The Capitol attack
The last battle (for now) in the “Fight for America’s soul”

I. A ‘near death experience’ for American democracy

That sure was traumatic for the nation. For the first time since 1814, the Capitol in Washington is ransacked, but this time not by foreign soldiers acting on the orders of a hostile, undemocratic monarch. On the contrary, it’s ardent American patriots, bursting with love for “freedom and democracy,” who are going at it certain that they are only claiming their good democratic right to “four more years!” under the rule of their favorite president. They are following his fairly unambiguous suggestion; for he himself is sure that the only correct, i.e., only democratic, election outcome can be that he stay in the White House. To the shock of a worldwide public, Trump and his supporters have now behaved in a way that is otherwise only seen in “banana republics” (George W. Bush) — places where it is customary for even elected rulers to hang on to their power no matter what (occasionally with the active support of honorable, democratically empowered US governments) when they think their electorate is not quite “ready for democracy.” Yet now this hallmark of lesser powers and inferior societies has been brought right into the capital of the world-power model democracy itself — where superior power until now went hand in hand with its unshakable stability and with the unquestionably democratic legitimacy of its operators, especially because transitions of power at the top were always orderly and peaceful. So for Americans with a sense of pride and mission, the whole thing is shameful.

But if only it was just that. The rioters and their instigator are supposed to be responsible not only for creating a basically unthinkable, extraordinarily embarrassing exception, but also a dangerous precedent. By breaking into the Capitol they have opened “Pandora’s box.” This is how alarmed observers register in their own way — as the concern that a precious, fragile good is in danger — a messy truth about their beloved system: democracy saddles both elected rulers and voters with a contradiction, always and everywhere. On the one hand, it organizes an identity between above and below by having the governed choose a person as leader, and giving ambitious candidates the opportunity to win state power themselves by vying for votes. The focus is on carefully staged character traits that are supposed to make the candidate look like an excellent leadership personality. These traits are made the main criterion for a decision that is supposedly crucial for nothing less than the fate of the entire nation. Democracy celebrates this competition to gain power over the people and personally embody their need for state power as its high point and its seal of quality — as proof that the will of the governed comes first, so that this arrangement can only be termed rule by political scientists, certainly not in any moral sense. Voters can see the elected person and the fullness of his power as their own power in the state; they can see this powerful person as a reflection of themselves, the true sovereign that state authority officially comes from, an authority they in any case have to obey whether their candidate has won or not. And yet, on the other hand, from his first day in office the person selected by the people is only in command conditionally, in accordance with long established competencies of the office and an inescapable tangle of checks and balances specifying what the most definitely replaceable personnel has to execute. The nation’s business that the elected personnel exercises power over is already given as an institutionalized mandate whose necessities and constraints he has to accommodate. Moreover, the celebrated identity an election establishes between ruler and ruled is treated as a merely temporary one that is periodically put on the line — much too quickly as far as the winner and his voters are concerned. No wonder, then, that it is not only in the many pitiful ‘fragile democracies’ but also in the staunch ones that elected rulers are known to identify a little too closely with the office they are holding and have trouble accepting the time limit on their power. Even in the functioning democracies of the West there are often complaints about unfair competition, about the process being manipulated, and so on. If the master himself is now misbehaving too…

But how could it have gone so far, here of all places? The officially correct answer is clear: a power-obsessed and manipulative cynic stirred up and exploited the sinister propensity for violence among right-wing extremist militias and conspiracy theorists. This answer is not entirely wrong, yet somewhat puzzling. After all, it doesn’t exactly go without saying that traditionally anti-government militias, who are otherwise known for their hatred of anything that smacks of ‘central government’ and ‘Washington,’ should now fight so vehemently to keep a president who uses his autocratic claim to power to actually solicit voters. And the shocked public itself can’t help noticing that the armed spearhead of the rioters was backed by an impressively large group of demonstrators, who, according to all reports, are backed at least ideologically by millions and millions of voters. The latter may not agree with all the details of the rebels’ attack, but they do agree with their standpoint. How could this unholy alliance have come about? An authentic witness who was there explains:

“I’m not a ‘deranged Trump supporter’ … I’m an American supporter, and I think that there’s only one person on the ticket that has the same values as I do.” (quoted in The Washington Post, January 10, 2021)

The love of freedom makes strange bedfellows.

