We had been waiting for barbarians for some time. The President had, for over six years, mapped the threat of the barbarians advancing from across borders as a security threat. And so we imagined that they would arrive from the edges of empire, the edges where the acting President had been mapping threats of their arrival for five years. When they did arrive on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol, the picture was not clear: ten thousand had entered the grounds, and some had scaled the scaffolding set for the inauguration two weeks off; even if the border was fortified by a complex system of defense, informed by threats a border that without adequate defenses would leave the nation facing an existential threat, the grounds of the Capitol were breached to protest the transition of that the Presidential election had determined. Waving confederate flags, the rioters may not have only been inspired by the outlandish claims of fraud and failure of governance in Trump’s speech that morning, but of insurrection. The logic of insurrection was embodied in the confederate flags so many held, trumpeting rights by evoking the logic that the South had a right to separate the union–a “sacred right of insurrection” that excused their disturbance of civil peace.
While invoking such a “right of insurrection” was not central in the impeachment proceedings House managers presented, and not articulated in President Trump’s speech, the rights to perpetuate a distasteful drama was one that he delighted in amplifying in his final day as U.S. President–and scarcely needed a map to do. Donald Trump loves a drama, and reprised his role as dramaturge in the month long aftermath of the election. The seeds of doubts placed in the vote tally over multiple months had occurred in local audits amidst charges of rigged voting, reprising the power of “rigged” as a rallying cry in 2016, animating his base and motivating believers with the false news that there were 1.8 million dead voters, already registered, who would be casting ballots in 2016. They were not only registered but, Trump assured Sean Hannity, “some of them absolutely vote,” and the image of zombie voters helped kill the promise of representative government. In addition, with 2.5 million voters that were cross-registered between states, and voting twice, the uncertainty of legitimacy became a narrative of injustice, crafted to disorient and impassion, as the question of a conclusion of the Presidential vote was already primed for uncertainty and indeterminacy in 2016, so that it was almost in the eye of the beholder: while the numbers may be credible,–they were wielded to disorient, suggesting a desire for massive voter fraud able to be attributed to “bad actors” that seemed a scheme to sow division and uncertain outcomes, exploiting potential animosity in the electorate to defray any conclusion in the Presidential election, as if exploiting divisions among parties in an increasing tribal sense.
As the 2016 contest heated, it was notable that Trump’s campaign website appealed in all caps echoing social media to “Help Me Stop Crooked Hillary From Rigging This Election!” Inviting citizen groups more akin to vigilantes monitor irregular voter behavior, he created a logic for political involvement in a coming election. When flag-waving followers descended to the sites of ballot counting in 2020, waiving campaign flags, American flags, “Don’t Tread on Me” flags in the occasion of state-wide audits of paper ballots and absentee ballots to review machine tallies diffused a skepticism of alarmism, destabilizing and distancing any conclusion of confidence, they echoed a strategy already deployed in 2016. But this time, they carried the problems of ballot counting to a county level, voting machines, demanding certification that the ballot tallies were “fraud-free” that had never been seen before, in shock jock tactics, sewing a level of distrust and dissent that promised to undermine the democratic process long term, having unleashed a river of groundless skepticism whose merits were cast aside. And the staged assemblies that proliferated at state capitols in the aftermath of the 2020 Presidential election seem almost an amping up of the populist rage that reached a crescendo in the license of crossing police barricades, the steel pipe reviewing stands recently assembled on the Capitol’s west front, to break down doors and windows in invading the U.S. Capitol, and proclaim it the “people’s house.” Breaking down the barriers, and flooding the Capitol, was almost a projection of the fears of migrants storming the nation, but this time the barbarians arrived fully armed, asserting rights–freedom of assembly; freedom to won guns; freedom to form a well-armed militia–that migrants never claimed.
Back in 2016, public intellectual and linguist Geoff Nunberg aptly noted the danger ‘rigged’ gained as a “keyword” in the national political discourse, launched by both Democrats and Republicans to frame civic participation in unprecedented levels of skepticism and doubting of social ties: ‘rigged’ described the uneven economy, the tax system, and increasingly deferred any outcome of the election and injected the news cycle he toxic term with a newfound populism replicated in social media that served only to exponentially escalate that “built-in biases, so that losers may feel that the system is rigged against them,” by using a term expressing anger at unfair business practices or fraudulent investment into the arena of politics as only Trump could. The new charge of incompetence of elected officials disrupted the resolution of any outcome; Trump acted as if he was mustering honesty when telling rallies “the election is going to be rigged–I’m going to be honest!” and in late summer dropping hints to respected left-wing media he would not even accept a victory by Hillary Clinton in September, pushing the limits of a candidate’s sense of grievances while acting as if airing grievances as just another victim of fraud, mirroring the charge of a “rigged economy” many felt, and boosting his won support. The Presidential vote was itself “rigged,” involving dead voters, rigged voting machines, a massive scam of democratic principles discounting rights, demanding protest on the grounds of patriotism, that made the flag-waving demonstrators in the mob feel immune to charges of insurrection as they were waving American flags, many the very flags waved at stage capitol buildings months previous with similar megaphones, to assert American values that were under attack.
Arriving in Detroit, Philadelphia, Portland, Las Vegas and Atlanta, protesting bearing similar flags outside of arenas and capitol buildings, both asserting liberties and demanding improper practices of tabulating votes be stopped. It was not forgotten in any way that these protests concluded the Summer of Protests, seeming to draw the line at The extension of doubt about the 2020 election that preceded the Capitol Riots fanned populist grievances as if they were infringements on constitutional rights, deferring the conclusion of electoral results by extending a narrative that had no happy end. The protest rallies that sprang into action as lawsuits proliferated in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Michigan with recounts demanded in Arizona and Wisconsin to prevent states from “flipping” and electoral votes to be claimed by Joe Biden.
Protestors mobilized a rhetoric of grievance that sought to expand the electoral map, long after the election. Their doubts were amplified on social media to destabilize the electoral map, creating “grey spaces” as if puzzle pieces that did not cohere, letting the world puzzle by holding narrative conclusion in abeyance into 2021, distending the election’s narrative by sewing deep doubts about secure results and preventing consensus from emerging from the electoral college.
