Julio Cortez/AP Photo
Police stand guard after a day of rioting at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, January 6, 2021.
Invoking the Nazi era in a political debate is typically dismissed as a bad-faith tactic for those without a compelling argument. But many of us, including many who grew up Jewish, could not ignore the rhyming of history after rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6. When photos emerged of vandals in shirts that read “Camp Auschwitz” or “6MWE” (which stands for “6 Million Weren’t Enough”), that feeling deepened.
It’s easy to point to the haplessness of the Capitol Riot and laugh at how short it fell of a real fascist coup. But the Beer Hall Putsch, an early Nazi uprising, never even got past a police cordon blocking one of Munich’s main squares. The threat was neutralized, and Hitler and his conspirators were apprehended. It wasn’t until a decade later, when the Nazis were elevated to power, that it became clear that the putsch was a beginning rather than an ending. Revolutions, coups, and insurrections often fail before they succeed.
The well-documented events of January 6th have enabled us to learn a lot about the rioters quickly. There were the led and the misled, their anger stoked by social media and encouraged by a mountain of lies, from election fraud to a secret society of elite pedophiles. There were those I’ve seen described as chaos tourists, marching with their cellphones in front of them, “doing it for the ’gram,” for the refracted glory of being watched. There were off-duty policemen and Air Force veterans, personifying the links between cops and military figures and the far right. There were state lawmakers and corporate CEOs and dilettantes flying in on private jets. And there were very clearly organized and determined nationalists and racists, extremist leaders and militia members, sporting zip ties and weapons, explicitly seeking to do much more than scare the political class.
Puffed up with decades of hate, these disparate figures lashed out with violence against the state, justifying it as the only way to save America. It was bloody and could have been much bloodier. But more chilling was how exultant the display was. People were acting out fantasies harbored in the deepest reaches of their imaginations, typed out on Parler or spoken on a podcast and then made real. They reveled in it, and just by taking action, opened up possibilities for more cruelties in the future. A taste of power doesn’t lead to abstinence.
The immediate aftermath saw an end-of-the-movie roundup of the conspirators, a simple task given the ubiquity of images of the riot. Within three days, 25 domestic-terrorism cases were opened. The zip tie guy, the guy with the horned fur hat, the guy who ran off with Nancy Pelosi’s lectern, and other assorted figures were arrested. This response reveals two important things. First, we have all the tools we need right now to bring lawbreakers who mean to tear down democracy to justice without further corroding civil liberties. And second, the brutally efficient machinery of the state has yet to be turned on those who truly led the uprising, rather than those who followed it. Only accountability up the ladder, not down, will stop short the escalating unrest, and the fracturing of the union.
YOU CAN’T SOLELY DESCRIBE this attack through the actions of the on-site participants. Dark-money groups connected to Trump campaign funders financed the rally that preceded the march on the Capitol. Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones claimed to have chipped in half a million dollars. Numerous spokes of the conservative machine, from Turning Point USA to Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife Ginni, supplied buses that brought Trump fanatics to Washington.
Republican members of Congress, by objecting to the certification of electoral votes, raised hopes that Joe Biden’s victory could be blocked. Reps. Mo Brooks (R-AL) and Paul Gosar (R-AZ) reportedly plotted with right-wingers who went on to lead the riot, and at the least psyched up crowds to “fight for America.” One hundred and forty-seven Republican House members and senators, led by self-immolating Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), continued to object to the legality of Biden’s election even after the rioters were cleared, still pushing the same falsehoods that had triggered the sacking of the Capitol.
Finally and most prominently, you have the inciter-in-chief himself, who whipped his followers into a frenzy about a stolen election for months, summoned them to Washington, and set them loose on the Congress. People are searching for links establishing coordination between the White House and the rioters. But what happened during four years in public view tells enough of the story. Well before the election chaos, Trump projected a false picture of American catastrophe without him at the helm. He gave recognition to those with racist, anti-Semitic, misogynistic, and xenophobic views; he created the space for them to emerge from the shadows. He told them his loss would signal the nation’s end.
Only accountability up the ladder, not down, will stop short the escalating unrest, and the fracturing of the union.
Why wouldn’t believers in this apocalyptic vision take up arms to fight what Trump and the right described to them so vividly as the end-times? Why wouldn’t they betray the country in the name of protecting it? Trump activated a long-simmering undercurrent of discontent and disunity, sending into battle those who would take America by force rather than submit to its multiculturalism and tolerance. He broadened and deepened a movement for hate.
And once activated, that movement cannot be easily deactivated.
But even keeping the spotlight on Trump’s responsibility for stirring up a mob doesn’t tell the whole story. Hatred and demonization of the other has been the trade Republicans have trafficked in for more than 50 years. In the 1990s, they took a centrist Democratic president and impeached him over infidelity. In 2000, they threatened insurrection to stop a vote count and had the Supreme Court turn over power to an unelected candidate. They deemed the next Democratic president unfit to serve because he was a foreigner, according to a conspiracy theory to which large sections of the party gave credence. (As recently as 2019, 56 percent of Republicans believed that the statement “Obama was born in Kenya” was either definitely or probably true.) And just this January, the majority of Republicans in Congress signaled Biden’s illegitimacy with their votes to baselessly reject an electoral count. The overwhelming evidence is that the Republican Party, not just its most extremist faction, believes that it’s illegal for a Democrat to win the presidency.
