The seditious attack on the Capitol this past Wednesday, 6 January 2021, was not sui generis. It was the culmination of a long, expensive, and immoral effort by numerous parties, mostly on the far right, to fleece millions for fun, fame, and profit. This poisonous effort has rendered a substantial chunk of the country's population not just unmoored from, but actively hostile to, reality.
The domestic Dear Leader, the dishonorable and mentally disordered Donald J. Trump, bears primary responsibility for the attempted insurrection. He egged on his fanatical followers not just at a rally that morning but for weeks before, promoting the gathering that day in multiple tweets. In the run-up to the election (i.e., most of 2020) he repeatedly made the false claims that the election would be "rigged" to disfavor him, that fraud would be endemic, that his electoral opponents would employ every dirty trick in the book to ensure they won.
Some 60 court cases attempting to make at least some of those claims have been dismissed. While some dismissals were for technical reasons, like being filed too late, in other cases trial court judges, appellate judges, and even Supreme Court Justices examined the supposed evidence supporting the allegations and found the evidence totally unpersuasive.
Nevertheless, Trump has kept lying that the election was stolen from him. Further, he has tied his followers so closely to himself that they feel the election was stolen from them, too. They converged on 6 January not for a joyous lark but for a righteous battle to "stop the steal", in their words. They're not just talking about a stolen election, either. They think the whole damned country has been stolen from them.
Trump couldn't have instilled that outrageous lie so deeply by himself. Indeed, he couldn't have amassed such a cult following if the ground hadn't been prepared for him. These people have been primed to see themselves as victims of shadowy "others" who control everything. Who are these "others"? The idea is fluid and depends on what seems most threatening at the moment. Liberals? Black and brown people? Jewish people? Chinese people? (See: "China flu" and similarly aggressive misnomers for CoViD-19.) Muslims? LGBTQ people? Immigrants (except wealthy ones)? Non-right wing journalists (and right-wing journalists who critique the right)? The highly educated? All of them, and more, have been implicated as "other" in the last forty years.
Reagan took advantage of tremendous doubt and fear about the country's future under Jimmy Carter, a smart and decent man whose chief flaw seems to have been recognizing the immensity of the challenges facing the country and being paralyzed by them. It didn't help that the 1970s felt like a bad hangover caused by the late 1960s. Reagan cannily saw that liberal policies and attitudes were deeply unpopular in much of the country and he vowed to undo them. In so doing he harkened back to an idealized, idyllic (and mythical) image of the 1950s and to the streak of American exceptionalism that is a foundational element of our national myth. He persuaded much of the country that our problems lay in our drift away from "traditional values" and the ballooning of government beyond its supposedly proper size and functions. He effectively created the modern distrust of government, especially the federal government, though Watergate was a big help on that front.
Reagan assisted and was assisted by both a conservative intellectual movement that had been waiting for the chance to shape policy, and a nascent conservative media, mostly print and radio. Deregulation of markets and re-regulation of abortion and sexual relations were the early goals that united businesses (which often wanted nothing to do with social and cultural issues) and the deeply religious, who obsessed over the nation's putative immorality (read: failure to adhere to stringent Protestant norms) under the shared tent of the Republican Party. Politically, this alliance paid off spectacularly.
Emboldened by the Reagan Revolution, conservatives decided to carve out safe spaces in which to talk to one another without liberal bias creeping in. Conservative talk shows attracted large audiences and large profits to radio networks. Soon enough, conservative TV talk shows followed, and finally, Fox News, modeled on and intended explicitly as a challenge to CNN.
The downside to creating those safe spaces, as we can see in hindsight, was that they let conservatives talk solely to each other. Undoubtedly that was refreshing but it also created an unhealthy dynamic, one that, ironically, conservatives delight in pointing out when it afflicts liberals: the tendency toward groupthink.
Groupthink not only tends to exclude dissent, it encourages radicalization. Over time, the most radical ideas, by dint of sheer repetition, lose their shock value: they become normalized.