As the problems proliferated from dead voters and cross-registration to how battleground states relied on duplicitous voting machines or made “unconstitutional” changes in voting practices, the narrative of grievance grew, calling into question the distribution of electoral votes that led us to tally up possible distributions of alternative futures.
The waiving of flags from the 2020 campaign as votes were being tallied at multiple cities morphed expression of concern about the tally of votes to questions of constitutional rights. Questions of outrage had suggested a criminal theft was at work, undertaken by elected officials, discounting their legitimacy and treating the tally of votes as an extension of the never-ending Presidential campaign but now leveling charges of broad electoral fraud before federal and state buildings, waving flags to assert the constitutional rights at stake.
The militant-like assertion of flag waving became a basis to assert the preservation of rights, and to “fight for them” to protect them, “fight against big tech, big donors, big media,” “fighting with one hand tied beyond your back,” and collectively “fight like hell and [realizing] if you don’t fight like Hell, you’re not going to have a country any more.” The expansive claims of unconstitutional grievances recapitulated on the morning of the January 6 rally at Freedom Plaza, escalated by a charge they were perpetuated by Big Tech, and announced as the basis for a loss of freedom, and presented as a final chance to fight for their rights. Many believed no other politicians would fight for them. Trump used the verb “fight” some twenty times, making sure they had heard, letting them know, “now, we’re out here fighting” as if defending constitutional rights that would be taken away, beginning with election security, an election security that was in doubt, and, Trump used the false collective, would be resolved as “we’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue,” and break the third wall between rally and government, “we’re going to the Capitol and we’re going to give . . . ”
Even without the addition of the activating words “them hell,” the crowd was not only activated, filled with righteousness as they waved more flags, hoping to make their voices heard and their rights to wave flags. Congregating before the Capitol as electors were being certified, holding banners proclaiming their loyalty to Trump and refusal to concede the election, lest constitutional rights be sacrificed. Their righteous indignation was animated by the slogan “Stop the Steal,” instead of “Build the Wall,” but the “steal” would be a robbery of the wall, and of security domestic or electoral. Trump exploit the apparent lack of conclusion as if it were an expanded denouement of the 2020 Presidential election, targeting the Capitol building as the culmination of a false narrative of remedying a deep, deep failure of electoral transparency. Presenting the innocuous sounding “march” as a last opportunity to make their voices heard, the unprecedented targeting of Congress and elected representatives sought to interrupt the transition of power, by interrupting tabulation of electoral votes: in questioning the transparency of congress, the march questioned the transparency of how the nation mapped onto the halls of representation, whose organizers pledged in allegedly figurative terms commitment to appear at Freedom Plaza “fight to expose this voter fraud and demand transparency and election integrity” as a civic duty.
Despite confirmations of no evidence any voting system, the combative terms sought to prevent an absence transparency argued to undermine American democracy, in the narratives that President Trump devoted his final months in office to perpetuating. The hopes to continue his claim on Presidential power was almost secondary, after a narrow election both for the Presidency and Congress, than the prevention of a loss argued to be enabled by massive voter fraud, fake news, and dissimulation, and claims for fraudulence that multiplied and perpetuated to erode the very foundations of the alleged democracy for which Congress stood. If electoral loss was apparently determined by the inclusion of absentee ballots of long-undercounted minority voters, the claims of an erosion of democracy was a claim of a loss of the entitlement of white voters that Trump had come to embody, and protection of their interests, tied to hateful myths of “replacement” of the franchise and white majority status of America, a shattering of a global picture that mapped, in the frenzy of counter-charges of the perpetuation of fraudulent voting, pursued in multiple lawsuits, that seemed to seek to turn back time, literally, to the first returns of electoral votes and the projections of possible Trump victory, rooted in a misunderstanding of voter trends and patterns that would not deviate from early results. But it was also to turn back time, by whatever means necessary, to white regimes of the past, embodied in the sea of white supremacist flags, confederate flags, MAGA flags, flags of crusaders, and TRUMP 2020 flags, preserving fake dreams in the name of continuing what Amy Kremer, in the two week, cross-country bus tour rallying support for what were literally the troops, claimed would be the second and perhaps more important goal of the March on Washington: “to support one another,” to nourish false fantasies of a lack of transparency, and to hearken back to an era of “electoral transparency” that excluded access to the ballot by many.
This was an image of governance, combined with the imagery and logic of impending wrath, designed to take back the coutnry by an occupation of the Capitol from “corrupt politicians” who had distorted the votes, as the true delegates from all fifty states might fight the ultimate reality game, claiming to be liberators and “rightful masters,” a mashup of Lincoln’s famous call to power with the urgency of a playstation episode of Star Trek: Invasion, and a call to summon their skills of combat as the moved to occupy the capitol grounds to remediate the alleged absence of transparency, even if that meant crumbling the pillars of democracy. The brewing battle referenced in Gothic font and brewing clouds implied an apocalyptic battle between Trump and the “Deep State” of liberals, staged in the arena of the U.S. Capitol itself, echoed in increased social media chatter on “battle stations” and “dropping the hammer” and an approaching “war” over stolen votes suggested a destruction of government and appealed as inhabiting a huge exercise of cosplay.
The invocation of a revolutionary mythology, a crowd-sourced lightening storm whose disastrous advance was targeting he Capitol from the heavens, as if it came from a 1930s Hollywood studio, or a recent thriller about the need to save society in a single moment, summoned the associations from early modern medicine of a critical point, but the critical point was in the social body–as the impending advance approached the Capitol, rocking its foundations as never before as the thunder was called down from the heavens, more spectacularly than Avengers: Endgame.
The ESRI story map map of the tunnels underneath the Capitol that in some version appears crossposted on TheDonald.Win conjured a troubling sense of enforcing the transparency of government the protestors had claimed, by luring them through maps of a hidden “sprawling underground world . . . curving like tentacles made of brick,” evoking, if playfully, the logic of secret routes of underground access to restore democratic representation by force in a world gone disastrously wrong and demanded repair lest the tentacles of the opposition party–the Democrats–might gain control of the U.S. Congress, by the double whammy of the previous night’s election of two Democratic Senators from Georgia as well as an African American Vice President.
