{"id":943170,"date":"2023-01-03T14:33:11","date_gmt":"2023-01-03T14:33:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/?p=417878"},"modified":"2023-01-03T14:33:11","modified_gmt":"2023-01-03T14:33:11","slug":"how-jan-6-brought-frontier-violence-to-the-heart-of-u-s-power","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2023\/01\/03\/how-jan-6-brought-frontier-violence-to-the-heart-of-u-s-power\/","title":{"rendered":"How Jan. 6 Brought Frontier Violence to the Heart of U.S. Power"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe battle between good and evil has come now.\u201d
\n\u2014 Senior staff member in the U.S. Senate<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

In the Cormac McCarthy novel \u201cBlood Meridian,\u201d a man called Captain White leads a mounted company of American irregulars into northern Mexico on a mission to plunder and lay the groundwork for further U.S. expansion. \u201cWe are to be the instruments of liberation in a dark and troubled land,\u201d he tells his men. As they ride, White notices dust clouds on the horizon. Through his spyglass, he sees a massive herd of cattle, mules, and horses being driven toward the company by what he takes for a band of stock thieves. They seem to pay his men no mind as the herd rumbles past. Then, suddenly, hundreds of mounted Comanche lancers and archers appear:<\/p>\n

A legion of horribles \u2026 wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners \u2026 one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I first read those lines 14 years ago, in a hostel bunk bed amid the wanderings of my early 20s. I was in Naples, where my great-grandfather had boarded a ship to America, and though faces on the streets looked eerily familiar, I felt only a tenuous connection to the city. The novel\u2019s lines about a distant frontier, in contrast, instantly resonated, though I struggled to understand why. There was shocking clarity in the violence: The attackers butcher the Americans, \u201cpassing their blades about the skulls of the living and the dead alike and snatching aloft the bloody wigs and hacking and chopping at the naked bodies, ripping off limbs, heads.\u201d The description of their garish attire, with its funhouse mockery of the would-be conquerors, left me with a lingering sense of vulnerability.<\/p>\n

These lines resurfaced in my mind after the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, an event whose meaning I\u2019ve found myself continuing to interrogate as we approach its two-year anniversary. At the start of 2021, I was married, with one small child and another on the way, and living in a brick-house suburb of Washington, D.C. I\u2019d covered conflicts in Syria, Iraq, and Ukraine, then returned, in 2017, to report on the sort of militant-minded Americans who ended up storming Congress. I had traveled to pre-election meetings with Stewart Rhodes, the Oath Keepers leader later convicted of seditious conspiracy for his role that day, and I\u2019d been at a previous \u201cStop the Steal\u201d rally, in November 2020, watching pot-bellied Proud Boys march around like Catholic school kids in matching polo shirts. On the morning of January 6, however, I stayed home. I was sick of it all: the crowds, the Covid risk, the threats of violence. I\u2019d seen my share of real war at the margins of the U.S. sphere of influence and couldn\u2019t stand another day of listening to comfortable Americans talk about inflicting such violence at home. It wasn\u2019t just them, though. It was also me. In the interludes between my trips around the country, contemplating America\u2019s breakdown from the desk in my sunroom, I\u2019d found I no longer understood what my role was supposed to be.<\/p>\n

\n\"Protesters\n

A\u00a0woman draped in an American flag near a broken window\u00a0in the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.<\/p>\n

\nPhoto: Ashley Gilbertson\/VII\/Redux<\/p><\/div>\n

Then the riot commenced. The Capitol was breached. I thought, if this is something that will overturn the republic \u2014 if it\u2019s a real revolution \u2014 then my path is clear again, and there will be time to get to the Capitol tonight, tomorrow, and probably for days.<\/p>\n