II. What unifies freedom-loving patriots: The absolute right of free competitors to assert themselves autonomously

For freedom is the one all-important value that the radical militiamen share with those who were crossing their fingers for them on January 6th, and that in turn links them all to their president. Whatever particular idea they have of it, this sacred supreme value has basically a profane content: being free means proving oneself in the competition for money, using the means that one has as one’s property. For the vast majority, this means that being free is being very dependent — working hard for their bosses or themselves, with dreams of advancement and independence that as a rule remain dreams. They are of course not free in the sense of being able to choose to take part in this arrangement; they are compelled to do so by free state-power — long before and quite regardless of whether they decide to see it as the epitome of human freedom, as the very opposite of a life determined by state rule.

But they are definitely free to form their own opinion about it. This they do in a way that suits the organizers and beneficiaries of this arrangement to a tee. The vast majority see competitive capitalist society as a playground for social and character virtues: for ‘free enterprise,’ i.e., the right to do business for oneself; and for ‘self-reliance,’ i.e., the duty to provide for oneself and not be a burden to anyone, unless that person freely decides to lend a helping hand. Finally, they are also free to find the principles of a competitive market-economy society so convincing and so fine that they actually imagine they themselves are the masters of the arrangement when they are behaving in accordance with its rules and constraints. They can — and the state also expects them to — identify with this mode of production and all the power relations peculiar to it so completely that they read the American Constitution mainly as assuring that this special state-power’s job is to leave citizens alone or make sure they are left alone. In this way, they manage to see this document, in which a bourgeois rule stipulates what its citizens may and may not do and how it intends to deal with them, as rejecting rule. According to this legend, the venerated Founding Fathers founded the American state primarily by repressing it.

What they have put in its place is a unique community of self-responsible fortune hunters for the whole world to emulate. Americans have created an expansive home on the North American continent for a chosen people who — being free to rely on property — get no free lunch but have a God-given natural right to everything they can turn into a means for their free-market activities. It is precisely in these activities — competition and all the conflicts that go with it — that Americans see the source of their unity. Their economic collisions thus do not put them in conflict with each other, but morally unite them: as free individuals, identical with each other in their common will to compete, free from all the shackles imposed from above in other epochs or other nations. Across all classes and all levels of the social hierarchy, which also exist in the American version of the capitalist ‘way of life,’ Americans recognize each other in this identity as people of their own kind: whether rich or poor, powerful or not, they demonstratively greet each other using their first names and a firm handshake — sharing their pride in being the only truly free, i.e., perfect, human beings.

It’s an interesting connection the heroes of free competition are making. They insist on having no higher authority than their wallet and their God, whom they declare their trust in on their banknotes. But their patriotism and their unconditional devotion to the ‘land of the free and home of the brave’ and its flag are unbeatable when it comes to how willing they are to make sacrifices for the greater good. This devotion in any case outshines anything that bygone enemy systems or current rival systems could ever orchestrate from above. Without any ruler telling them to, they also display a mistrust of their fellow citizens that would make every block warden and ‘thought police’ blush. They gladly and thoroughly search for compatriots who they think are cultivating an all-too-lukewarm fair-weather patriotism, not appreciating their precious freedom and its enormous costs, and actually holding a detached, or even critical, view of the American nation — its glorious history, its sacred mission in the world, and everything it does to that end. Many good patriots are even able to detect such deplorable detachment in the color of someone’s skin or the way someone talks.