The moment of crisis became imminent, but the routes to power were made to seem almost present to one’s eyes; it helped that Capitol Police were poorly equipped with old plastic shields that broke on impact, lifting the advancing mob a further sense of the invincibility despite their utterly unfounded claims to power. The image of tunnels that could allow the mob to gain easy access to Senate chambers, in air ducts repurposed in the Cold War as structures of civil defense were not even needed. The advance of members of the rally as Trump asked the assembled crowd to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue Constitution Avenue, to “save the Republic” by taking the Constitution in to their own hands, as he wrapped up his speech, some two hundred crowd members were already advancing on the Capitol by 12:33, moving past bike racks and other obstacles as they took over the inauguration stands, moving past officers who were not outfitted with shields, shouting “Hey! We’re breaking the wall!” with glee or sneaking through fences, entering the capitol from the west and from the east as the police finally declared a riot by 1:46, overwhelmed, according to recent forensics, by about 28 to 1, as over three thousand, four hundred members of the mob exulted in their new identity and success at forcing the police to pull back inside the building by 1:56, no longer able to secure the inaugural stands, as Trump was still speaking. The protestors who engaged Capitol Police and city police grew to an estimated 9,000, obsessed with creating transparency in the electoral tabulation. Fear of direct access to the Capitol grounds grew, increasing the giddy sense of success as police were waiting for reinforcement, and the mob broke windows to the Senate Chambers climbing on the the mid-terrance, and entering the east and west sides as police defence lines crumbled by 2:28.
The image of direct access to the chambers of government teased Trump supporters as a promise of transparency, as map of the tunnels underneath the Capitol Building that circulated on TheDonald.Win in anticipation of the event not an image in itself of the failure of electoral transparency. Don Jr., never the brightest bulb but the most eager, seems to have been overly transparent in telling the assembled crowd in Freedom Plaza that the time had indeed come to confront Republican representatives reluctant to support the seating of electors that would confirm the transition of power, claiming “we’re coming for you and we’re going to have a good time doing it,” hours before the crowd attacked the U.S. Capitol to affirm his overly earnest claim that “we have a country to save and [rioting] doesn’t help anyone.”–after urging the crowd, “if you’re gonna be the zero and not the hero” to prevent the transition of power, “we’re coming for you and we’re gonna have a good time.”
They were rather supposed to be having a good time. They advanced to the U.S. Capitol, having been urged on by how President Trump nurtured fantasies of “Making America Great Again” with existential urgency, and had delegated responsibility with urgency by letting them know that it was their turn to fight at the gates: “It is up to you and I to save this Republic! We are not going to back down, are we? Keep up the fight!” The barbarians were brought to the gates, and he all but invited them in, by activating their discharge down Pennsylvania Avenue, to bring a conclusion to what he had long postponed or deferred as a conclusion to the election that he had long argued would decide America’s future was at stake, with President Trump telling his supporters that his opponent would “destroy the American dream,” building anticipation for “the most important election in the history of our country” to magnify his supporters’ sense of a mission; as Trump predicted that the cities would be given over to roaming crowds of “violent anarchists,” and intoning about the existential dangers that immigrants who crossed the border, and failed to show up for court hearings would cross the border en masse–indeed, only by sending Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol who had become his personal army to find immigrants failing to show up for immigration court hearings could the U.S. Border and the nation be kept secure and we allow “a socialist agenda to demolish our cherished destiny” as a nation.
The barbarians had been summoned to the gates of power, by the logic of claims of lack of transparency. Perhaps they were also looking for violent anarchists, but they acted more like insurrectionists. Trump had cultivated an image of instability, akin to the specter of the invading migrants by celebrating the border wall as a prop for his Presidency, arguing “if we had a wall, we wouldn’t have any problems.” If the specter of immigrants as a threat to the nation’s sovereignty, tied to electoral transparency, the moment of revanchism had come as the tocsin sounded when the President called his base into action to forestall the transition of power. “They cross the border, and they they disperse across the country,” Trump had long warned of immigrants; but the the many busloads of protestors who arrived in Washington, DC, assembled before the authoritative structure of the prime chamber of American government, ready to cross barricades to target the U.S. Congress, staking a counterweight to its historic representational functions in their own bodies, as they sought to make their voices heard with urgency, least the boundary to the nation be opened, and the security of the state be fully compromised. The barbarians had now crossed police lines, barricades, bicycle racks, and overpowering officers as they invaded the halls of government. The arrived out of a distinct sense of a mission to defend the electoral results they wanted, with a sense of cheering the man to whom they were bonding for a final time, assembling before mesmeric screens that magnified the face of the outgoing President to whom they played homage, and who would instruct them to interrupt the certification of electoral votes, in deeply personal tones, as if it was the final plea to relitigate the election.
As late as April, Trump has continued to praise the crowd that arrived for his speech at Freedom Plaza as patriots, before fundraisers, boasting about its the size of the January 6 rally as if it offered a testament to his holding power in the party, but quickly claiming “he wasn’t talking about the people who went to the Capitol.” It is difficult to estimate the size of the crowd, or of the mob that besieged the Capitol as Trump spoke: if he claimed a number as large as 250,000, and althouht 100,000 is a likely exaggeration, it was at least 10,000; as they approached the Capitol, the crowd gained a density of 5 square feet per person, mosh-pit style, that both allowed it to gain a new sense of identity, and to overpower unarmed police. During Trump’s speech, he spent most of his speech acting as if he had been playing out the tallies of votes on an electoral map in a non-stop loop in his head for months describing fraudulence across states–Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada, and then several counties in Georgia, to conclude in contradictions of an obsessive–“We were ahead by a lot, until within a number of hours, we were loosing by a little”. Trump seemed to have counted on the audience replaying the same electoral maps, tallying cases of fraudulence in comprehensive detail–illegal ballots, never audited; the astounding alleged “error rate” of Dominion Voting Systems in Fulton County–late-arriving ballots in Detroit; dead people voting in Arizona; back-dated ballots in Wisconsin; ballot-harvesting in Pennsylvania, votes received after the deadline, an accumulated variety of dizzying wrongs. They were recited in disturbing detail as if to turn back the clock on the election, and demand that the tallying of electoral votes just not occur, given all these wrongs. All conveyed a deep sense of being wronged, and a vast conspiracy of wrongs, all allowed to exist, if folks did not show righteous rage. Did he imagined we had all visualized the possibility that all states were not called, and the electoral map remained unsettled as more legal cases were pending, or ballots needed to be recounted.
