All jokes aside, yesterday should've been a wake up call for the entire country to see how easy this is for the right wing. When the next fascist comes, they won't be making the same mistakes Trump made.
For anyone decrying this and blaming BLM protesters for not being able to do this, go back and watch the videos. The cops helped them. They opened the gates and let them storm the capitol. More than one cop hung back and took selfies with them and generally showed no letehal force whatsoever. Had that been BLM protesters, they wouldn't have even got to the gates. Cops would've already teargassed, flashbanged and sprayed them with rubber bullets while DHS and the National Guard would've been waiting to arrest them.
Half of the GOP are in support of this. They've been calling the election rigged and riding that train with the base.
The most amazing part to me IMO is that liberals live in some weird alternate reality where the mainstream media has been feeding them BS for what they want to hear for 4 years. Trump has an over 90% approval rating with the GOP voter base and it only went up after the riots last year and all of his stunts. This isn't that hard to figure out. They love him cause he says the quiet parts out loud and don't put on a happy face around the coded language. Libs have had 4 years to get it that people vote conservative in America to go after the people they hate. It's about keeping black people and minorities out of their neighborhoods; putting the LGBT back in the closet, jailing immigrants and sticking it to poor people. But instead of realizing this, mainstream media has simply shoved microphones in the face of any old neocon who they label "anti-Trump" and propped them up as if they run the GOP.
The biggest thing to take into consideration is how police protected them, allowed it and then sat back and refused to use lethal force. Liberals can't seem to figure it out and acted all stunned, but it's really not a shock. Far right groups have been infiltrating police departments for decades. We've been screaming about this for years while libs just ignore it and think voting is going to solve all of these problems. The next fascist that comes around, also will have the backing the police, you can bet on that.
If Trump wasn't a stupid idiot worried more about his ego than anything else, he could've totally pulled it off and seized power yesterday. But once they got in the capitol, he did what he always does and chickened out after all his big talk.
Liberals also proved how useless they are yesterday, not that it's a big surprise. They don't know how to do anything but be smug and condescending. You saw how they act in a coup yesterday. They'll just get on twitter, make 'white privilege' trend as a hashtag and try to explain that the problem isn't so much our system, or corrupt police helping fascists. Then sit back and scream and shout that the cops aren't beating these people or showing lethal force. Libs don't get it and they never will. They're over-educated wimps who will cower in the face of fascism unfolding.
I have long believed that when Trump originally ran for president back in 2015, that the Republicans were fine with him as a sort of experiment and test. It was like they were testing the waters to see how far the American public would be willing to accept fascist rhetoric and how far they could go with someone like him and get away with it. Yesterday definitely felt like a test run for a coup. They've had 4 years to realize they can pull it off cause Dems are a bunch of cowards and will just hide behind the system and status quo, regardless who is in power. 4 years of a bumbling moron president and no real push back for it from Dems. Just liberals fact-checking and writing smug articles for years decrying everything. Yesterday was the last test and it proved to them, they can pull this off in the future when they get their ideal fascist, opposed to a reality TV star game show host.
We're starring right down the barrel of fascism. The next fascist we get isn't going to be a moron reality TV show star. Somewhere out there, the next Trump is sitting and watching. They are vowing not to make the same idiotic mistakes he has made through all this time.
Will Dems learn from this and take advantage from a GOP in disarray? I doubt it. They just barely won the Georgia runoff, squeaking that out after McConnell and the GOP wouldn't push for the $2k stimulus and doomed themselves. Another 4 years of Obama style nothingness and open, naked class war is going to lead us to Trump 2.0.
Start preparing cause it's a rough ride ahead.
100% agree with you on everything.
Trump isn't a fascist. He's a narcissistic bumbling clown. As someone said yesterday, seeing the big crowd was enough to satisfy his ego. He wants to feel loved. So the big crowd made him believe his supposed election win was a landslide. He went home and probably felt the best he's felt in months. If he were smarter, yesterday he could've totally pulled it off and seized power.
Biden absolutely will lead us to a real fascist. 4 years of extreme austerity and open, naked class war will do that. Dems only won the Georgia run off IMO cause of McConnell not backing the $2k stimulus and they just barely won it by a nail biter. While they did take in wins here in the election, they're barely winning and most of it has moved to the suburbs with middle and upper middle class voters. They even came up with a new smug politically correct term to label the poor; "non-college educated".