I was right and wrong. The riot was over in a matter of hours. Congress reconvened to certify the election result that night. But I thought the attack had struck a deeper, psychological blow whose impact was hard to see clearly. I felt it in the reactions from friends and neighbors, in the hysteria in the news, and in my own unease. The answer seemed to lurk behind the nature of the freakout. Turning back to the passage from \u201cBlood Meridian,\u201d I reconsidered what was so unnerving about it and wondered if the rioters, perhaps without realizing it, had tapped into the same anxiety the scene had animated in me years earlier. It conjures a fear about the edge of empire that has always lurked in the American mind, in which the frontier is the place where the violence and suffering the nation has inflicted as the terms of its expansion and sustainment bend back on us, and we encounter our demons. There\u2019s an air of reckoning as the legion descends on Captain White\u2019s company. The first weapons they brandish against the Americans are \u201cshields bedight with bits of broken mirrorglass.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThey came dressed for chaos,\u201d read<\/a> the New York Times the day after the Capitol was attacked, \u201cin red, white and blue face paint and star-spangled superhero outfits, in flag capes (American, yes, but also Confederate and Trumpian) and flag jackets and Donald Trump bobble hats. One man came as a patriotic duck; another as a bald eagle; another as a cross between a knight-errant and Captain America; another as Abraham Lincoln. They came in all sorts of camouflage, in animal pelts and flak jackets, in tactical gear.\u201d Other writers noted the \u201cseditionist frontiersmen\u201d and\u00a0\u201crevolutionary cosplayers\u201d and \u201cConfederate revivalists.\u201d The ghosts were rising up from across the American centuries. Solemn-eyed Christians with their wooden cross. The gallows with its noose. Militants dressed like our modern Forever War soldiers. Some of them, indeed, had been those soldiers, and here they were in their battle attire. A writer for The Atlantic described<\/a> spending time among a group of protesters that included two men in camouflage and Kevlar vests, along with a woman in a full-body cat suit. He was confronted by a sense of mystery. The event, he wrote, was \u201cnot something that can be explained adequately through the prism of politics.\u201d No \u2014 the meaning lay in the subliminal. What these people were describing were their nightmares about the edge of empire, come to life, and massing in the heart of Washington, D.C.<\/p>\n

The legion advanced holding up a mirror, and I looked at my reflection. It clarified the unease that had been troubling me at my desk. If that side had the aspect of barbarians ready to sack the Capitol, then my side might be manning the imperial gates.<\/p>\n

<\/div>
\n
\n\"Protesters\n

A rioter filming with an iPhone is seen in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda on Jan. 6, 2021.<\/p>\n

\nPhoto: Ashley Gilbertson\/VII\/Redux<\/p><\/div>
\nFive days after January 6, a writer who uses the pen name John Mosby, after a famous Confederate guerrilla, posted an essay<\/a> about the attack online. It began with a question he said a friend had asked him that day: \u201cEver see a government starting to totally lose control and just flail ineffectually?\u201d<\/p>\n

Mosby describes himself as a Special Forces veteran who deployed to Afghanistan after 9\/11, though he is guarded about specifics. His friend\u2019s question was rhetorical: Part of the job of a Green Beret is to operate in the chaos of broken countries. One thing that serving in or otherwise witnessing recent U.S. wars can also show you, though, is America\u2019s own weakness, laid bare in the yawning gap between what it promised in those wars and what it was able to achieve. For more than a decade on \u201cMountain Guerrilla,\u201d Mosby\u2019s blog and now Patreon page, and in survivalist and tactical guides that people in militant and prepper circles discuss with reverence, he has laid out an apocalyptic understanding of the world centered on the idea of America\u2019s decline and eventual collapse.<\/p>\n

Two aspects of Mosby\u2019s post are striking in relation to January 6. The first is his starting point: America is an empire. Prominent U.S. thinkers once\u00a0wrestled with\u00a0this idea, with Mark Twain and others making the Anti-Imperialist League a political force during Theodore Roosevelt\u2019s presidency. These days, the concept often seems relegated to the Noam Chomsky<\/a>-citing hard left or pockets of the far right, but a shift in perspective can sharpen the picture. \u201cTo an outsider, the fact that America is an empire is the most obvious fact of all,\u201d the British journalist Henry Fairlie, who spent 25 years in the U.S., wrote during the Vietnam era. America emerged from a revolt against an imperialist power, giving its citizens an aversion to \u201cthe mere suggestion that they may themselves be an empire,\u201d Fairlie noted. \u201cCall it, then, by another name \u2026 but the fact will remain.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