In fact, the lack of clarity in the electoral maps of 2020 flipped, for the first time, the tabulation of electoral votes across the country into what was openly portrayed as a crisis of representation, unable to be resolved by the usual manner of the tabulation of votes, in which despite the clear majority of votes won by one candidate, the final tally of electoral votes were not clear on the map–and some television news stations seemed to expect the block of red states that ensured an electoral victory in 2016 to be repeated, and left Trump deferring any conclusion to the election until January 6, 2021.
Trump affirmed his refusal to concede, and urged the rally to refuse to accept these results as well, stewing in what he portrayed, again, performatively and pleadingly, as a crisis in representation that his own Vice President had failed to maneuver around. He taunted the crowed by insisting on the mendacity of Democrats who were all talk and no action, would undercut the America First policy, and fail to defend rights to Free Speech that was in danger of being curbed, with freedom of religion and of owning guns–articulating “rights” that extended from gun control to religious practice. The chaotic jumble of multiple flags dominated by the five letters long used to promote luxury complexes concealed the presence cultivated from white supremacist groups, Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, all groups expected to be at the event, heirs to the supposed promises of a Lost Cause who wove separatist flags of different stripes, suggesting loyalty to deep truths. Trump lionized the patriotism of the crowd, which he insisted were “totally appropriate” in all ways, pronounced the election not only rigged, in a keyword of his campaign, and marred by a range of unprecedented “abuses” that can “never happen again,” distinguishing the crowds of 30,000 at the Save America Rally where he promised he would never concede as the crowd already approached the seat of the U.S. Congress in tactical garb before he concluded speaking.
As if hoping for a last-minute reversal of fortune, Donald Trump invited these barbarians into the gates, having granted them honorifics as “patriots committed to the honesty of our elections and the integrity of our glorious republic,” ready to “patriotically make your voices heard.” “I have never been more confident in our nation’s future,” he said in closing, reminding the patriots assembled that “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country any more.” These patriots arrived on the perimeter of the U.S. Capitol, convinced that they would present a new ideal of sovereignty, a popular sovereignty, that would overturn not only the certification of electors but the falsity of a tainted electoral process, as if they might replace it with direct sovereignty evoked in the sea of flags that so exultantly if chaotically unified the voices and identity of the mob that rushed the U.S. Capitol, streaming their success on social media, to give a transparency to their own actions that they found lacking in the electoral process. The prominence of defensively waved confederate flags beside TRUMP 2020 banners, American flags, and a range of flags from the Gadsden Flag to the Blue Line Flag to states’ flags, suggested defending an imaginary of the nation greater than the actual nation; they proclaimed a project of patriotism and national reinvention, glorifying as “revolutionary” insurrectionism.
There was something deeply fraught and un-American in the dissonance of the crowd-sourced populism of these men and women who arrived to accomplish what could not be accomplished at the ballot box. But there they were, claiming populist roles for themselves and claiming identity as patriots, taking selfies and filming one another, defending an administration that had signed into law the America CARES Act that offered targeted relief for industries hard hit by the pandemic–whose Title IV boasted relief for airline industries and the financial sectors in the form of massive tax write-offs, and over $25 billion of loans and loan guarantees to aircraft carriers alone and over $15 billion to defense industries–as if it was a populist movement, redefining populism as a mission of unwittingly preserving interests of corporate elites. The huge tax write-offs of the CARES Act that allowed “carry-back” provisions allowing companies to deduct losses from the profits they had recently reported, even if they were unrelated to COVID-19 or the pandemic, boasted the outright gift allowed ultra-wealthy Americans to consolidate their social safety nets by deducting personal losses from non-business income, at a time they were worried about their income security, in a manner demanded by the Americans for Tax Fairness non-profit, bolstering their financial profiles of the wealthiest of the 1%, and ensuring their hospitals, health centers, , even as hospitals were overwhelmed. What were these people doing defending their ground at Freedom Plaza?
These yahoos were not from the edges of empire, from outside of the borders of the nation, but were claiming to be from its heartland. They were, rather, crowd-sourced from social media platforms and news sources of political disaggregation, animated by the inflation of abstract values–arriving not from the southwestern border we had been warned of an invasion by gangs, drug lords, child-traffickers, and illegal aliens, but from across the nation. They were different barbarians, promoting popular sovereignty. The Alexandrian poet Konstantine Kavafy began Waiting for the Barbarians, by imaging the expectation of their arrival as government ground to a halt: toga-wearing legislators, bored, seem to wait something to break the logjam of their work to lift them from their idleness: “Why should the Senators still be making laws?/ The barbarians, when they come, will legislate.” The hope that those who invaded the Capitol grounds had for forestalling government would respond to what they saw as the true emergency–the end of the Trump Era, the fear of losing automatic weapons, immigrant protection programs, and the fear of a fraying of law and order that the Republican party had encouraged them to believe were all too imminent, warranting the emergency sign of flying an inverted American flag.
When Elias Canetti examined the formation of the crowd’s sense of license, tracing it from a moment of ‘discharge’ when they had arrived on the terrace, exulting in sense of short-lived victory. The members of the crowd at the moment of discharge, Canetti argued, sense of bonds to one another solidify. He would have been struck by the theatricality of the formation of a crowd that formed with a clear sense of timing: this crowd was long prompted by an urgent sense that January 6, 2021 was a critical day in the history of democracy, and of the union, and as the final moment of the selection of an American President, not by an election, but the final moment to question that election’s results–a true critical moment in the preservation of a democracy.