That thinking leads directly and inescapably to ham-handed coup attempts. It’s bred by a right-wing media machine that treats the opposition as an enemy. It’s funded by a network of billionaires and corporate titans who tolerated the eliminationism so long as it led to low taxes and deregulation. It’s sustained by a sprawling network of “think tanks” and operatives and campaign strategists, who skillfully use racism and xenophobia to maintain a grip on power.
WHEN I SEE ARREST AFTER ARREST of Capitol rioters, I’m reminded of Lynndie England, the Army reservist convicted of torturing Iraqi soldiers at Abu Ghraib. She did not devise the policy she carried out, and her punishment had no effect on the policy’s architects, all of whom went free. She was a lowly mob member, sacrificed so that nobody with power would see sanctions. Despite the arrests of the Capitol insurrectionists, there’s been no parallel effort against those who spent decades teaching the rank and file to hate, and provoked the inevitable by-product of that hatred.
This is why it’s necessary to impeach and convict Trump, even if he’s already out of office. It’s why it’s necessary to tar the Republican Party as the instigators and enablers of the mob. It’s why corporations that lavishly funded Republicans for years should not get away with a short-term pause in contributions during a time when there are practically no federal elections. The warning from conservatives that holding them accountable will just sow division and incite more rebellion is the logic of a hostage situation, where the assailants warn that their wishes must be granted to avoid bloodshed. There can be no unity without accountability.
You cannot impeach a party or arrest a corporation. (I wouldn’t mind seeing someone try.) There is such a thing as social accountability. Taking away a golf tournament from Trump’s resort, or disbarring one of his lawyers, makes a statement that their lives cannot and will not return to normal. Ask Republicans in North Carolina who felt such blowback from a transgender bathroom ban that they had to reverse the policy if social accountability works. In a country that for decades has failed the test of equal justice, it may be all we have left.
There’s no doubt that, in the absence of consequences for riotous and seditious actions, those actions will only metastasize.
This accountability should not be pursued out of a sense of vindictiveness, but because it’s the only way to protect the nation. After the Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler did see a jail cell but only served nine months, most of which he spent writing his manifesto Mein Kampf. The ruling parties dismissed the Nazi threat, and thought they could contain it. Failing to enact swift consequences ensured that the wounds festered. Here in America, the government suppressed the post–Civil War revolutionary threat by methodically dismantling the KKK. After 1876, however, the government allowed white supremacists to reassemble, violently strip voting rights from Blacks, and institute Jim Crow. Accountability was the right choice until it veered off course.
In its fight against the Klan, the Reconstruction-era Congress gave the federal government new powers to enable the rooting out of domestic terrorists. We now have every possible tool necessary to fight sedition and conspiracy and attacks like the Capitol Riot. President Biden has talked about prioritizing a domestic-terrorism law, which has been in the works for a while. Such a statute would be completely unnecessary, however, as the immediate rolling up of the main rioters directly responsible for the violence makes strikingly clear.
Just as after 9/11, there’s a danger that in our need to diminish the threat of subversive violence, we could tilt too far toward repressive measures. Every time we add some new authority to the tool kit, it gets abused and often applied to groups far from its intended target. Suddenly, spies are scouring through library records or emails or the cameras attached to laptops, targeting marginalized groups and government critics based on suspicion and bias rather than facts. We should question the effectiveness of all this lost liberty. The bloated security industry, blessed with the most expansive surveillance apparatus in human history, couldn’t subvert the aims of a couple thousand Trump supporters who broadcast their plans all over social media.
Seeing liberals thrill to rioters being placed on no-fly lists (something requested by the chair of the House Homeland Security Committee) concerns me. Laughing at the stripping of rights without due process may lead us toward an even more menacing security state. In the hands of a president who might sympathize with right-wing groups—like the last one—you can be assured that even the most well-intentioned law will be perverted. There’s no doubt that such a president would have invoked new domestic-terrorism statutes to crack down on last summer’s racial-justice protests, had they been in place. We should be rolling back the most invasive anti-terror abuses; we don’t need them to protect us from the threat of right-wing violence.
By the same token, glorying in the deplatforming of Trump and his cadres is misguided. I don’t think you can stop fascists from finding and communicating with one another using whatever technology they find available, be it burner phones or sealed letters or meetings behind locked doors. I do think Facebook and Google have a business model that incentivizes capturing attention in a way that can marinate people in hate speech. Just as overwhelming surveillance isn’t necessary in law enforcement, it’s not necessary to make Silicon Valley billionaires richer. We should ban targeted advertising, which would stop the profitability that comes with social media addiction.
There’s no doubt that, in the absence of consequences for riotous and seditious actions, those actions will only metastasize. Planning is under way right now for future events. Mobs have a way of gathering their own fuel. We’ve allowed our politics to spiral, and we must collectively press our hands against the pinwheel, to keep it from spiraling further.