The modern blend of America\u2019s economic might, military alliances, and borderless campaigns of surveillance, drone attacks, and commando raids makes its version of empire look different from those that preceded it \u2014 and from the blunter attempts at power grabs\u00a0in Cuba and the Philippines that mobilized Twain and his allies. Mosby, however, also subscribes to the idea that the country itself is a patchwork of far-flung places tied together by conquest. The distance from London to Rome, he notes<\/a>, is less than from Denver or Austin to the White House. So the U.S. decline Mosby sees is imperial decline, both at home and abroad.\u00a0He\u00a0derides the idea that America\u2019s technological advances and the comforts of its globalized economy will help it escape the fate of every empire that came before it. In fact, he believes that the excesses of contemporary U.S. capitalism will only speed that fate along. He titled his post about January 6 \u201cThe Hubris of Technophilia.\u201d<\/p>\n

Secondly, in\u00a0Mosby\u2019s view, Donald Trump existed outside the true power structure of this crumbling empire even when he controlled the presidency. The real authority lay somewhere else. This was the authority that revealed its weakness on January 6. It wasn\u2019t the breach of the poorly guarded U.S. Capitol that told him this. (\u201cI could give two shits about that, and in fact, was surprised that we didn\u2019t see smoke billowing out the windows.\u201d) He saw it in the agitation of the politicians and talking heads and the panicked talk about insurrection in the news. It was in the frenzy of a kicked beehive.<\/p>\n

What you\u2019re watching, right now, is the mechanisms of imperial power \u2014 the government, the legacy media, and the oligarchs, of social media and big business \u2014 lashing out ineffectually, in the throes of panic, because the collapse of the imperial hegemony just became readily apparent to even the willfully blind \u2026 They\u2019re NOT in control, and at their core, they know it. They\u2019re not in control in Afghanistan. They\u2019re not in control in Iraq. They\u2019re not in control in Syria. \u2026 Hell, they\u2019re not even really in control in Washington, DC.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If you ask me, Trump embodies the worst of U.S. empire and is exactly the fallout that critics of its runaway capitalism, militarism, and nationalism have predicted. He campaigned on stealing oil and indiscriminately bombing ISIS territory, and on demonizing Muslims, who for 20 years have been the state-sponsored enemy, as well as by\u00a0fearmongering over migrants at the southern border. It wasn\u2019t just talk: Trump ramped up drone attacks and embraced secret wars and loosened airstrike rules designed to limit civilian casualties<\/a>. Large corporations and defense contractors raked in profits during his presidency. I recognize in the January 6 movement the same alliance between a supposedly anti-establishment grassroots and the super-rich that I remember from the tea party. My goal, however, is to look in the mirror, and Mosby’s writing shows how the Democratic side of the political divide can also be portrayed as aligned with the centers of entrenched power. After January 6, many liberals looked to Big Tech for more censorship and to financial institutions for help blocking funding streams. They embraced the government agencies that had managed the war on terror<\/a> and pushed them for domestic remedies<\/a>, such as the Department of Homeland Security\u2019s short-lived disinformation board<\/a> and a new law to give the FBI more tools and funding to counter\u00a0domestic extremism. Maybe some of this was justified, given the stakes, but one goal in psychological operations is to get your opponent to act like the enemy you want to fight.<\/p>\n