The crowd that progressed from the Ellipse gained new clarity as a body as they moved down Pennsylvania Avenue, past the Mall, and entered in waves into the chambers of the U.S. Capitol. They arrived to fulfilled their ambitions to fill the “our house”–occupying the architecture of the ship of state and government. They had arrived with an ease as surprising to many members of the mob as their leaders, as well as the President they would continue to support in his calls for patriotic defense of liberties.
The crowd that wanted to preserve the “red map” FOX Anchor Tucker Carlson displayed as
backdrop of “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” the highest-rated news program Fox airs, to orient viewers to his perspective and to the news. Perhaps that map has helped promote Carlson’s improbable rapid emergence and designation as the hands down “front runner” for the Republican nomination in 2024: a race-baiting, dynamic figure who would affirm the Trump constellation, and fluidity of the White House and Fox news, who Roger Stone had attempted to persuade to run for President against Barack Obama, all the way back in 2012. A young Conservative pillar whose news show began by featuring the backdrop of the electoral map in November, 2016, the most watched Fox News program of the year, Carlson made clear his promotion of Trump from the start, and adopted the conversion of the electoral map from a form of consensus to a declarative statement that Donald Trump was associated in a telling hanging of the map-of 2016 election results Trump had displayed in the White House in a frame–an image he had long given out to visitors to the West Wing, as if in a sign to the broadcaster who had in early 2016 heralded Trump as able “to fight Washington corruption, not simply because he opposes it but because he has actually participated in it” in Politico, able to become “the most ferocious enemy Ameican business has ever known,” as if he were Teddy Roosevelt: Tucker Carlson even went so far as to openly sanction Trump’s vulgarity by his allegedly pugnacious populism, creating a person of the former President struck a clear chord for viewers.
Did Carlson help to inspire the riots? Carlson’s “fighting words” crystallized Trump’s ability to represent the other America Carlson had tapped at The Daily Caller, piling scorn on Washington as a seat of corruption even at CNN, sanctioned Trump’s vulgarity as of a piece with his ability to attack Washington, e exponent he became as founder of the Daily Caller, who left CNN and MNBC for Fox. Trump had never participated in public politics, if he had threatened to since 1996 or earlier, but Carlson’s uncanny knack to converet any position to a pleas to sound like a righteous rebellion against double talk and political corruption anointed Trump as the one able to take on Washington, before Trump had even won the Republican nomination, and was incarnated in the very map of “election results” that magnified the size of Trump’s small share of the popular vote, by making it seem that Trump “big red, using the visual of the county-by-county vote as a proxy of sovereignty which he tweeted out to his 70+ million followers during his second impeachment. An example that might be understood in Trump’s taste for “truthful hyperbole,” it does the trick of showing his victory in 2,626 counties to Hillary Clinton’s 487, but cleverly masked that she had almost three million more popular votes.
The cultic status of the alternative map Carlson long used as a backdrop to tell the news was perhaps a form of brainwashing. It was the map, to be sure, that the crowd in Washington, DC on January 6, 2021 believed to exist, and obstinately refused to stop believing in. Tucker promoted the map as he baited viewers by denigrating social justice protests as the work of “criminal mobs,” and identified the insurrectionary riot as only seeking to promote “justice.” The crowd hoped to turn back the clock on the electoral map, by a license prefigured by interactive tallying electors FOX invited viewers to build interactively and to share in teh 2016 and 2020 elections–
–maps that may have contributed to entitlement to dimiss the electoral maps perpetuated by “Fake News Media.”
Much as Carlson had spoken from before the map of Trump’s 2016 victory, the same map before which Carlson later dismissed the presence of white supremacists in any responsible role at the rally–and even denied it was an armed insurrection–the spokesperson who has been a major apologist for Trump, promoting the illusion of a “heartland” victory of 2016 across Trump Country, a stretch of the nation that had come into existence in 2016, convincing viewers to keep their eyes on the prize, and imagine “your own 2016 presidential election forecast” as if the election could be personalized to reflect their historical role to promote a Trump victory on the “road to 270.” Their arrival in Washington, DC was bracketed by a sea of blue streamed from red states across the nation, as if to continue the Presidential campaign and to bring it to a final conclusion, as the 2020 electors were being certified.
Were they not an expression and manifestation of Carlson’s own sense of utter indignation at being wronged? This was the need to actually attack Washington, DC, and what way to do so than by attacking the Joint Session of Congress at the U.S. Capitol? The collective rage of the crowd was cast in righteous terms, and they had been baited by the very categories FOX news had purveyed. Advancing to the U.S. Capitol as Senators and Congressmen stalled for time to prevent state electors from being certified, the crowd aimed to empty the U.S. Capitol of the sacrality it commands. They did not need the government any more, or need its representatives. The argument in early 2016 that “Trump is leading a populist movement” led Carlson to invoke Teddy Roosevelt, while attacking the elitism of Republicans. In a robust attack on his former party for their attention to details of sexism, he attacked “people who were to slow to get finance jobs and instead wound up in journalism” as betraying the Party of Ideas, dismissing Trump’s critics as “fixated on fashion and hair,” and in an explicit sense to effeminate to appreciate Trump’s robust challenge as lying in straight talk and masculine confrontation–as if he were not a Member of the Tribe.
Was this a crowd that channeled the righteous indignation that Carlson had summoned over four years, from when he scolded a political caste of “Washington Republican” to let them know that he believed voters “know more about Trump than the people who run their Party,” the attack on the elites who were beholden to vested interests, as only “proof that you live nowhere near a Wal-Mart” in their priggish readiness to call Trump “a ridiculous buffoon with the worst taste since Caligula.” This wrath of Carlson was in a sense the wrath of the mob, directed by the conspiracy theories he had spun about an attempt to “bypass voters” and the autopsy he delivered from his news desk of a man Minnesota police killed. Carlson’s accusations of “rigging the election” led to the anger of the mob as they targeted that symbol of Washington–the Capitol–to “make their voices heard.”