At the same time, the American nation’s radical devotees themselves show a decidedly critical detachment when it comes to the actually existing political community, i.e., the state with its apparatus and its workings. They even typically reject it a lot more emphatically than the unpatriotic bunch does; that is because of their rights standpoint of themselves being the masters of the capitalist conditions they love so much under the sign of freedom. This standpoint is not free from certain contradictions. There has to be law and order, it has to be absolute and prevail everywhere; only irresistible force will help with swindlers and ‘bad hombres.’ But the state claiming a monopoly on the use of force to maintain law and order is problematic, to say the least. It is always threatening to water down the citizens’ freedom that has to be protected, namely, their constitutional right to defend themselves against encroachments — not least against those by an all-powerful state. Equally problematic is the state presuming to regulate free competition, e.g., with laws protecting the environment, workers’ safety, and consumers. This encroaches on the state-protected rights of private property, and could well justify getting a gun from the closet. And it is generally acknowledged that a collective of freely competing citizens needs a few other ‘public goods,’ besides legal certainty, that the collective also has to pay for. But that does not mean the public authorities are entitled to lay claim to fiscal sovereignty and decree from above which ‘goods’ these are and how much citizens have to cough up for them. So these patriots have their suspicion that American state functionaries have designs on citizens’ constitutional freedom long before they get wind of a new push to tighten gun laws. They find evidence of encroachments whenever state power acts as what it is, in America too: as the political power for free competition. It not only ensures law and order but also takes the necessary steps to look after competition with all its contradictory consequences and ups and downs, to secure and expand what this competition of private individuals actually is: the societal power-base of the state that dominates it.

The freedom they are claiming is miles above the question of whether what they have earned and are protecting so autonomously will even last until the end of the month. Such material questions have to be a free person’s own business. What matters is that they get to prove themselves in competition freely and self-confidently — this being the perfect qualification for filling the dependent roles that free competition has in store for most of them. One prominent unforgivable encroachment by the state is the social-welfare department, which liberty-loving patriots of this species regard as obviously distorting the principle of self-responsible freedom. As far as they are concerned, there is no social discontent that might justify demanding that the state make American society into something more or better than capitalist competition, for instance an oh-so-harmonious ‘social market-economy.’ And if there is any such discontent it only goes to show that the state is already doing far too much in this regard. It has only one job to do, but this it had better do: use force to safeguard their freedom from being attacked or watered down in any way — by conquering half a continent; by opening up an entire world to free American profit-makers; by guaranteeing Americans are the first and greatest beneficiaries of the American world order; and most recently by building a wall to keep out foreigners, who restrict Americans’ freedom just by a lot of them being in the country.

When it comes to this function of the state — using force to support the natural freedom of American, that is, perfect, human beings — these patriots are very demanding especially vis-à-vis foreign peoples, enemies and allies. Here they expect their state power to do anything but restrain itself. They want it to adopt the same, both absolute and abstract, rights standpoint that they claim for themselves as a collective of private competitors, as a community of individual sovereigns over their own business. Whatever the nation’s leadership sets out to do, it must successfully assert itself. It must always make sure the nation conducts all its necessary foreign affairs as a free agent, as its own master, no matter what the cost. Their state must be a power that recognizes no equal authorities, much less higher ones — no alliances, supranational organizations or human rights commissions, which could water down the nation’s right to success. It must have no need to do so. The leadership’s sacred duty toward its citizens’ patriotic standpoint is to enforce the nation’s right to everything it decides it has a right to.