Mosby\u2019s prescriptions seem somewhat apolitical: He sees America\u2019s collapse as unavoidable and advocates a retreat into austere survivalism. There are plenty of people on the right, however, who are keen to harness the January 6 crowd\u2019s momentum to enact radical change. This includes an expanding constellation of anti-democratic thought that can draw on similar notions of empire and the modern right\u2019s place outside its hierarchies. Thinkers in this space have posited that liberal authority is so ingrained that America is already in or approaching a form of autocracy; this was the concept behind the former private equity executive Michael Anton\u2019s 2016 case for Trump in his widely circulated\u00a0essay \u201cThe Flight 93 Election<\/a>,\u201d\u00a0which gave conservatives an ultimatum: \u201cCharge the cockpit or you die.\u201d\u00a0Anton became a National Security Council official in the Trump administration and is now at the Claremont Institute, an influential right-wing think tank. Curtis Yarvin, a writer often cited as a favorite of Steve Bannon and Peter Thiel, has also deployed the declining empire frame. He has called for an \u201cAmerican Caesar\u201d to rescue the country from its liberal masters. \u201cCertainly, our choice in the early 21st century \u2014 if we have<\/em> a choice \u2014 is one of two fates: the fall of the Roman Republic, or the fall of the Roman Empire,\u201d he wrote<\/a>. \u201cDon\u2019t let anyone hate on you for preferring the former \u2014 or being willing to learn from it.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

\n\"Jake\n

Jake Angeli, a self-described QAnon shaman, confronts police officers in the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.<\/p>\n

\nPhoto: Ashley Gilbertson\/VII\/Redux<\/p><\/div>
\nLet\u2019s consider a different moment when protesters massed in the heart of Washington, D.C, the crowd stretching out by the tens of thousands. There are militants in helmets among them, along with the frumps and strivers of the middle classes in jeans. And then there are the freaks. They have come decked out in various costumes, including furs and animal skins. These are the legions of the anti-war left, assembled for their October 1967 march on the Pentagon.<\/p>\n

In \u201cThe Armies of the Night,\u201d his book about the march, Norman Mailer described the spectacle. \u201cThey came walking up in all sizes,\u201d he wrote, \u201cperambulating down the hill, many dressed like the legions of Sgt. Pepper\u2019s Band, some were gotten up like Arab sheikhs, or in Park Avenue doormen\u2019s greatcoats, others like Rogers and Clark of the West, Wyatt Earp, Kit Carson, Daniel Boone in buckskin.\u201d He counted hundreds of hippies in Union blue and Confederate gray marching beside samurais, shepherds, Roman senators, \u201cMartians and Moon-men and a knight unhorsed who stalked about in the weight of real armor.\u201d<\/p>\n

With this absurdist show of force, Mailer hoped the left had found the momentum to challenge not only the war in Vietnam but also what he called \u201cthe authority\u201d behind the version of America that he called \u201ctechnology land,\u201d where the horrors of napalm, Agent Orange<\/a>, and nuclear bombs were tied in some intrinsic way to all the stifling domestic corruptions.<\/p>\n

Their radicalism was in their hate for the authority. \u2026 this new generation of the Left hated the authority, because the authority lied. It lied through the teeth of corporation executives and Cabinet officials and police enforcement officers and newspaper editors and advertising agencies, and in its mass magazines, where the subtlest apologies for the disasters of the authority \u2026 were grafted in the best possible style into the ever-open mind of the walking American lobotomy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The movement\u2019s power, the book\u00a0suggests, was born of a refusal to accept, at home, what America manifested overseas, and a determination not\u00a0to lose sight of the immediacy of burned forests and dead civilians. It challenged the authority by refusing to play on its terms. This was the energy behind the idea of such a horde preparing to march, with no coherent plan, against the annihilating structure of the Pentagon, a building that encompasses 6.5 million square feet of office space\u00a0and 7,500 windows. \u201c[T]he aesthetic at last was in the politics,\u201d Mailer wrote, rejoicing that \u201cpolitics had again become mysterious.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the end, the marchers streamed across the Arlington Bridge and descended on the Pentagon, where some managed to break in and run amok for a while. Hundreds were arrested. The world seemed to spin on. Mailer felt, however, that a psychological blow had been dealt \u2014 because the event, he wrote, was one \u201cthat the authority could not comprehend.\u201d<\/p>\n

