Jan. 6 as Foundational Event for American Autocracy
Many of you have written to me since the election expressing your worries about possible political violence nationally and in your communities. Over the past weeks I have been immersed in the study of that grim subject: I gave the Jerrold Post Lecture keynote at a symposium on Perspectives on Political Violence at the University of California Irvine, and I participated in a workshop on political violence organized by Prof. Barbara Walter at the University of California San Diego.
This is the first in a series of essays about political violence and how to combat it. Here I focus on Jan. 6 as a historic event that prepared the psychological, social, and political climate for an authoritarian politics of violence by breaking taboos against assaulting the Capitol and hunting down lawmakers. With each blow, the mob declared that nothing was sacred and anyone could be targeted for harm or death. Without Jan. 6, there would likely be no Trump 2.0.
From Fascism onward, authoritarians have believed in violence as the way to move history forward and create new realities to “get things done” when other methods do not succeed. “Only through force do we make any change in a corrupt town like Washington D.C,” declared then-Rep. Matt Gaetz, now Donald Trump’s nominee for Attorney General, at a campaign event for Trump in Iowa last summer, expressing this conception of violence as a lever of change.
Authoritarians hollow out institutions, voiding them of any values and professionalism beyond loyalty to the leader, but they also hollow out people. Strongmen need to bring everyone around them down to their level of corruption and depravity. To show their loyalty, elites compete to be the most sycophant and self-abasing, doing anything the leader asks, no matter how criminal, and going along with the inevitable escalations of violence and corruption.
This hollowing out of political elites is a precondition for a political party to institutionalize violence. In pledging support to a brutal demagogue, you are sooner or later required to betray not only your compatriots, but also yourself. As political violence spirals, you can become a target of that demagogue, no matter how loyal you have been in the past.
No matter how traumatic your experience, you will likely stay silent and continue to support the man who incited violence against you. You may rationalize this as being necessary to keep your status in the party, but it will be harder and harder to escape the truth: by accepting his violence, you have validated the strongman’s mantra: I am everything, and you are nothing.
The world saw a version of this scenario on and after Jan. 6, when Trump unleashed a violent mob on Republican as well as Democratic lawmakers and their staff members, who had to run for their lives, many barely escaping an encounter with MAGA extremists.
How tragic that, after an initial period when a few GOP politicians denounced Trump, the party quickly labeled Jan. 6 as a protest or a tourist visit gone awry. The terror of those hours at the Capitol, and the phone calls to loved ones as the violence began around them, became forbidden subjects.
And so they stayed quiet, and settled into rituals designed to mirror their lack of self-regard: being humiliated by Trump in public, having their spouses insulted, and humiliating themselves for his delight, as in August 2023, when rival candidates for the GOP nomination –including former Vice President Mike Pence, who was targeted for harm by Trump on Jan. 6 for disloyalty—pledged on live television to support Trump, even if he became a convicted felon.
The specter of violence –the mob that the all-powerful Trump turned against them, and could activate again—continues to haunt the GOP, even as the party invents other targets: immigrants who eat cats and dogs! Childless cat ladies! Radical left professors and prosecutors! Vermin!
No wonder that, instead of enjoying their party’s victory in the recent election, “GOP politicians fear their physical safety if they defy Trump’s agenda,” Vanity Fair journalist Gabriel Sherman reports. “A high level MAGA person told me: ‘They should be afraid. They didn’t win the election. Trump did.’”
Jan. 6 radicalized the GOP, accelerating its transformation into an entity dependent on lying, corruption, and the threat and reality of violence against internal enemies. But it is fear, as well as fanaticism, that has kept the GOP disciplined in the years since the insurrection, no one wanting to be a target.
Because Donald Trump won the 2024 U.S. election, we did not see the expected waves of political violence “from below” in November. Nor was it necessary to stage some form of replay of the Jan. 6 coup attempt. Instead, we are bracing for the start of institutionalized violence from above. On “Day One,” mass deportations of undocumented people will supposedly start, assisted by the U.S. military –or so the incoming administration hopes.
Authoritarianism is the conversion of the rule of law into rule by the lawless. It makes perfect sense that a convicted felon and the man who sent the violent mob into the Capitol on his behalf would initiate an American autocracy.
No wonder many Americans fear consequences in their daily lives, such as hate crimes from local armed extremists who will feel more protected and empowered. “Day One” may be about deporting immigrants, but millions of other Americans will live in fear they will be discriminated against or harmed: Muslims, Jews, LGBTQ+ individuals, the disabled, the political opposition, journalists, prosecutors, judges, scientists…the list goes on.
This is why we must remember and revisit Jan. 6. The thugs who hunted down lawmakers and assaulted Capitol Police officers on Jan. 6 will likely soon be pardoned and the history of that violence further erased.
I feel sick every time I see those images and experience the sounds of a “grisly, grunting, intimate violence” that the New York Times critic James Poniewozik compared to a horror movie. Yet we cannot turn away from the lying, the violence, and the worship of a morally depraved individual who has been elevated to the status of Instrument of God’s Will and Savior of the Nation.
Fascists believe you have to destroy to create, and Jan. 6 has already been canonized because of its violence as a foundational moment of the New Era of Trumpism. If authoritarian history is any guideline, Jan. 6 could become a holiday one day.
Donald Trump is different from other strongmen, it seems to me, because he advocates violence but is too much the coward to actually practice it. I bet his hands haven’t known callouses since military school. Hitler, Il Duce, Putin—all were soldiers or KGB, saw some action. Trump, and his mini-me, Stevie Miller, perform behind a curtain. I find the quaking but loud bully the most despicable of all.
From my perspective, watching on from Australia, it all began when Trump tweeted Liberate Michegan in 2020 and an armed militia turned up! I just couldn't understand that - it seemed so unreal that a group of thugs could hold the government hostage. It was not surprising that Jan 6 happened, and now there are reports that Pete Hegesworth has said we are growing our military underground. Some of my American friends think I over react but I think they under react!!!