A radical idea can be a good one: the once-radical notion of a forty-hour work week, for instance, is one that many of us wish were still the norm. For every good radical idea, though, there are a lot of bad ones.
The other flaw — again, only obvious in hindsight — is that groupthink lets lies take root. Again, repetition is the key because repeating lies overcomes whatever resistance we might have to them. (And we might not have much resistance to certain lies in the first place.)
Decades of stewing solely in conservative media, including social media, have left millions vulnerable to groupthink, radicalization, and outright lies. The result? Clearly lunatic conspiracy theories find large, receptive audiences. When everyone around you is chattering about dark forces ("the deep state" or what have you) conspiring against you and yours, it's hard not to buy in.
Radicalization and anger reinforce each other, too, hence the prevalence of hate groups on the far right. Unfortunately, white supremacy and cultural conservatism are all too comfortable being bedmates, and while not all cultural conservatives are white supremacists, it's hard to imagine a white supremacist who isn't culturally conservative.
Finally, the profit motive underlies all of this. Slaking the thirst of millions for right-tilting news and talk has been immensely profitable for companies like Fox News, personalities like Sean Hannity, and political groups like the Republican Party. Talk radio and Fox News knew all about keeping their audiences engaged long before Facebook and other social media giants came along and made the process algorithmic. Audience engagement is maximized if you feed the beast (that is, the audience) raw meat. And for twenty years or so, right-tilting media has been less and less concerned about where that meat came from and whether it's good for the audience. Republican politicians have marched along in lockstep, both to stay in office and to earn a living afterward.
Media stars like Hannity and Alex Jones (a repellent person but undeniably a star on the far right) love the glory, too, and will do almost anything to hold onto it.
What about the motive of "fun" I mentioned? Well, trolling your critics and enemies is a big reason why Twitter and Facebook are battlegrounds for political speech. All that battling is great for audience engagement, which brings us back to the profit motive: social-media companies make a lot of money off the fighting.
For forty years these elements have been brought together to reinforce one another — and here we are, with millions
- prepared to believe whatever Trump says;
- certain that the 2020 election was stolen from him and that Joe Biden was not legitimately elected;
- convinced that letting Biden hold office not only would reward perfidy but would mean the end of the republic; and
- grimly determined to save "their" nation by any means necessary.
The frenzied mob that broke into the Capitol included objectively despicable people: white supremacists, Hitler apologists, anti-Semites, plain old hooligans out to create mayhem, and more. But some of those who broke in, and undoubtedly hundreds or thousands more who stayed outside, participated because they fervently believe what Trump and his enablers have been telling them. They showed up because they're desperate to save their country from the terrible threats that generations of opportunistic profiteers (hello, Rupert Murdoch) and snake-oil salesmen have conjured out of thin air.
They showed up for no good reason. They showed up because of big fat lies.
And the tellers of those lies must be held accountable.
The scramble to disavow responsibility has already begun among politicians. They're the obvious, high-profile figures because they were at the heart of the mayhem: Trump's rally, after all, was aimed right at the Congressional certification of the Electoral College vote count. He and his enablers hoped to change the count (somehow) in his favor, or at least to disrupt it for a time. Those enablers of that delusion must not be allowed to slip quietly into anonymity.
But the voices in conservative media circles who echoed and affirmed the lies, reinforcing them in their audiences' minds, also were complicit.
It also seems fitting to apply the longstanding conservative insistence on personal responsibility to all those who came to Washington, D.C. Wednesday, or who aided and abetted the effort. While I do believe their minds have been warped by the echo chamber they inhabit, they are not mindless automata: they have some agency. They could have interrogated the claims they heard, rather than swallowing them hook, line, and sinker. They could have questioned the truthfulness or intentions of the anonymous figures behind those claims. They could have asked themselves, "Am I really so special as to be 'in' on the 'real' secrets?" A measure of humility and introspection might have gone a long way toward averting tragedy and chaos.
In the end, though, we're left with the infuriating fact that the seditious riot of 6 January was the culmination — so far — of decades of decisions and actions by the far right wing of this country. Trump was the match but he lit decades' worth of fuel.