My belief is that the next fascist who comes around will most likely address the wealth inequality and talk about the class war in a warped context. When that happens, Dems are going to be fucked, cause they have spent the past 30 years ignoring material conditions and getting cozy with Wall Street while leaving their old base of the working class behind.
So a fascist comes along and essentially blames the contradictions of capitalism on the existence of minorities. They make promises of better material conditions and flip leftist talking points about class and idpol to be reactionary to gain power
This is more or less my prediction. I think M4A will be transformed and morphed into something by the next fascist who comes around. They'll morph it into something like "Healthcare for all Americans" and they've already begun blaming wealth inequality on immigrants and criminals. If protesting continues to be dominant in the following years (strong possibility, it kinda already is if we go back to 2014), then fascists have a chance to normalize talking points about how all the protesters are criminals "looting and acting like thugs".
One thing that is often left out with Trump is that the middle class petty bourgeoise absolutely voted for him and were his base in 2016. Libs and the media never want to focus on this aspect cause they just ran Joe Biden as the "middle class president".
This is right, the proletarianization of the petty bourgeoisie was already happening before COVID and has been greatly accelerated by it. Those affected by this process were Trump's most fervent supporters, and they will support any fascist down the line that represents their interests.
Yeah, yesterday was the big moment that proves this. If he were truly a fascist, he wouldn’t have told his supporters to stand down. He would have told them to defend the seized capitol with force to inaugurate his new era.
I mean, it feels like he got threatened with 25a or literally 25a'd when he made those half-ass statements.
Yeah, that thought definitely crossed my mind.
There’s also the fact that he was at a military command center in Abilene, and that recent editorial by all the former secdefs about how the military mustn’t interfere with the transfer of power.
I suspect that he was thinking about and laying the groundwork (in his haphazard way) for a seizure of power, but wussed out at the last moment.
Yeah, but if he was already going for a violent takeover, he'd just say, "go ahead." That shit would be meaningless if he was just declaring himself president anyway.
Trump was just hoping to prevent the electoral college votes from being counted, because he really does not understand that if somehow no president gets delcared, it's Nancy Motherfucking Pelosi who wins the presidency
like I really think nobody has told him that
Not just a test run, but also an important threshold and a radicalization point. Now the people involved have tasted power and have stripped the sanctity of these institutional buildings we usually have. And while the focus is on Capitol Hill, wasnt it the case that multiple capitals got occupied across the states? Anyway, the point is that now that this threshold is crossed, it would be much easier to do so again, and people have overcome one more taboo.
It is kinda similar to the fear a lot of people had during the summer protests, that someone will fuck up, and there will be live ammo massacre (the killings that we saw were very limited, and that line ultimately wasnt crossed), cause after that happens there is no putting back the genie in the bottle. And with each one crossed, and with the mounting number of bodies, things intensify and speed up.
Great reply, thank you. I 100% agree that it's a radicalization point. This whole thing is a wet dream for the far right. Your post made me think of the 90s era militia types. They have been waiting for a moment like this for decades and seeing it, they have to be happy.
We'll likely see it again in the future. As my original post states, it was a test run for the future. I expect to see them do crazier things now in states with local governments.
This is the reaction from the far right that many of us are anticipating during Biden's presidency. We haven't seen anything yet. They are going to get a lot crazier and scarier under another neoliberal president.
on the plus side, if the rightists are the ones to start a revolution and dont successfully topple the government, leftists will be on the side with the armaments and will likely have the ability to take over a bit similar to what happened in russia and china
Yeah, they were attacking all over.
They breached the gates of the governors mansion in WA and the cops just escorted them back out through the gates.
Hello Dave Anthony!
In all seriousness your whole post is excellent but I'm genuinely shocked by how few people I know seem to grasp this bit...
The biggest thing to take into consideration is how police protected them, allowed it and then sat back and refused to use lethal force. Liberals can’t seem to figure it out and acted all stunned, but it’s really not a shock. Far right groups have been infiltrating police departments for decades. We’ve been screaming about this for years while libs just ignore it and think voting is going to solve all of these problems. The next fascist that comes around, also will have the backing the police, you can bet on that.