Were the the true barbarians of whom the United States senators and congresspeople were in fear, and took the place of actual invaders? In a chastening poem that meditates on the dynamic of an end of the Byzantine empire, that evokes the fall of Rome to outsiders, poet and historian C. P. Cavafy drew on his erudition to conjure the dramatic scene of an utter inability of senators as they wait for the arrival of the “barbarians” to see the large picture. They have retreated from the larger consequence of inviting the crowd who posed as “patriots” to enter their very chambers in a perverse attempt to defend their country–or the country of red states and white majority with which they identified . Cavafy describes the legislators “bored with eloquence and public speaking,” as they found that with the specter of the barbarians from across the southern border were hidden behind, senators fled from the specter of the advancing MAGA mob, relinquishing their offices in fear: after four years of affirming the sacrality of the border wall to the nation, they shamelessly cowered from these barbarians without responsibility.
President Trump had incited the crowd to occupy the sacred architecture of government, in the neoclassical Palladian capitol building that he spoke before–what Joe Biden affirmed, in the hours of the riot, as an unprecedented assault on the very “citadel of liberty” and heart of government, occupying the sacred space of government and “most sacred of American undertakings,” the “sacred ritual” of the certification of the Electoral College vote, by occupying and filling the architecture of government into which they flowed. President Trump talked of the Capitol not as a sacred architecture or citadel, but the arms and tactical gear brought to the rally made clear it was a site to be filled: President Trump described an “egregious assault on our democracy,” a strange collective, as if the Capitol were a site of a wrong, rather than sacred, where the “brave senators and congressmen and women” would be cheered on, as in a sporting event, while not cheering much for others, to “make our voices heard” and in doing so “take back our country,” shifting sacrality from the architecture of the Capitol and making it appear a site to be filled by a cheering and booing crowd, as it had been almost evacuated of sacrality in a Presidency that was committed to the sacrality of the border wall. Teh rioters who affirmed a red-state religion of states rights held many obsolete flags–campaign flags, confederate flags, Betsy Ross flags, crusaders’ flags–not only to create a lineage for their protest but to protest their patriotism during the insurrection.
Only less than a thousand of those attending the Save America Rally on January 6, 2021 forced their way into the doors of the U.S. Capitol, hardly a fraction of the minimum size of 250,000 Trump claimed to face, as the “low number a few hundred thousand, high 2-3 million” that the rally organizers had promoted–but the spark for the crowd was set by the urgent request to save their country, from a threat that was all too real. The social media whistleblower who urged his followers to “take action” before the Capitol Riots taunted the Capitol police on poor planning for an event he hoped would attract three million American patriots, as if they were woefully underprepared for the reckoning the Save America Rally would create over the coming days.
The apparent abdication of the President from his executive responsibility was mirrored in the refusal of Republicans to recognize the danger of advance of militant resisters of a peaceful transfer of power. If only eight hundred entered the U.S. Capitol on January 6, breaking police lines and forcing their way into locked and guarded doors, the dissolution of momentum as the crowd could no longer fill the cavernous rotunda seemed to let it dissipate energy, but the insurrectionary force of entrance had already destabilized the workings of government and shocked the nation. It seems probably the organizers expected many more would have followed, as they insurrectionists hung Trump 2020 flags atop the Capitol building, from flags of the Trump campaign to other lost causes, from the Confederacy to South Vietnam–and tore down the American flag from the flagpole, to replace it with a Trump flag. When they entered the chambers of Congress, they cried “Trump won that election!”
They communicated a truly chaotic sense of exultation and arrival, as if that was their purpose. The many flags of imagined nations that no longer exist were on display at the insurrection linked the riots to an imagined heritage by radical telescoping and “umbrella descriptor” able to conjure “utopic” parallel worlds of whiteness. From the assembly of a “new American to the refighting of lost battles–evident in the many flags of the Confederate States of America; Trump 2020; Thin Blue Line–the array of flags suspended on the walls of the Capitol and from its flagpoles and windows suggest realities that were all no longer past, but, as Danielle Christmas reminds us, but synchrony of imaginary spaces which –from the Betsy Ross flag; the Confederacy; League of the South; Knights Templar; Vinland–validated a sense of belonging to a heritage of whiteness, in the attempts to give a national coherence to white nationalism, and even more a sense of authenticity and transparency to their aims. The attempts to untangle the mashup to sanctify their cause in hyper-masculine tropes eliding patriotism and militancy may explain the ebullient apparent chaos in the use of Confederate flags with neo-pagan flags, militant flags of crusaders, early revolutionaries, and diehards of the 2020 election, were images of white strength. Against the backdrop of accusations of failed transparency, an iconography of “lost causes” staked out an authenticity of faith, for all its fakeness and lack of historical accuracy.
While his social media followers may have been unmoored from any stable epistemological ground, the ability to warp the truth over the past five years may have made it incumbent upon them to respond to this lack of truth, to dislodge them from ties to any reality other than his refusal to concede the already decided Presidential race, as he sent his own troops into battle to rally against the reality of his political defeat. The flags pronounced claims to faith in lost causes that both magnified the crowd and its energetic claims to belonging to groups that were more transparent than the alleged “false media” narrative of an election defined, in contrast, by a lack of transparency. The power of belonging in a crowd no doubt attracted many to the Capitol, as it would reprise the many rallies Trump had staged nationwide since 2015.
But after promising his audience that he would accompany their progress down Pennsylvania Avenue, Trump cannily left the rally he had called, gleefully watching the progress to the U.S. Capitol on television from the White House with friends and advisors, as if relinquishing center stage; he abdicated responsibility for inciting the ensuing violence he followed gleefully in the Oval Office with his son and several advisors, and seems to have waited for his Vice-President to summon the National Guard, so ecstatic was Trump in what seemed an Insurrection Party with a soundtrack of upbeat rock. The open transparency of these patriots was on view for all to see, and was being documented live on camera, evident from the map of cel phone signals from towers near the Mall and U.S. Capitol as the crowd advanced.
