A Trivial Insurrection
74 million people voted for Trump. Something like a few thousand marched up Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol. Of these, a few hundred demonstrators confronted the police. The confrontation was poorly policed. As a result, some of the demonstrators got inside the Capitol building and ran around, for the most part frolicking despite some menacing talk. One of them, unarmed, was shot dead. A policeman was hit by a fire extinguisher, reported back to his division office, collapsed, and died the next day. Three more demonstrators died: one trampled; one of a heart attack; one of a stroke. No member of Congress was even slightly injured. The demonstrators were easily dispersed and caused no more trouble.
Many commentators seem much more alarmed by these events than by the two weeks of unrest following the death of George Floyd, which left 19 dead, hundreds of police and presumably many more civilians injured, and “the highest recorded damage from civil disorder in U.S. history”.* Because the DC demonstration involved The Capitol, American Democracy was on the brink of non-existence. Or America itself: maybe we’re becoming Iraq! Syria! Yugoslavia! More moderate opinion focused on some armed white supremacists openly talking of civil war. This was an insurrection!
It goes without saying that the Capitol demonstration isn’t even in the same galaxy as serious insurrections. In Chile, when Allende was overthrown, the armed forces for the most part sided with the insurrectionists. Thousands died. Hundreds died in Turkey, where the 2016 insurrection had important military support; both the parliament and the presidential palace were bombed from the air. These are overshadowed by insurrections in Ceylon, Afghanistan, Chechnya, and Iraq, not to mention coups in Brazil, Argentina, Greece, and Egypt.
But forget these events. In the comfortable West, there have been violent outbursts, much, much worse than the Capitol demonstration. They were orders of magnitude less severe than the non-Western insurrections. No one called them insurrections. They were too small-scale. So we have the activities of Germany’s Red Army Faction, in which 34 people died and hundreds were injured. These militants killed the president of Germany’s superior court of justice. In Italy there were the bombings, kidnappings and killings during the Years of Lead. A former prime minister was abducted, then executed by leftists. Powerfully connected rightists blew up a train station in Bologna (a prosperous communist stronghold); 85 died. In these cases, the violence persisted for years.
America is different. It’s not only Trump who is a blowhard. In recent decades American activist groups have been, to an overwhelming extent, a bunch of blowhards. Weatherman talked a lot and blew up a couple of washrooms. And a statue. The Black Panther Party paraded with guns a lot, talked about guns and power a lot, but never came up with anything remotely like armed insurrection. Like the Black Muslims, they soon became well-behaved community workers. There are individual acts of violence committed by individuals with right-wing sympathies. But these are not collective actions. There are 330 million people in the United States. That some vanishingly small fraction of them commit political crimes is no doubt deplorable, but neither surprising nor alarming. White supremacists are no more formidable. In 2019, the number of blacks or African-Americans killed in hate crimes was: 1.
As for the Trump supporters, like Trump, they like to talk big. They like to play with their weapons and Molotov cocktails, like the ones some guy left in his van when he demonstrated in Washington. So of course there is a mountain of evidence that some tiny fraction of Trump supporters talked of insurrection. But they did approximately nothing.
All this explains why many Middle East analysts and commentators, those with no investment in dramatizing American politics, regard the hysteria around the Capitol demonstrations with amazement, even contempt. But the hysteria is a serious matter, for two reasons.
First, the more commentators obsess about insurrection, the less they emphasize the spectacular security failures of January 6th. The failures are far more important than the acts of the demonstrators, because only the failures enabled the acts. Instead of portentous words about the state of America, it’s security in DC, an unspectacular matter of policing, that needs to be addressed.
Second, the more commentators lose their composure, the less the incentive to address the grievances of Trump supporters. Yes, many of these supporters are affluent or comfortable. Some are just plain nasty. Millions of them are in despair. It is unlikely that they will ever become a security risk. It is also unlikely that the practitioners of hysteria will ever address the terrible problems of the rust belt and the ravages of globalization. Demonizing Trump supporters is no solution.
* These numbers suggest only the scale of the unrest, not that the protesters were unjustified, nor to what extent they were responsible for anything, nor that what they were responsible for was unjustified. No matter what your view on these issues, there has to be cause for alarm.