The liberal response will absolutely be to increase police budgets, authorise more lethal force and police powers, increase surveillance capability and possibly even more draconian forms of pre-crime arrest. They'll give fascist a dream suite of weapons to ensure absolute success as well as further entrenching the psychology of law enforcement as the vanguard of the country, the makers of its destiny, the only thing standing between the dangerous masses and the country's existence.
The liberal response will absolutely be to increase police budgets, authorise more lethal force and police powers, increase surveillance capability and possibly even more draconian forms of pre-crime arrest. They’ll give fascist a dream suite of weapons to ensure absolute success as well as further entrenching the psychology of law enforcement as the vanguard of the country, the makers of its destiny, the only thing standing between the dangerous masses and the country’s existence.
Sadly true. We saw that from libs after all the BLM protests during the summer. "Police reform" is such a joke. Citations Needed did an excellent episode on this where they talked about how all the police reform talks after the Ferguson riots just resulted in them getting even more bloated budgets and tools. It led to the whole body cams and those have been proven to be useless since in court, the body cams will often be used as evidence to defend the police.
All libs are doing is whining about how the police sided with the fascists, and I highly doubt any Dems in Congress are going to push to investigate them for corruption or anything. Instead, we'll probably get an investigation over that woman they shot and killed yesterday since the right wing will make her into a martyr. The movie Serpico proves how useless their investigations are into corruption anyway. That movie and the real life Frank Serpico documented NYPD corruption in the 1970s. The NYPD only continued to get worse as decades went on.
Absolutely, although to be honest I doubt there'll be much of an investigation into the shooting. It seemed to be a Secret Service agent and don't think even Republican lawmakers are going to want to limit or make an example of their own security detail essentially.
I dunno, the obvious failure of the cops here is being noticed.
Congress is gonna want massive security upgrades though. sigh.
True, but the stated Democratic response is to increase police funding.
Hello Dave Anthony!
Dave Anthony if this really is you, please unblock me on Twitter, I'm sorry for thinking that running up the score in baseball is cool
I feel like what this really showed is that the dems will do nothing to stop a coup. As long as Fascists can make deals with the DoD, DHS, CIA, ect, the dems won't give them any trouble. Basically regardless of the election results if the fascists have the backing of those institutions they can just take power. We'll see what the Dems do in response to this, if they really do just bolster the police and surveillance state then Fascism actually seems pretty likely. I have the financial resources to emigrate, but hopefully it doesn't come to that.
The US is going to openly embrace full on fascism.
There is nothing that can be done to stop it from happening here.
Yep, we've been on a carefully paved path to fascism for a while now. I believe it truly began with Ronald Reagan's presidency, and then escalated further and further from there. The PATRIOT Act was the major turning point going into the 2000s and what do you know, it was written by a Democrat we just elected to president.
According to some theorists, we’ve always been at some stage of fascist development. Since fascism itself is a process and its intensity varies.
It was always going to be trivially easy because in Germany and Italy the fascists only came to power by a backstairs coup by the conservative establishment and the military. It will be the same here. Fascists can only be placed in the driver's seat by the conscious collaboration of existing institutions and the military.
and liberals aren't going to do jack shit about it. They'll just act shocked again when they see cops still siding with fascists in the future.
I mean Matt addressed this in his blog yesterday in brutal fashion. What can they do? What could we or anyone do about it? Oh you're saying its a fascist coup? Why are you posting about it instead of riding down the street raising your militia and marching to defend the state?
Fascists will take over and we will let them because we are powerless. I mean in Italy and Germany there was a very strong and organized and militant political left. Nevertheless in both countries that left was paralyzed by indecision, lack of preparation, and inaction when the moment came that demanded decisive anti-fascist action. Here? We don't even have that. We have nothing. So yes, if it happens we all will let them because we have no alternative.
Matt seems intent on being a helpless doomer well beyond what's reasonable.