Even in the paradise of freedom that the American global power has actually achieved through its workings at home and around the world, those with this rights standpoint are never really satisfied — how could they be, given what they are demanding? And particularly in recent times they have been confronted with more and more reasons to be unhappy about the nation’s foreign and domestic life. For years it has been waging wars that turn out so unfortunately that one has to wonder whether they are even aimed at America’s success or are just benefiting ungrateful nations and allies unworthy of ‘our’ soldiers’ service.^[1]  The state has long been pursuing an immigration policy that makes one wonder if it is really interested in reserving the home of truly competitive people and the jobs that go with it for the American citizens who love them more than anything, meaning they are entitled to them as Americans. Finally, the nation’s culture has taken on a standpoint that defines more and more inhabitants of the “great stable of liberty”^[*] as victims and gives them — as blacks, women, gays, illegal immigrants, etc. — a protected status that leads them to start making demands and accusations directed at good citizens and their traditional morals. All this is threatening to change America from a community of self-reliant, strong patriots pursuing ‘happiness,’ i.e., success in competition, into a mutually protective and supportive community of victims and weaklings pursuing compensation.^[2]

Right-wing firebrands do not agree with those usually termed conservative on every point, in every interest, or in every national affair, but they do share this all-encompassing rights-consciousness. And today, the various shades of this conservative spectrum evidently agree about all of them going into action as Trump supporters. They see in Trump what they see in no other politician: an absolutely reliable representative of the values that make them, as “American supporters,” by no means “deranged” but nevertheless fanatical Trump fans ready for some new levels of escalation. When they destructively demonstrate their right to ‘possess’ the Capitol, they are fighting for his right to power in the White House, which must not be tampered with in any way.

III. Trump’s highly popular offer: a ruthless rights-consciousness, guaranteed forever

To explain why Trump is the leader that true Americans have been waiting for, his supporters need exactly two words: “America first!” This campaign slogan initially stands for a series of specific plans and measures that make free hearts pound. To wit: a draconian immigration policy; a radical rollback of environmental, labor, and tax regulations that burden American business; a trade and foreign policy that has no false friends and takes no prisoners; a rearming of the military like in good old Cold War times, with the finest weapons humankind has ever seen; a commitment to private gun ownership and to all the brutality needed for maintaining law and order against insubordinate victims, etc., etc.

But what really matters is not so much the measures themselves, let alone the question of how they would actually benefit an individual “America first!” supporter. According to this slogan, all worries and hardships document a higher kind of violation: of the nation’s sacred right to succeed in everything it sets out to do. So what matters here is the rights standpoint that Trump stands for and that perfectly fits what his freedom fans are asking for. “America first!” stands for the resolve to achieve the nation’s success through its own effort, to derive its rights from its own strength and define them the same way. It stands for doing without the hypocrisy of asserting the nation’s interests while wanting to keep to a higher standard of the Good and Just. And when Trump does cite such noble values, he does so with such out-and-out exaggeration that the main message is that he knows no shame when it comes to the nation’s sacred egoism. As free people by nature, Americans themselves are the True, Beautiful, and Good.

Strictly speaking, however, this rights standpoint is not all Trump is offering his free supporters under the slogan “America first!” What he is offering is simply Trump himself. He is offering himself as the embodiment of the rights standpoint that characterizes true Americans as a nation of the Free — as an ‘identification figure’ in the literal sense, namely, as the living guarantee that competitors' private rights-standpoint is identical with their rights standpoint as a nation, and this is identical with their political leadership’s driving motive. The offer itself is definitely not new; Trump just represents the particular American variant of the above-mentioned democratic promise that by electing its top staff the people will be one with their state. American citizens have always demanded that their president not merely act as the head of a bureaucracy full of wonderful professionals, but embody the nation’s free morality himself — with his personal strength, his personal success, and his powerful dignity. He is supposed to be a kind of modern monarch, but one with genuine, not just representative, power. Trump is extremist here in that he does not leave it at representing the people’s will as a figure hovering above other government agencies, he is determined to ruthlessly fight against them — and against anyone somehow trying to stop him.