Animated by the defense of a sense of patriotism, if not of the delicate boundaries of the Republic, when Trump vowed “we will never give up, we will never concede,” at the very start of his speech, repeating the useful conceit “we won by a landslide,” he created a bond of collective relation to the crowd, before he affirmed that if “we don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country any more.” The tweet that arrived to the followers who all had brought their phones to stream the event to which they were amassed to follow lit up at 2:24 p.m. with the alarming news the acting President of the Senate failed to question the validity of seating electors, and indeed lacked the “courage to do what should have been done to protect our County and our Constitution” that triggered the mob to form from the crowd, waving a raucous abandon of flags semiotically difficult to process–TRUMP 2020 flags; Betsy Ross flags; Gadsden flags; 2nd Amendment flags thin blue line flags; and, of course, confederate flags–in an abandon of over-signification born of deep desire to destabilize sovereign unity, lifted by an eery undercurrent of red MAGA hats. The guns, explosive devices, and tacitical policing gear as well as hunting weapons were fetishized as a protected”right,” enshrined in the Amendment ratified in 1789, although those rights derived from the English common law notions of preserving the peace–not the libertarian “liberties” of owning guns that span hunting rights or self-defense, rather than the common defense. Yet the keeping of military arms for use in local militia was appropriated with expansion of the very term “militia”, now fetishized as a right of border protection and vigilantism without local regulation.
INdeed, the personalization of rights to “defend” the nation inside the “well-regulated militia” that the Second Amendment affirmed as a right central to preserving “the security of the state” has become delegated to self-run groups, often composed of Border Patrol members or military veterans, designed to preserve their sense of security deemed “necessary to the security of a free state” has increasingly elevated “right” to bear arms into an obligation, staged with theatrics on the very structure of the inaugural stands transformed to grounds of a tactical campaign of defense, whose propulsive energy soon became one of aggressive assault.
About a sixth of the way through President Trump’s address–and just after he claimed that the voice of the crowd of believers that would not be silenced, martial chanting filled the space that Elias Canetti, who found that history of the twentieth century a history of mass psychology–termed the “acoustic mask” of the collective, more akin to sports events than individual articulation, a subsuming of the self in the crowd, of openly martial tones. Canetti’s distinction between the “open” crowd whose expansion knew no limits and from the “closed” crowd that fills an architectural space to take it over, and fills it while sacrificing its mass size. The crowd at the Capitol combined both aspects, as it was a crowd that had assembled at multiple earlier rallies and online, but was determined to expand to fill the architecture of the Capitol, opening a preserve of government as it was determined to make its voices heard. Architecture provided a stimulus for the crowd to gain its sense of a unity, Canetti argued in his distinction between the “open” and “closed” crowds, echoing the image of the Nuremberg Rallies of Hitler, no doubt, when he claimed that architecture “postpones [the crowd’s] dissolution,” but the limited number of entrances to the closed space where the crowd assembles not only attracts them, as a space that the crowd will fill, harnessing the power of the crowd which realizes with a sense of sudden entitlement that “the space is theirs.”
The transformation of the space outside the Capitol to an architecture of protest, even not able to be entirely filled, affirmation of the stakes of the battle for rights that was at hand. For Canetti, the architecture of the space–here symbolized by the inaugural stands, and by the open architecture of the Capitol dome, becomes filled as it invited mobilization. Indeed, the filling of the space transformed the crowd into a collective surge, whose motion through space “reminds them of the flood” or crucial metaphors of conceiving the crowd as a stream, tide, or waves–metaphors usually based on water, to illustrate its cohesion–that are, mutatis mutandi, the very terms often applied to the migrants on the southwestern border, but are now poised to enter not the country but the seats of government power. In the context of a history of crowds over the twentieth century, Elias Canetti sought to understand the psychology of mass movements of Fascism outside of a Freudian concentration on ego, and relation of self to collective, but as a new configuration of. self to collective. The crowd allowed him to focus on the question of the political fusion of self with crowd as a moment when all inhibitions are overcome by a drive toward greater density and physical proximity; the procession of the crowd as it moved toward the U.S. Capitol became a mob, gaining identity to cross the Capitol’s perimeter, realizing its transformation from the open crowd of online space to the physical space that it might occupy: in this case, the mass of Trump supporters that was assembled before the U.S. Capitol was it fear of the arrival of the barbarians that Trump has himself warned against,–but seemed to seek acceptance as a new political unit. They gained power as a mob as they approached the U.S. Capitol, defining their power by their proximity to the U.S. President, and growing in power as their distance diminished to the Capitol building that appeared within their vision on the horizon, just out of reach of their own pressing raucous popular demands as the mob acted as a militia.
The centrality of gun rights as the crowd outside the U.S. Capitol became a militia itself, was recouped in subsequent call for a “Million Militia March” on inauguration day, a counter-protest in grotesque parody of the Million Mom March, which 20 years ago drew an estimated 750,000 to protest an epidemic of gun violence, or the Million Man March, against the continued infringement of civil rights in America by police violence. The sustained transposition of constitutional originalism as justifying a “right” to bear arms is diffused in claiming the assertion of a full-blown “right to insurrection” should government overstep its constitutional right, distilling the notion of a well-regulated set of liberties to a “well-regulated militia” engaged in aggressive self-defense–far from the founders’ original intent. If the fear of southerners of slave insurrections , affirmation of a “right to insurrection” within the Second Amendment is argued as a basis to keep politicians in line, or a check against arbitrary authority of rulers. A protest on Inauguration Day was planned to include a return, this time “carrying Our weapons, in support of Our nation’s resolve.”
Was not the call to an insurrection the very term that the members of the mob would adopt for themselves, proclaiming an insurrection that was able to The “right to insurrection” was claimed by the mob as they assembled before the inaugural stands, and proceeded to the Capitol. Drawn toward the Capitol as if to hope to fill its space, the logic of the crowd that had assembled was oriented toward the building where Trump had baited them to disrupt the votes, as if it was within their power to do so, removing and prohibition from entering the property that they were convinced was their own to possess, instructed by the leader to whom their banners all proclaimed fealty.
