The images of Confederate flag-waving mobs storming the U.S. Capitol and shutting down the certification of the election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as the next president and vice president shocked many in the U.S. and around the world.
Even more shocking was the fact that the chief inciter of the crowds was none other than the out-going president of the United States, Donald Trump.
For weeks since he lost the November election by around 8 million votes, Trump has been campaigning to overturn the results. Leading Republican politicians, including the majority of Republicans in the House of Representatives and one of six U.S. Senators, aided and abetted him.
However shocking, these events shouldn’t surprise us. In the last few years, our sense of what is politically “normal” has been stretched. Mobilizations of organized gangs of white supremacists, from Charlottesville, Va. to Portland, Ore., have become part of the political backdrop of U.S. politics. Armed vigilantes murdering anti-racists and social justice protesters have also become part of this “new normal”.
And now, the far right that spearheaded the Capitol takeover can point to January 6, 2021 as a marker in their attempt to build a movement grounded in racism and opposed, quite literally, to democracy. They may even have martyrs that they will celebrate in the future.
At the time of writing of this statement, the U.S. Congress had reconvened to take up the business of certifying the presidential election. And some of the most loathsome of its denizens, such as newly defeated Georgia Sen. Kelly Loeffler, read prepared statements stepping away from their earlier attempts to challenge the legitimacy of November’s vote.
Nevertheless, we can’t forget that a substantial section of one of the two ruling-class parties in the U.S. rallied behind a corrupt president’s attempt to steal an election. And under that umbrella of protection, far right elements tried to catapult themselves to the center of U.S. politics.
Over the next few days and weeks, we will find out more about just how these events transpired. Why, for example, were the authorities seemingly caught off guard in allowing the right-wingers to take the Capitol? Those of us on the left know that if the protesters had been supporters of Black Lives Matter or labor rights, they would not have been allowed within a mile of the Capitol.
Perhaps the social media posts of law enforcement personnel taking friendly “selfies” with the Trumpists might help to explain this “kid gloves” treatment of these rightists. But as the saying goes, the “fish rots from the head,” and it goes right to the top of state and the U.S. ruling class.
Trump and his supporters’ attempts to overthrow the results of the November election—to wrench from them even the limited democratic rights ordinary people in the U.S. have won—didn’t succeed. But the fact that the escapade got as far as it did speaks to the anti-democratic features of the U.S. system.
U.S. voters still don’t directly choose the president, and twice in the last 20 years, the loser of the popular vote became the president due to the Electoral College, one of the vestiges of the U.S. founders’ support for slavery. Trump and his enablers were trying to exploit features of a system that was explicitly constructed to insulate the U.S. government from the popular will.
In only two weeks, the Biden-Harris administration, and a Congress with Democratic Party majorities in both houses, will ascend to governmental power. They will face a crisis like that not seen in a century—a deadly pandemic, a crisis of unemployment and poverty in the working class, and now, the threat of a resurgent far right.
The Democrats, as capitalism’s B team in running the U.S. state, will want to restore “normality,” bipartisanship and “law and order” when they take power. Biden’s top advisers have even hinted that once they address the pandemic, austerity politics will be back on their agenda.
If they follow this path—trying to put a Band-aid on a gaping wound—they will set themselves up for failure. And they will further pave the way for the growth of the far right, who will look to scapegoat Blacks, Latinos and immigrants for the bipartisan attacks on working-class living standards.
The next few years will present a very challenging time for the socialist left. We will have a number of tasks on our agenda.
First, we defend democratic rights and will join movements and campaigns to expand them.
Second, we need to unite in a national (even international) campaign to defeat the far right. The January 6 events may have been a failure from the point of view of preventing the election of Biden/Harris. But many on the far right will see the breach of the Capitol and its brief occupation as a “success” that they can use to build their movement. They must be stopped before their ranks grow even more.
Third, we need to organize not just to confront the far right, but to confront the conditions in which the far right can grow. That means organizing workers across race, ethnicity, gender and other divisions that capitalism imposes on us to win gains that will improve our lives. It means demanding real public health and income support measures to defeat COVID-19.
And it means building a socialist movement that won’t be satisfied with Democratic Party half-measures. We need to push for a new society to conquer the despair that leads so many today to cast their lot with con-artists like Trump or with the more sinister forces of the far right.
