling — to fulfill its most basic responsibilities. During Bush’s tenure, polls showed a mind-boggling 40-point drop in Americans’ faith in their government.
Then came the financial crisis and the presidency of Barack Obama, in what now looks like a last-chance opportunity — a fleeting moment to use a massive election mandate to resurrect Roosevelt’s New Deal formula, reverse the neoliberal deregulation that fueled the emergency, and really deliver for a ravaged working class.
Instead, Obama fortified the policies that created the crisis in the first place. Regulations were aesthetically polished but not fundamentally changed. Bailouts were quickly delivered to the Wall Street donors whose banks were firing up a foreclosure machine. Meanwhile, millions of people thrown out of their homes were given some meager health insurance subsidies, a few nice speeches about “hope,” and the prospect of Social Security cuts.