Many waved an American flag, but far more wove banners of Trump’s campaign slogan, repurposed for insurrection, or adopting other symbols of an allegiance that was more originalist than the members of Congress assembled to certify the electors. The crowd members acted as if they were mobilized as a separate country–the nation of Trump 2020, of Confederate America, or of America Made Great Again, as they pursued the MAGA agenda into the halls of government to finally make their voices heard; this was a country deeply tied to White Supremacy, to the founding fathers, and asserted that the state of affairs had become an emergency, and a new allegiance to foundational principles had to be asserted and proclaimed. From imagined lands to alternate realities, the flags provided an imagined inheritance of precedent–often of mythical nature, as the so-called “Vinland Flag,” repurposed from an old punk band that suggested an original pre-American world discovered by Norse voyagers who had arrived in North America in the eleventh century, repurposed to suggest a mythic white majority nation for extremists, often combining it with the image of a modern semi-automatic AK-47 as if it was a territory worthy of armed defense.
The approached the U.S. Capitol, waving Second Amendment flags and hanging their banners that celebrated the recent candidacy of Donald J. Trump as if it was indeed marked by victory, still with meaning, not able to be consigned to a trash-heap of history. The moment of heightened proximity to one another outside the White House walls marked the transformation of the audience to a mass, identified by professions of patriotism, patches, clothing, hats, and the acoustic mask of any cry they could improvise. They wished they had brought a boom box, and had a soundtrack by which to enter the chambers of Congress in a mask of dignity.
As martial chanting was a mask, a new collective identity by assuming the power to overturn sovereignty, the flags, MAGA caps, and weapons and tactical gear were a mask of identity by which they were made suddenly visible, accountable, and politically powerful, in collective denial Trump had lost the Presidential vote of 2020: as much as perpetuating a big lie that Trump planted, they laid claim to the collective identity that would not be ignored Trump championed. The acoustic mask was mirrored in the mask of signs, flags, demands, and an interruption to politics as normal. The flags were a baiting of power, a refusal of the sovereign power of the Joint Session of Congress, and a denial of its authority to certify electors: the mass of Trump supporters offered a new form of power, a delegitimization of the sovereignty of the U.S. Capitol itself, as the crowd presented a new form of power, ready to supplant it, unassailable by Capitol police, but that had in this moment before the Rotunda assumed an identity of invulnerability, in the new identity they presented as members of a crowd, and took a new sense of their own power as a crowd, attracted to their own ability to “save America” lest it not be “Great” anymore. They had all been, after all, invited to the event.
1. Trump urged the crowd to step into the breach opened by political polarization across the nation, to right the ship of state at the site of government, by going to the U.S. Capitol. This was the dominant trope of the deep risk of the Republic that American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had channeled, as a task of righting the voyage of the Republic lest it plummet into fatal waters. And the crowd approached, as if it embodied the hopes of the Republic and of mankind, magnifying its own power as a renewal of the Union, akin to a new state of civil war, and of democratic dignity, if the collective construction Longfellow called for imagined timbres from across the nation would be used to “bring tribute, great and small/and help to built this wooden wall . . . of oak and maple, and pine wood; iron, and pitch, and hemp,” to contain “humanity with all its fears.” For Longfellow, the shore was a site of contact, commerce, and danger of natural forces, rather than the fantasy of native purity Trump mapped as a source of fears to be contained by the still unbuilt border wall as a reimagined architecture of sovereignty. When Schoen read the envoi from “The Building of the Ship” inseparable from American Presidents standing steadfast in the face of disunion from Abraham Lincoln’s admiration of how the verses powerfully “stir men” on the eve of the Civil War to Franklin Delano Roosevelt sending them with Wendell Wilkie to Winston Churchill–“Sail on, O Ship of State!/Sail on, O Union strong and great./Humanity with all its fears . . . /Is hanging breathless on thy fate”–before the United States entered World War II, as a commitment of solidarity the former Lord of Admiralty, desperate for reassurance of an Atlantic alliance, would see “applies to you people as it does to us.” (Churchill would frame the hand-written letter on the walls of his Chartwell home, “I think this verse applies to your people, as it does to us.”
In electing to recite the poem in closing arguments, Schoen’s reading tied Presidential authority and a foundational reading of the constitution to the nation’s fate. His lawyerly reading of the envoi for the ship’s departure summoned an array of Presidential authority in defense of Trump’s accusation of violence that mimicked the exhibition of multiple flags arrayed behind Trump as he addressed the Ellipse on the morning of January 6, 2021, taking the figurative reading as a declaration of the innocence of his client in the face of the violence against the capitol and due process, and even Trump’s own taunting words by which he worked the crowd into a mission to move on the Joint Session. Longfellow’s poem had long provided a powerful topos of national unity, and transnational unity, any sense of the shared collective meaning of a transcendence–and the transcendent role of Presidential authority–were hard to recuperate days after the insurrection incited by an intense partisan opposition of an outgoing President, hard to read as deferring fears of the lack of consensus Trump hammered home in provoking the crowd by insisting the media suppresses “free speech” and urged them “we’re going to have to fight much harder” to prevent a “sad day for our country” of the ship of state hitting the rocky shoals of a smooth Presidential succession. In delegating the defense of the constitution to the crowd he addressed, he summoned a flase populism by inciting crowd members to band together, and gain their unity in order to defend their version of false “freedoms”–freedom of speech without fear of reprisal for hate speech, at a “Free Speech Event” to protest second amendment rights to possess guns; freedom of the”right” to assemble to promote civic disunion.
Schoen’s stilted reading of the trimeter of the envoi beseeched us to place faith over fears–“faith triumphant over our fears”–seemed to steel the nation against the insurrection. Longfellow’s language of righting the course of the ship of state became the language of a mob seeking to make their voices heard, in an insurrectionary slogan that granted license to trespass government property to disrupt Congress before electors were certified. And the mob of rioters who advanced on the U.S. Capitol inspire more fears for the future of the unity of state, than a manufactured by a steel wall of concrete core might stop, impelled by the fear that America as they knew it might suddenly stop if Joe Biden assumed the Presidency, and the America Made Great Again would no longer be America any more.
Continue reading
