To that end, if one of my days of rest (yesterday) was going to be interrupted with something I was forced to pay attention to, it could have at least been a display of Nazis getting their comeuppance. You know, for consistency's sake. But instead I got a text from my oldest, after a long morning of doing golf,** along the lines of "so there's a coup happening" at 11:57 am Pacific time. This was annoying for a lot of reasons. I'll just say up front, I'm against a coup. I'm not afraid to come out and say that. I don't care who disagrees with me. Partly it's because a coup is messy. There's usually a lot of broken glass and traffic congestion and a disruption of the normal cyclical patterns of re-evaluation and renewal built in to a functioning democratic sociopolitical structure. We also did a whole shitload of them in the 1970s and 1980s, ostensibly to keep communists out of power in South America, Central America and the parts of Africa we could be bothered learning existed, but normally they just resulted the creation of torture industries and the bloody repurposing of football stadia. I'm not sure why that last one is a regular feature at/during/around/associated with a coup, but it keeps coming up and thus bears mentioning. If nothing else, it's a really underused line of argument against public funding for sports venues.
The main issue is that it interrupted my wind-down afternoon of a fast-food burrito lunch while watching a YouTube video of some guy narrating episode 7 of a series showing him playing Civilization VI. To be clear, I'm not saying that agenda was in any way equally or more important than tracking the events of an attempted dissolution of constitutional rule of law in the country I live in. It wouldn't have mattered in any way what I was doing, I still would have resented leaving whatever it was to go and watch six straight hours of commercial-free cable news. Which I did.
The main takeaway, after the initial terror passed and it became clear that there weren't going to be a line of gibbets along the west facade of the Capitol where Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi and John Roberts and the other stated targets of this effort swung in the breeze as a warning to others who supported the apparently intolerable ideas of representative democracy and/or the procedural aspects of the 12th Amendment of the Constitution of the United States, was extreme disappointment. We were definitely not going to see any Nazis get their comeuppance. Instead we got to see several of them take selfies in the Senate chamber, break windows, assault police (without reprisal) and steal shit and then... kind of wander out. Up to and beyond a curfew mandated by the mayor of DC. And then go back to their hotels. And then get on planes the next day and go home.
Were they all Nazis? Of course not. Godwin's Law requires that I point that out, as does a working understanding of the historical (and, probably in a lot of cases, literal) illiteracy of the participants. You can't be a Nazi if you don't actually understand what a Nazi is. What you had was a bunch of really mad white people waving banners and screaming blood-and-soil slogans, whipped into a frothy frenzy about a political stab-in-the-back and then trying to destroy the figurative if not actual house of the legislature. Sometimes history goes right ahead and does echoes whether you're knowingly shouting into the void in the first place.
There was a lot of shock to go around yesterday, but that confused me as well. Nothing happened yesterday that didn't fit the rhetoric of the last four-plus years. Or indeed the actual actions that now look like dress rehearsals for the Big Show yesterday. All that happened is that the fascist-adjacent things Republicans pretended were bluff and bluster and therefore tolerable from Trump as long as he enabled them to seat all the fucking federal judges, all of those things happened at once. And with a couple of super douchey exceptions (none of whom I will name or link to because fuck those guys), the old white people in the House and Senate had an hour or so where they got to face the reality of what four years of unabated mendacity and demagoguery might forge. And they were besieged in their offices and afraid.
To be as fair as possible, a couple of the lizard-est of Lizard People, Mike Pence and Mitch McConnell, had already publicly broken with the president and his narrative about election fraud and the trajectory toward extra-constitutional derailment of the quadrennial cycle. We can't give them credit for bravery as both of them, creatures of the system they rely on to remain in place, had played the game right up to the point where it was no longer playable, when the electoral votes were to be solemnified and counted. Mitch McConnell wants to be the one putting Republicans on committees in the Senate*** and Mike Pence wants to be president in 2024. They're Trump loyalists in the mode by which Trump himself defines loyalty, which is: immediate personal utility. So in that sense at least you could call them consistent. This is not a compliment.
I don't have any doubt that these events, as shocking as they were, will be minimized and... well, not forgotten, but definitely subjected to a lot of flexible repurposing in political cycles to come, by participants and victims of every stripe. Everyone will have that luxury because the effort--the very real, very serious effort--to storm the Capitol failed. There is a lot to criticize the law enforcement for, in the loudest, starkest, harshest terms defying "overstatement" as a concept, and the cruel double-standard has been covered a lot elsewhere. But one thing the Capitol Police did achieve was evacuating the members of Congress before the rioters could get their hands on them. Which was the plan. The plan was to disrupt the recording to the electoral votes for President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris. But it was also to put their hands on a list of people and... deal with them.
Trump contributed by his speech that morning, sure, but this was not spontaneous. This was not a situation that took a turn. This was the logical conclusion of four years of Trumpism. My only real surprise is that it, unlike everything else Trump has tried to erode and destroy, didn't work.****
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*I took two and a half weeks off because... well, because I could
**You and other people you know might play golf, but that suggests a level of participation that attempts approaching the stated goals of the game. As literally all of those goals have proved to be well beyond my physical, mental and emotional limits, it's mostly me wearing a ball cap and a collared shirt, looking thoughtful while seated in a rented electric buggy. Sometimes the pose is all you can hope for.
****Yet.
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