One essential tactic of the 1960s left, in fact, was to screw with the squares just by being their opposite: the freaks.<\/blockquote>\n

The protesters, it seems to me, were trying to reach into the subliminal reserve of guilt and fear that Americans keep buried, and in doing so, they took on the role of McCarthy\u2019s legion of horribles. One essential tactic of the 1960s left, in fact, was to screw with the squares just by being their opposite: the freaks. The system was run and staffed by squares, policed by squares, and supported by squares, the unquestioning drones of empire. There was power in the ability to interrupt the programming, to jolt them with a sense of dislocation. It\u2019s an ethos captured in miniature in Hunter S. Thompson\u2019s \u201cFear and Loathing in Las Vegas,\u201d when he recounts standing in the men\u2019s room of a popular nightspot\u00a0and spilling LSD powder onto his flannel sleeve. A stranger walks in and begins to suck the powder from Thompson\u2019s arm: \u201cA very gross tableau,\u201d he writes, that makes him wonder if a \u201cyoung stockbroker type\u201d might walk in and see them. \u201cFuck him, I thought. With a bit of luck, it\u2019ll ruin his life \u2014 forever thinking that just behind some narrow door in all his favorite bars, men in red Pendleton shirts are getting incredible kicks from things he\u2019ll never know.\u201d<\/p>\n

During the protest at the Pentagon, the hippies held an exorcism, trying to levitate\u00a0the building and drive out the demons within it. The new generation of the\u00a0left, Mailer wrote, “believed in LSD, in\u00a0witches, in tribal knowledge, in\u00a0orgy, and revolution.\u201d Now it\u2019s the new right reaching for magic \u2014 black magic, maybe, but magic nonetheless. They believe in international conspiracies<\/a> of pedophiles<\/a>, in Satan worshippers, and Anderson Cooper drinking the blood of babies. These are terrible, dangerous fantasies, yes, but they also contrast with a left whose anti-establishment impulses often\u00a0seem to\u00a0go corporate, like rock and roll and weed, and executives with hired\u00a0shamans preaching psychedelic healing. One side believes in apocalypse and ivermectin<\/a> horse paste, and God, and bleach<\/a>. The other believes in grown-up generals and congressional committees, rules and norms, and the FBI.<\/p>\n

<\/div>
\n
\n\"A\n

A man wearing a helmet and tactical vest listens to a speech by President Donald Trump during the “Stop the Steal” rally on the Mall in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021.<\/p>\n

\nPhoto: Ashley Gilbertson\/VII\/Redux<\/p><\/div>
\nI recently was reading\u00a0one of the books to which\u00a0liberals flocked in the Trump era \u2014 actually, even more on-brand, I was listening to the audio version while buying groceries in the middle of a weekday. It was \u201cHow Fascism Works,\u201d by Jason Stanley, a professor of philosophy at Yale. Stanley\u00a0details contemporary problems that can be understood as aspects of fascist politics: male chauvinism, unreality, the demonization of minorities, the glorification of an imagined race or ethno-centric history, attempts to divide people into \u201cus\u201d and \u201cthem.\u201d\u00a0He also expands the discussion to other traits\u00a0of U.S. conservatism: being against abortion, for example, or paternalistically regressive.\u00a0He writes that a 2016 tweet by Mitt Romney \u2014 in which Romney called Trump\u2019s sexist comments on the \u201cAccess Hollywood\u201d tapes \u201cvile degradations [that] demean our wives and daughters\u201d \u2014 evokes the Hutu power ideology behind the Rwanda genocide, suggesting that Romney\u2019s description of women \u201cexclusively in traditionally subordinate roles\u201d supports the paradigm of \u201cthe patriarchal family in fascist politics.\u201d Academics who advocate for so-called “great books”\u00a0programs centered on the works of white Europeans,\u00a0he warns elsewhere, citing a \u201cMein Kampf\u201d passage on the supposed dominance of Aryan cultural heritage, are at risk of finding themselves in the company of\u00a0Hitler.<\/p>\n

