Looking at the political situation in the US and trying answer the question “what is to be done?” I think it’s best to think in terms of short term, medium term and long term goals.
Short term Trump needs to be disabled from accessing new media to prevent him from whipping up anymore dangerous mob action, and the means whereby the hard core Trump activists, militia, Proud Boys, QAnon, etc organise and propagate needs to be disrupted. But both of these are temporary measures. Longer term censorship will be bypassed (unless truly draconian measures are taken) and more importantly such restrictions play into the hands of those promoting conspiracy based ideologies.
Also short term a really thorough Federal investigation needs to bring to justice as many as possible of participants in the storming of the the Capitol. More aggressive policing of public gatherings of armed militia would be good but is harder to do as it would have to be enforced at a state level.
Medium term the Republican leadership need to be helped to abandon the political platform and organised base that Trump created, and Trump needs to be prevented from running for president under the Republican banner in 2024. All of that will be difficult. It will be hard for the Republicans to let go of a political project that just secured such an enormous number of votes and the party is now saturated with Trump supporters. I sense that a big part of the Republican Party leadership was truly shaken by what happened at the Capitol and the Democrats need to act sensitively to strengthen and facilitate the anti-Trump block in the Republican Party. That will demand sophisticated and clever politics.
Longer term the political system in the US is crying out for reform. Not just the arcane methodology for actually electing a president, or the way the Senate system over empowers sparsely populated areas of the country, but the very way that political parties have come to operate needs to be addressed. The US party system is both weird and dysfunctional. US parties don’t have leaders for example and are more like ramshackle and sprawling collections of not very well connected political and ideological apparatuses with nobody in charge. Active membership of both parties is at historical lows and in fact they don’t really have a membership system like European parties. Both parties have spent the last four decades trying to assemble popular voting blocks every four years to support broadly the same national political and economic configuration based on a disorganised labour force, stagnant wages, grotesque levels of inequality, the prioritisation of rentier finance capital over industrial capital, and of course the fall out of the great financial crisis when the banks were bailed out but nobody else was. The problem facing both parties is how on earth to you get the masses to vote for that?
The Republicans and Democrats responded using the same methodology (which sort of emerged as a series of opportunist lunges from the Heath Robinson assemblage of each party) but with different content reflecting the different population segments they were chasing. Both parties thrived by demonising the other party and the people who voted for them. They did this by feeding the outrage and paranoia generated by all sorts of third party and non-party entities concerning issues that ultimately did not threaten the political and economic system that both parties were signed up to. A good term for this is ‘outrage outsourcing’.
The Republicans had talk radio, Christian evangelicals, The National Rifle Association, and of late the strange new online communities where outrage thrives in a vast echo chamber. The Democrats were chasing the educated middle class votes so it has championed all sorts of ‘liberal’ social and cultural issues (non of which of course challenges the way the country or it’s economy is run) and presents itself as the only thing that can protect the nation from a take over by the ‘undesirables’. It was enthusiastically supported in this by the liberal cultural and professional elites in the cities with the support of big chunks of the old media, the universities and the leaders of the new tech sector.
This strategy, of allowing all sorts of autonomous centres of idealogical power and activity to come up with and promote new innovative ideological components which then become core parts of each parties political offering to the voters has begun to backfire spectacularly. Beginning with Tea Party political insurgency (itself a direct creation of the aftermath of the Financial Crisis) the Republican leadership lost control of of the dynamic and it began to accelerate away from them. Eventually a sociopathic, rich reality TV celebrity pulled all the strands together and took control of the party. Much of the party leadership ended up going along with him because he won elections, which from their point of view is the point of the whole thing.
On the other side a new and rapidly spreading ideology of wokeness has taken over the universities (which have expanded enormously along with the growth the post-Fordist knowledge economy) and spread rapidly in to the media, the professions and the middle class liberal communities of the big cities. This new ideology is founded on the demonisation of entire social groups and devotes enormous energy into carefully placing people into groups and assigning them roles of oppressor or victim. This constituency was super active in the Black Lives Matters wave in the summer during which it promoted very similar actions as that carried out at the Capitol last week
So on one side we have people saying all white people are privileged and carry a guilt for a racism which is everywhere and eternal (this can be expressed by a black educated professional whilst addressing a white person dependent on food parcels and living in a trailer park) and unsurprisingly on the other side a lot of people who listen to this and decide to organise as white people. Both the two systems of outrage outsourcing, the Republican and Democratic systems, both feed off each other, each generates energy in the other side, each acts a recruiting agent for the other side. Both struggle to achieve a majority so as to seize control of the machinery of government in order to attack and exclude the other other side. Neither side sees the other side as legitimate. Both sides view the other side as dangerous enemies who need to be administratively neutralised. Meanwhile neither the resulting Democratic or Republican political projects actually have a reform program that would change any of the fundamentals of the current system.
Into this juicy mix hostile foreign intelligence services make mischief when they can. They didn’t cause the problems of the US political system, that was wholly home grown, but foreign intelligence services are happy to stir the pot a bit.
Fixing this political mess is a huge project, fixing the American economy and rebuilding national solidarity is a huge problem. I’m pretty sure Biden and his team are not capable of doing this but finger crossed, all we can do as onlookers is hope.