It is this will of the people that Trump is fulfilling in his notorious, aggressive political style — which is why this is not just a question of style. He fulfills the combative self-image of true Americans by being openly hostile to whomever, choosing not even to make a distinction in the way he addresses the leader of an enemy state power, an uncooperative judge at home, or a regular journalist pestering him with a critical question. For Trump, these are all just opportunities for “your favorite president” to assert himself personally. By always making sure he gets his way, he is providing proof of being the right person to handle the nation’s rights. He is proving that he is the proper echo chamber and executive arm of the people’s electoral voice.^[3] It is precisely this uncompromisingly self-centered will to assert himself that gives Trump his ‘credibility’ as a politician, this being the democratic leadership virtue par excellence. Whatever he promises, he does — a democratic voter cannot ask for more from an empowered leader. As to the ‘division’ in the country that Trump is accused of stoking, there is a method to it. Whenever he insults an opponent, breaks a taboo to show disrespect for some nationally recognized standpoint or — above all — group of victims, Trump’s supporters see a reflection of their own rights standpoint, i.e., of how dead on they are with their competitive thinking, their conservative morals, and about being the true American people. And the fanatical approval they show their leader in the White House proves to him how suitable his own egoism is as the lodestar for the nation’s interests. A first-rate echo chamber, then, which is not playing out in some dark corner of the internet, but has been at the center of America’s public democratic life for the four years of Trump’s term, thereby actually putting the logic of this freedom-loving patriotism on display day after day, shrill and clear.

And now, Trump has demonstrated his offer to perfectly embody a free people identical with their free leadership by flouting the democratic procedure par excellence, the vote, and insisting on his right to power in the White House and the unconditional, neither ‘checked’ nor ‘balanced,’ authority of the executive branch. He is of course not abolishing democracy; he is not doing all this to circumvent the voice of the people, but to let nothing come between himself and his people. He is instead radicalizing the above-mentioned offer that democracy itself makes to its citizens: that they can act as true sovereign by putting a governing person at the head of the state. He is radicalizing this offer by setting out to disregard the other side of the democratic contradiction. He is disregarding above and below being fused into a personally vouchsafed and embodied democratic unity merely temporarily, and this unity being embedded in a plethora of mechanisms and procedures that he and his supporters combat as being a plethora of opportunities to disrupt their immediate unity. Trump’s final call for his supporters to riot on his behalf so he can remain their president is thus his invitation that they do something for their own democratic right to be identical with their state — that is, take a big step beyond the act of voting in order to make the true meaning of their vote a reality.

IV. How resilient democratic institutions respond: The people are us!

To the rest of the nation, what Trump and his supporters have done here is unforgivable.

After all, they have defiled the glorious headquarters of American power, which already says everything about them. They are in any case definitely not ‘the people’ taking back “our house!” but a “mob.” They are not awestruck by the cathedral of parliamentary rule, nor by the dignitaries present there, the legislators who are about to perform a rather ceremonial yet decisive act: enthroning the new man at the top. So the first thing to do is root for the palace and the personages of American rule — and also entertain one or two violent fantasies. When people indignantly ask how the rabble could have gotten so far in the first place and what would have happened if “Black lives matter!” demonstrators had dared to even go near the seat of Congress, it is apparent what democrats would have thought appropriate. There have to be consequences, i.e., the perpetrators and their abettors must be ruthlessly prosecuted. The liberal press rushes to assist the responsible authorities, employing all the means social media offer to publish dozens of modern wanted posters every day that disclose whatever biographical background they can glean about the Capitol attackers. The judiciary goes into action and analyzes first results without waiting for the fourth estate’s help. In the meantime, the Democratic Party takes the big instigator himself to task in order to banish him from the corridors of power once and for all. The Republicans won’t let him be removed from office this time either, but right after supporting his acquittal one of their leaders sees a need to clearly blame the outgoing president…