I really hate this trend in some parts of this community where I or others talk about one of Matt's correct but hard-to-swallow takes and then brush it off as "oh he's just doing doomerism", as if counting perceived contrarianism with counter-contrarianism will resolve the contradiction here, but Matt's take isn't doomer, it's Marxist. This is the entire point Marxist have been trying to make in theoretical texts when it comes to the phrases and concepts "organize" and "mobilize" and "vanguard party".
All states are class dictatorships. America is the paramount bourgeois dictatorship. To destroy a bourgeois class dictatorship through revolutionary action you must disrupt the circulation of capital which is the source of bourgeois class power within that dictatorship. This cannot be done through mere participation within the existing legitimate institutions of the dictatorship, as those institution are explicitly built to protect and defend the class power of the bourgeoisie. They can only be destroy through organizing and mobilizing the proletariat into a mass movement, led and given direction by a party of the proletarian interest, which together constructs the counter-institutions of a future proletarian dictatorship outside of the boundaries of legality and legitimacy of the bourgeois dictatorship. You don't defeat the dictatorship by conforming to its laws, you defeat it by defying those laws and building a movement robust and coherent and militant enough to resist it violently if necessary. When this movement reaches a threshold of organization, mobilization, discipline, and militancy in a time of acute crisis for the bourgeois dictatorship, the proletariat will establish its dictatorship through revolutionary violence. The shadow counter-society and counter-state it has constructed after years of organizational effort will step into the vacuum left by the dissolution of the bourgeois state, and the vanguard party of professional revolutionaries will lead the charge into the breach with the masses of the workers on their heels.
It's. About. Power. Organization, mobilization, and discipline give you power. Power allows you to impose your will upon your enemies. Lack power, and your enemies will impose their will upon you. We lack power. If the fascists truly gain the power necessary to impose their will, we entirely lack the ability to resist it. Acknowledging that FACT is not "doomerism", it's acknowledging material reality and that is what Marxism is all about.
Matt’s take isn’t doomer, it’s Marxist
No it's doomer. Or at best it's selective materialism. he refuses to do any real analysis of the right because it would conflict with his "well they can't do anything because we can't do anything" rhetoric.
They won't do anything becomes well what they did doesn't mean anything.
:stalin-stressed:
They effectively didn't do anything because they failed! They had no plan! No organization! They were a spontaneous mob! Their supposed "leader" quickly backed down and abandoned them because he's a fat coward with no plan or ambition either! They were literally doing idealism by thinking if they believed hard enough and shouted loud enough occupying the Capitol they could make Trump President for another term but guess the fuck what it doesn't work that way!
These MAGA CHUDs aren't the fucking Nazis. The Nazis had a party. They had paramilitaries. They had leaders. They had manifesto and a (literally just lying) political platform. And eventually they had corporate and military backing too, which was the final piece needed to seize power. MAGA has none of these things. They're at war with their own fucking party leadership. Their notion of "organization" is posting on fucking Facebook groups and fringe websites. Their leader has no ambitions or coherent ideology or barely functioning brain, for fuck's sake.
The police let them. And then they kicked them out after like two hours. They didn't even reach anyone important enough to take hostage. The lesson here at the end of the day being that the police are the ones with the fucking power here, not the MAGA CHUDs. Sure, the cops sympathize with them vis-a-vis the left and liberals, but they aren't yet ready to outright throw in with them, which is what actual fascists NEED to take power. They can't do it by themselves, establishment power must hand it to them willingly.
Like, I understand hysterical takes inevitably pop up after events like this, but people need to stop overstating the power of these morons. These people are not organized. Like, at all. This was fucking Occupy but for MAGA, it was arguably even less significant in material consequences.
sigh.
You admit that the police siding with them is a huge concern but you just ignore that yesterday they sided with them.
~800k cops, overwhelming violent heavily armed fascists. Spread out everywhere with military like organization.
They can’t do it by themselves, establishment power must hand it to them willingly.
Donald Trump is president.
This isn't a fascist takeover from nothing, this is trying to entrench someone who already has power. Very different.
Like, I understand hysterical takes inevitably pop up after events like this, but people need to stop overstating the power of these morons
Just because you label your takes as materialist doesn't make those who disagree wrong, and it certainly doesn't make anyone hysterical.