I breezed along with my shopping, until I thought I felt Stanley reach for me. Other key features\u00a0of fascism, he writes, using Rush Limbaugh<\/a> as a foil, are\u00a0the undermining of\u00a0\u201cexpertise\u201d and attempts to create a climate in which \u201cexperts have been delegitimized.\u201d Wait a minute, I thought, pulling out my earbuds. Which experts does he mean? (And is Stanley one of them?) Aside from calls to defend science and academia from right-wing onslaughts, he leaves the category mostly undefined. Limbaugh\u2019s attacks on all sources of information that ran\u00a0counter to his own hyperpartisan propaganda were transparent enough, and easy to disdain; this has also become part of the Trumpian playbook. At the same time, however, many among the sprawling class of elites and experts in America\u00a0have used Trump’s\u00a0specter to shield themselves from challenges to their authority that may well be justified. Whoever has been guiding the country through the three-plus decades of my lifetime, at least, hasn\u2019t been doing a good job of it, and we clearly have more than just conservatives to blame. This is apparent in any statistical indicator that tracks the worsening of, say, climate change or economic inequality over time, the persistent discrimination faced by Black Americans, or their continued killing by our militarized police<\/a>. However inadvertently, broad defenses of\u00a0elites and experts support the status quo, while nurturing an increasingly dangerous American reverence for authority. Now more than ever, it seems, we should be leaning into the opposing tradition of vibrant skepticism as we seek to discern and constantly reevaluate which purported expertise is worthwhile and which we\u2019d be better off dismissing.<\/p>\n

The book dissects how problems from racism and inequality to inhumane treatment of immigrants have seeded the potential destruction of American democracy. It makes only passing mention, however, of an example of elite failure that\u2019s essential to the discussion: the disaster of U.S. foreign policy.\u00a0Nothing has bred hyper-nationalism like the post-9\/11 wars, or inflamed a reactionary sense of cultural superiority, or fed the worship of violence and power, or\u00a0eroded the rule of law, or\u00a0indoctrinated people in a constant, searching fear of new threats and enemies<\/a>, or encouraged them to turn, for relief, to industry, technology, and the security state. The wars and their knock-on effects, including surveillance and civilian casualties that continue to this day, have been supported by both political parties and sustained by a top-down culture of unreality based on encouraging people to look away. An edifice of official secrecy, staffed by experts and elites, has been built upon layers of classification, obfuscation, and denial that hide information we\u2019d rather not see anyway, helping us avoid a full view of our own reflections.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

Hannah Arendt, born in pre-war Germany, is widely considered one of\u00a0the foremost scholars of that\u00a0country’s descent into Hitlerism. She devoted a third of \u201cThe Origins of Totalitarianism,\u201d which analyzed the conditions that gave rise to the Nazi and Soviet regimes, to imperialism. Tyranny deployed abroad, she noted, \u201ccould only destroy the political body of the nation-state,\u201d and while imperialism alone didn\u2019t spawn Hitler’s rise, it was essential to creating the right conditions. Arendt immigrated to the U.S. in 1941 and tracked the overseas adventurism that has defined the era of American dominance. In her 1971 essay on the release of the Pentagon Papers, \u201cLying in Politics<\/a>,\u201d she observed that the Vietnam War was the province not only of flag-waving nationalists but also of seemingly well-intentioned experts and bureaucrats, the so-called problem solvers who\u2019d helped to support the war and lent it a sheen of respectability. \u201cSelf-deception is the danger par excellence<\/em>,\u201d she wrote. The experts ended up living in the same unreality they foisted on the public. For all their acumen, they became gears in\u00a0a machine that was grinding forward unthinkingly: \u201cOne sometimes has the impression that a computer rather than \u2018decision-makers\u2019 had been let loose in Southeast Asia.\u201d<\/p>\n