Trump’s term in office thus ends with a blitzkrieg to restore the constitutional state’s authority against him. Politicians and the public thirst for revenge, and call for state power to punish the guilty — those above and below — their vehemence being based on the certainty that restoring respect for democracy’s seat of rule, ruling personnel and procedure of rule is the way to secure the sovereignty of the people. For the democratic defenders of state authority share the position that a free people stand above the state, using it as their means. But this does not make them skeptical toward state power with its democratic and constitutional institutions and insignia, it makes them love it. The American people standing above state rule — that is exactly the thing that this variant of American patriotism sees the institutions and procedures as ensuring. That is what makes this palace and its occupants so sacred, what gives them their ‘dignity.’ The reason the Capitol shines so beautifully is that the power represented in its grand, marble dimensions is the power of a free people. After all, the rulers busy there got in by guaranteed democratic means and go about ruling as elected representatives of free citizens, so that the people see their representatives’ doings and magnificent house of rule as reflecting their own sovereignty back to them. And the so-important act of rule that the mob briefly interrupted is actually the ceremonial reenactment of what the people themselves have done by empowering the president through their vote. Congress, whose members collectively represent the freedom and power of the people vis-à-vis the president, certifies through this act, by strictly adhering to the applicable procedure, that it really is the freedom and power of the people that are embodied in the president.^[4]

This other reading of citizens’ democratic right to be identical with their rule, the one upheld by the establishment under attack, thus takes up precisely that side of the democratic contradiction that Trump has flouted: the ruling personnel being bound to all kinds of democratic and constitutional institutions and procedures that fix the nation’s business. According to this reading, the legitimacy of democratic rule rests not on uniting power with a person appointed by the people, but on the procedure always standing above the person it empowers. It is the respect that officeholders and aspirants have for this procedure that satisfies democracy’s claim to be rule by the people. What those are upholding against Trump and his people with such righteous indignation when they set democratic procedure against his democratic personality cult is the way democracy welds together the freedom of rule (to govern) and the freedom of citizens (to appoint the ruling figures). Voters are not condemned to forever follow a ruling figure once empowered, but are free citizens because they can always decide anew who will be ruling over the nation’s interests, and thus over them. Citizens thus have and exercise their freedom, not to be ‘deranged’ supporters of a Mr. Trump or Biden, but to be supporters “of America,” who promote the nation by always appointing a proper leader for it. It would be very one-sided to say that those elected affirm this right primarily by stepping down when the will of the people so decrees; they fulfill this right primarily when they step up to exercise legitimate, free rule. But by stepping down they document a dialectic that every democrat has mastered: that they never stand above the right that puts them above the people, but are ‘merely’ the legitimate executors of it.

This, then, is the crucial point where the establishment that Trump is attacking rebuffs him on principle: the right of the nation stands higher than any person who is meant to and means to promote it as president. What this right standing above those governing and those governed is about is nothing but the success of the nation, for Trump’s opponents just like for him. So it is no wonder the main accusation his enemies hurl at him is that he is weakening the nation by identifying the power in the state with himself. Particularly the one nation with an absolute right to success cannot tolerate power being identified with a leader who does whatever he wants with it. This, by the way, is also what those mean who after the Capitol attack publicly worried that the anti-democratic machinations of a Trump could weaken the USA’s role-model function vis-à-vis other states. It could undermine the credibility of America’s time-proven method of badgering the states of the world with how exemplary its democracy is when telling them how to organize their political and economic affairs to meet its interests and demands, which are morally impeccable to boot. If the USA presumes to dictate to other powers how to behave, including how to run their own shop, then it really can’t afford such shenanigans.

Therefore, the democratic program for fighting Trump and his supporters is at the same time one big plea to overcome the national ‘divide,’ to restore a moral unity of the nation that supposedly used to exist. Such unity is absolutely necessary if America is to get back on its feet; and it is also Biden’s essential promise to his people. That is precisely why a state power is needed that is sovereign in every respect because it is recognized by all Americans, the kind of state power Biden presents in his person. That is why he deserves the consent of the entire people. So democracy means the American people acknowledging the result of the election and trustingly rallying around the new leadership personality, who promises to promote their unity instead of fueling their division. What else Biden promises them remains to be seen — five days of national mourning for the many Covid deaths is a good start.

And Trump himself?

“Our historic, patriotic and beautiful movement to Make America Great Again has only just begun.”

© GegenStandpunkt 2024