There’s a non zero chance it’s a bot given the ubiquity of their posts
It's very hard to do historical materialism and not have that perspective imo
I don't find his material analysis convincing, I think he sort of, perhaps unintentionally, ignores material conditions to suit a larger narrative.
oh interesting. I don't know enough history to catch smaller oversights like these. Do you have an example I can think about?
It's not the historical part, it's the interpretation.
The right won't do anything. Then they do something and he comes up with a new set of excuses.
Honestly, I'm incredibly surprised by how disorganized and unmotivated the fascists were yesterday. With the various armed nazi militias that I hear about every so often, it just so happened that nobody with any iota of organization showed up.
it just so happened that nobody with any iota of organization showed up.
those were the police
The problem is cops and gun control.
"gun control good" no lib, POC need more guns.
"reform the police not abolish" no lib, cops just attempted a coup on the countrystop the flowery language and leftist meme formats. start "telling it like it is"
no, it's not "the police have a problem with institutionalized racism in their ranks"
it's "cops hate POC, tried to coup the country"armed protestors breaking into the Capitol is terrorism, yes
"why aren't the police shooting them?"
well because they're the same people, duh
I don't think it was a test to see how far the US will accept fascism, I think this is more like a creation that has gone out of control. People like McConnell and crap still want the institutions to exist as they do so they can do all their evil crap. I don't think they want to see the people they indoctrinate get anywhere close to them. If they are going to do a fascist coup it will be through the police first.
I also don't think its guaranteed there will be a competent fascist next. It is entirely possible that Trump is followed up by more fools. Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr, and Bush Jr were all stupid as shit and Trump follows that trend, except that Trump managed to achieve less.
Good post, and good comments, glad to see this type of in depth chat here :chavez-salute:
this was real fascism trying to seize power imo, the only reason there wasn't a full coup was because the ruling class isn't willing to play their trump card that is fascism by allowing the destruction of liberal democracy just yet.
If they were ready, this would have been it imo. Not to say it would have succeeded or gone well, but the only reason it didn't go farther than this is because the ruling class has decided that trump has to go for their security
I've got to disagree, respectfully. There was no threat to power yesterday and that's the reason for the non-response from capital. They know the idiots storming the capitol building ultimately will act in support of entrenched power structures.
I have long believed that when Trump originally ran for president back in 2015, that the Republicans were fine with him as a sort of experiment and test. It was like they were testing the waters to see how far the American public would be willing to accept fascist rhetoric and how far they could go with someone like him and get away with it. Yesterday definitely felt like a test run for a coup. They’ve had 4 years to realize they can pull it off cause Dems are a bunch of cowards and will just hide behind the system and status quo, regardless who is in power. 4 years of a bumbling moron president and no real push back for it from Dems. Just liberals fact-checking and writing smug articles for years decrying everything. Yesterday was the last test and it proved to them, they can pull this off in the future when they get their ideal fascist, opposed to a reality TV star game show host.
I could see that.
At this point I think they have lost control. It's not about a competent fascist IMO. It's about the republican Party.
Bastards like McConnell (who understands the system and how to work it) are gong to be replaced by dumb violent fascists. That's not gonna be better for anyone, no matter how bad Mitch is.
kinda wonder how many conservatives "on the edge" of fascist radicalization this whole thing have pushed fully into the Trump camp versus how many were pushed firmly away
libs proudly parading around examples of the rioters losing their jobs and Pence telling them they "didn't win", you could on the surface of it say that this was a firm setback for maga people
but my internal doomer keeps reminding me of studies that show that people tend to double down when presented with information that contradicts their internal beliefs
did this create more trump supporters than it destroyed? looking forward to funny polls in the future :doomjak:
kinda wonder how many conservatives “on the edge” of fascist radicalization this whole thing have pushed fully into the Trump camp versus how many were pushed firmly away
Early polls have shown that the wide majority of conservatives supported the attempted coup and were happy to witness it. Trump has the highest approval rating among conservatives of an elected president since Ronald Reagan.
Libs are morons and live in a fantasy land and don't want to come to terms with the fact that Republicans are not going to go "come back to their senses" or "go back to normal". They were never normal. They love Trump because he is them and says the quiet parts out loud, being mean and hateful towards people they loathe.