These decision-makers\u00a0were taking direction from\u00a0Robert McNamara, the former president of Ford Motor Company who served as defense secretary under\u00a0John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Some\u00a0detractors saw the \u201cproblem solvers\u201d and their technocratic counterparts across government\u00a0as\u00a0dangerous progressives. Some of the technocrats’\u00a0critics on the left, however, believed that, rather than truly changing the power structure, they were trying to alter it just enough to be comfortable in it \u2014 and that this applied more broadly to the Kennedy-Johnson coalition. In \u201cThe Armies of the Night,\u201d Mailer wrote of his unease at a pre-march party at the home of an academic who was both against the war and, as Mailer saw it, one of the empire\u2019s unwitting supporters.<\/p>\n

If the republic was now managing to convert the citizenry to a plastic mass, ready to be attached to any manipulative gung ho, the author was ready to cast much of the blame \u2026 [on] the liberal academic intelligentsia. They were of course politically opposed to the present programs and movements of the republic in Asian foreign policy, but this political difference seemed no more than a quarrel among engineers. Liberal academics had no root of a real war with technology land itself, no, in all likelihood, they were the natural managers of that future air-conditioned vault where the last of human life would still exist.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The enemies on the right were more obvious; here Mailer was concerned with the trickier battle within liberalism. He saw that you can\u2019t start a revolution, which is what pulling down the edifices of empire would be, if the people on your side are so ingrained in the power structure that they can\u2019t even see it.<\/p>\n

<\/div>
\n
\n\"Protesters\n

Protesters swarm the U.S. Capitol Rotunda on Jan. 6, 2021.<\/p>\n

\nPhoto: Ashley Gilbertson\/VII\/Redux<\/p><\/div>
\nIn June, I traveled to a town called Eureka, just shy of the Canadian border in the pines of northwest Montana, and stopped at a cluster of storage units off the main road. At the entrance to one of them, Dakota Adams, 25, the eldest child of Stewart Rhodes, the Oath Keepers leader<\/a>, took out a ring of keys and opened the padlock to the roll-up door. Inside, amid belongings piled halfway to the ceiling, were remnants of the many years his father had spent preparing for the revolution: rifle cases, old ammunition boxes, helmets, recruiting flyers, smoke grenades. Adams waded through the pile, dug around for a bit, and lifted up a camouflage vest heavy with bulletproof plates. \u201cAh,\u201d he said. \u201cMy childhood body armor.\u201d<\/p>\n

Adams had been brought up in the militant movement, immersed in meetings and trainings hidden away in the surrounding pines. Then, recently, he\u2019d broken from it and from his father as well, following a long process that he called \u201cdeprogramming,\u201d during which he also changed his surname. All around were obscure and dusty books that had\u00a0belonged to his father: \u201cThe Coming Battle,\u201d by M. W. Walbert;\u00a0\u201cFirearms for Survival,\u201d by Duncan Long; \u201cRawles on Retreats and Relocation,\u201d by James Wesley Rawles; \u201cTracking Humans,\u201d by David Diaz; \u201cBoston\u2019s Gun Bible,\u201d by the pseudonymous Boston T. Party. Though Adams couldn\u2019t find it, he was sure that \u201cThe Reluctant Partisan,\u201d one\u00a0of John Mosby\u2019s books, was\u00a0also buried somewhere in the clutter. The militant movement believes that it takes only a small vanguard to start the revolution, Adams told me, but its preparations for political violence have also been married to efforts to bring as many people as possible to its side. I found another type of book among the piles: \u201cGive Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto\u201d and \u201cHow to Win a Local Election: A Complete Step-By-Step Guide.\u201d The Oath Keepers, in the end, were just one of many pieces that came together on January 6, but Rhodes had been tapping for years into the momentum that fueled it. He\u2019d recognized that \u201ca meandering energy\u201d is on the loose in America, Adams said. \u201cPeople want structure and they want to feel a part of things.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe alternative is ending up with a system that\u2019s even worse than what you have.\u201d<\/blockquote>\n

