Liberal Democracy, Populism and the January 6 Capitol Putsch
On January 6 2021, thousands of Donald Trump supporters stormed the Capitol building housing the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, ostensibly to put pressure on legislators to overturn the presidential election results, and to declare Trump the winner. Many of them seemed to genuinely believe that “the election has been stolen”. They were there to ‘defend [liberal] democracy from the liberal establishment’. Others were not so naive or duped. It was Trump’s attempt at a putsch, incompetently planned and coordinated like everything in his presidency, and it failed.
As with all mass actions that are more or less ‘spontaneous’, or at least disorganized on the level of the whole crowd, the crowd that assaulted the Capitol building looking for legislators to pressure (and perhaps seize as hostages and/or torture or kill as ‘traitors’) was made up of multiple subgroups of people, subgroups with somewhat differing politics as well as differing willingness to take different actions.
Some were neo or proto fascists or wannabe Nazis. They were members or supporters of explicitly white supremacist and America First imperialist groups. They wanted a Trump dictatorship, or at least a Trump with emergency dictatorial powers.
The Capitol invaders were there to overturn an election — in the name of constitutional democracy.
Others were more typical of Republican voters who get their news from right-wing social media, or Fox and Sinclair Broadcasting and right-wing radio, and from Republican politicians and Republican political campaigns. They had long ago bought into the alternate reality of Trump, Trumpism and the Republican Party. Some of these people were also prepared to use extreme pressure, and if necessary violent techniques, to ‘stop the steal’ of the presidential election. The difference between them and the extreme right conspirators was not the tactics they were willing to employ so much as what they thought they were doing there.
This second group are the mass base of supporters for a right-wing populism. They think that the liberal democracy of a supposed golden age past of 1940s and 1950s America has been stolen from them by a ‘liberal establishment’. Many, but by no means all, think that this liberal establishment is in cahoots with a host of ‘undeserving’ social groups. The falsifying of the U.S. presidential 2020 election results by shadowy forces was just the latest expression of the stealing of that democracy.
The difference between the two subgroups may seem to be minor or moot, but it is real and important. The two groups acted together here, and can potentially act together going forward in more and more extremely right-wing ‘patriotic American’ actions. Nevertheless there is a difference. Group One are like those citizens of Nazi Germany who were ready to join the SS or Stormtroopers. Group Two are like those conservative party or Nazi party voters, who would eventually go along with whatever the Nazi government and Leader demanded of them, as they mobilized for war to ‘Make Germany Great Again’.
The U.S. empire is still too dominant to need outright fascism at home — but mainstream Republicans are okay with racist nationalism and degrading liberal democracy
My apologies for the analogy – the USA is still too powerful as an empire to be on the verge of a repeat of 1930s fascism in a new form appropriate to 21st century circumstances – but the analogy makes the abstract point: The Group Two subgroup at the Capitol putsch think just like tens of millions of Republican voters and supporters. Yes, they are supportive of many reactionary and illiberal causes, but they also think that they are defenders of liberal democracy against the liberal establishment.
We need to expose the myths and lies that are central to today’s right-wing populism (many of those lies are not about democracy, but about the threat of racialized others, of the need for a ‘My country right or wrong’ militant patriotism etc) . Conservative leaders like Trump are leading millions on the road to new era fascism, but the mass of citizens who vote for them are not there yet. Right-wing populism in the U.S., but also in most every other country where it continues to gain strength, appeals to the ideals of democracy as ‘the will of the people’, more precisely the will of the ‘pure people’ against the ‘corrupt elites’. It does so in order to justify to its followers policies and actions that radically degrade democratic institutions and norms and rights and liberties. It degrades real existing liberal democracy in the name of a more effective strong leader democracy, but still an alleged democracy.
Both left and right populists call for a democracy of the ‘pure people’ versus a tiny ‘corrupt elite’
But right-wing populists are not the only ones who organize their supporters around the idea that there is a tiny 1 percent who are ‘corrupt’ and conspire to manipulate the government and other institutions, and need to be challenged by a ‘pure’ 99 percent. Left-wing populists like Occupy and Podemos in Spain have their own variant of the same idea. Of course, they want more democracy, not less. But the idea that social oppressions in society can be reduced to a lack of autonomy and democracy for the pure 99 percent is deeply problematic.
We on the left need to figure out what ‘political democracy’ is for us, what real existing ‘liberal democracy’ is, and what our practical stance should be towards different aspects of it. We need to understand how all that relates to the much more radical democratization of the economy and other societal institutions (not just the state) that we are working to achieve in all of our progressive struggles. But we also need to get away from strategies for uniting people in collective debate and action that make the process of democracy in our own mobilization, and the goal of democracy in a future society, more important than getting out and organizing people where they live and work against the structures and ideologies that oppress them.
THIS IS THE FIRST POST IN THE ‘DEMOCRACY AND POPULISM’ SERIES
This post announces what will be a series of posts taking up the topic of democracy and how it relates to both the right-wing and left-wing populism that continue to be in the ascendant in so many countries around the world.