{"id":6267,"date":"2021-01-08T14:02:38","date_gmt":"2021-01-08T14:02:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.radiofree.org\/?p=147724"},"modified":"2021-01-08T14:02:38","modified_gmt":"2021-01-08T14:02:38","slug":"the-assault-on-the-capitol-was-shameful-but-defending-the-status-quo-isnt-the-answer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/01\/08\/the-assault-on-the-capitol-was-shameful-but-defending-the-status-quo-isnt-the-answer\/","title":{"rendered":"The assault on the Capitol was shameful. But defending the status quo isn\u2019t the answer"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Something weird happened to me as I was watching the assault on the Capitol. I started feeling an affinity with the Trump supporters who were storming the building.<\/p>\n

Obviously not the actual neo-nazis. But some of the others seemed so happy. They were having such a good time. Many people have described protests as forms of spirituality<\/a>. I myself experience a good protest as something spiritual. Thousands of people coming together for a common cause. The music, the camaraderie, the costumes.<\/p>\n

What must it have felt like to descend on the seat of government, to actually get into the building?<\/p>\n

Of course, the kind of protest I would go to would be the one where the police<\/a> kettle, tear gas and shoot you before you\u2019ve even gone anywhere.<\/p>\n

I share some common ground with those rioters. Unlike the \u2018liberal elites\u2019 they are railing against, I don\u2019t really believe that they were stopping the course of democracy when they interrupted Joe Biden\u2019s confirmation as president. I don\u2019t really believe that the difference between the Hong Kong protests and this one was that the US is a democracy whereas Hong Kong isn\u2019t, as a BBC correspondent argued<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not saying that the US and Hong Kong have the same political system, but the US isn\u2019t a democracy. That\u2019s exactly the problem. Our \u2018democracies\u2019 aren\u2019t actually democracies.<\/p>\n

George Monbiot recently argued<\/a> that Brexit is the outcome of a civil war among capitalists. On the one hand, you have the \u2018war lord\u2019 Brexiteer capitalists who are openly hostile to democracy, and on the other hand there are the more establishment \u2018Remainer\u2019 types who want to keep the trappings of democracy but who are nonetheless waging a silent war against it.<\/p>\n

The same applies here. Trump\u2019s supporters openly declared war on the recognised democratic process. But that process isn\u2019t actually democratic. Elections don\u2019t equal democracy, especially not when voter suppression is rife, there are only two viable parties (both of which are beholden to the lobby groups funding them), and the media is controlled by media moguls or massive corporations. Fancy civic buildings, rituals and ceremonies don\u2019t mean you live in a democracy.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t believe that Trump is waging a secret war<\/a> against elite Satan-worshipping paedophiles who have infiltrated America\u2019s institutions.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t believe \u2018fake news\u2019, but I also don\u2019t believe a lot of what the \u2018fake news media\u2019 says either.<\/p>\n

I was on the phone to an old family friend last night who lives in Los Angeles. There was something he just couldn\u2019t get his head round. He had always believed that the mainstream media more-or-less controlled what the mass of people thought. But in the case of Trump, only one big outlet, Fox News, was supporting him. The rest was dead against him. How could it be, then, that he had so much support among the public?<\/p>\n

I\u2019m an academic researcher in this field, have written books about it, and am supposed to know what I\u2019m talking about. But I wasn\u2019t sure how to answer him. I rehearsed saying things about social media and filter bubbles<\/a>, about polarisation and ideological sorting<\/a>, about the difference between lies and bullshit<\/a>. None of it felt right.<\/p>\n

Having slept on it, I think the process was something like this:<\/p>\n

1) People were hurting after the 2008 financial crisis, and they felt that the narratives being conveyed to them by the establishment about politics and the economy were a load of rubbish. In a sense they were right: much of what the mainstream media reported about the financial crisis and the austerity that followed wasn\u2019t true<\/a>.<\/p>\n

2) Trump was a multi-millionaire celebrity who had been grooming the media for decades and was already a certain entity in the public imagination.<\/p>\n

3) Despite his rhetoric, Trump was not an anti-establishment figure but he ultimately became a figurehead for one faction of the establishment. He did not have the full force of the establishment against him. He was able to mobilise the far-right \u2018populism\u2019 already manufactured<\/a> by the likes of the billionaire Koch brothers.<\/p>\n

4) Trump did, crucially, have the Murdoch media behind him. One important difference between Trump and Bernie Sanders is that Trump had a very powerful media mogul on his side, whereas Bernie didn\u2019t have any legacy media backing him.<\/p>\n

5) The things about social media, polarisation and parallel information realities come into play here. Because people knew that they couldn\u2019t trust established sources, and because the business model of social media encourages filter bubbles and extremism, people were willing to believe not in alternative truths \u2013 but in the idea that truth isn\u2019t a thing. It doesn\u2019t matter if QAnon has any truth to it or is just completely bonkers, it\u2019s a laugh and it feels right on some level.<\/p>\n

6) Those who have genuine alternative narratives to offer do<\/em> have the full force of the establishment against them, so it\u2019s much harder for them to reach beyond their much smaller filter bubbles and provide people with the alternative interpretations and solutions they were so desperately craving.<\/p>\n

I share some common ground with the \u2018mob\u2019, \u2018rioters\u2019, somewhat accidental \u2018insurgents\u2019 or even \u2018terrorists\u2019. I don\u2019t know them but I\u2019m sure I disagree with them on many things \u2013 the satanic paedophile thing, for one.<\/p>\n

But where I most fundamentally disagree is on their solution to the current crisis of democracy. They believe that whoever can most effectively wield violence should rule. They want Trump to be president and are willing to do whatever it takes to make that happen. This takes us even further away from democracy.<\/p>\n

What we saw at the Capitol was a hollow spectacle of democracy being disrupted by those who believe in rule by brute force.<\/p>\n

But instead of taking sides in a civil war within the establishment, we should ask a simple question: how can we build a real democracy? We can argue about what this looks like<\/a>, but one thing is for sure: it definitely doesn\u2019t look like Trump\u2019s mob, or the status quo.<\/p>\n\n

This post was originally published on Radio Free<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Something weird happened to me as I was watching the assault on the Capitol. I started feeling an affinity with the Trump supporters who were storming the building.\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":529,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6267"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/529"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6267"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6267\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6268,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6267\/revisions\/6268"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}