Maybe there\u2019s no choice, at the moment, but to defend the system we have in hopes of staving off a much\u00a0darker fate. That\u2019s what Michael Podhorzer, the former political director of the AFL-CIO, America\u2019s largest federation of labor unions, told me. He\u00a0has been\u00a0credited<\/a> with helping to organize the liberal defense against Trump\u2019s efforts to overturn the 2020 vote, sounding the alarm for months ahead of time and then, when the coup attempt was on, playing a\u00a0coordinating role in the response. That response involved mobilizing the grassroots left and institutional liberals alike \u2014 and yes, the retired security officials, tech and business executives, bureaucrats, experts, and elites who\u00a0are part of the wealthy, educated demographic that\u00a0increasingly votes Democratic. The larger effort to stop Trump from overturning the vote\u00a0brought establishment Republicans and big corporations into the fold as well, Podhorzer\u00a0noted;\u00a0the AFL-CIO even\u00a0released a joint letter with the Chamber of Commerce to support the election result.\u00a0History has shown, he told me, that right-wing authoritarianism can only be defeated when all of civil society \u2014 including corporations and the center-right \u2014 is aligned against it: \u201cThe alternative is ending up with a system that\u2019s even worse than what you have.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is probably true. It might even be heroic, in its own way. It also means manning the imperial gates. Our demons from the frontier are here, running rampant, and there\u2019s no one left to turn to but the people who loosed them in the first place \u2014 to get in line with the squares. Nothing shows that a system has been victorious like the inability of even its opponents to imagine an alternative. I suffer from this fate. Even my critiques of U.S. empire, I often think, exist so comfortably within its confines as to make me just another part of it.\u00a0It reminds me of a term I heard in countries I covered overseas: controlled opposition.<\/p>\n

This was the dilemma that had been plaguing me over those long months of suburban comfort as January 6 approached. And it\u2019s why, watching the chaos unfold at the Capitol, I felt, amid the dread, a hint of clarity, as if perhaps a fog were about to lift. If the coup happened, I\u2019d be able to charge at last against the authority like the revolutionary I\u2019d imagined I might be back when I was bouncing through hostels with a backpack full of books. The thought provided some comfort, but returning to the passage from McCarthy, I arrived at another set of questions. What if the battle between good and evil had already been settled in America? And if the latter had won, what would be the use in guarding the gates?<\/p>\n

The protagonist in \u201cBlood Meridian\u201d is a nameless, wandering youth called \u201cthe kid,\u201d who is traveling with Captain White\u2019s company when it\u2019s wiped out by the Comanches and survives by lying among the dead. Moving onward through the frontier\u2019s netherworld, he falls in with a man who makes Captain White\u2019s brand of violence seem quaint. The Judge is a towering figure, nearly seven feet tall, and apparently civilized; \u201cthis man of learning,\u201d as he\u2019s described, is well traveled and erudite, with an expansive knowledge of languages, history, science, and law. He also unleashes a machine-like violence capable of wiping out entire settlements of men, women, and children as they sleep. \u201cIt makes no difference what men think of war,\u201d the Judge says. “War endures.”<\/p>\n

Eventually, belatedly, the kid revolts against him. \u201cYou\u2019re the one that’s\u00a0crazy,\u201d he says weakly. The book ends in a violent hug, with the kid trapped in the Judge\u2019s arms, smothered \u201cagainst his immense and terrible flesh.\u201d When I first read this in Naples, it left me confused. Now, though, I can feel the familiar embrace of patrimony.<\/p>\n

The post How Jan. 6 Brought Frontier Violence to the Heart of U.S. Power<\/a> appeared first on The Intercept<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

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

The rioters had the aspect of barbarians ready to sack the Capitol. So who was manning the gates?<\/p>\n

The post How Jan. 6 Brought Frontier Violence to the Heart of U.S. Power<\/a> appeared first on The Intercept<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4390,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[383,14,2851],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/943170"}],"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\/4390"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=943170"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/943170\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":943171,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/943170\/revisions\/943171"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=943170"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=943170"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=943170"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}