The Meaning of January 6, 2021
A long history suggests that while the crisis of the moment dictates directing the state’s security resources and personnel toward the Right, this focus will, inevitably, shift back to the Left.
Pro-Trump supporters at the US Capitol following a rally with President Donald Trump on January 6, 2021 in Washington, DC. (Samuel Corum / Getty Images)
Trump’s troops, summoned by the Líder Máximo, assembled in Washington, DC, their minds mangled by an ideological fusillade of conspiratorial tripe about frauds, stolen elections, and political betrayal. The Commander-in-Chief appeared with others at the Washington rally. He and his entourage did not disappoint the crowd, pillorying the “radical socialist” Democrats and Republican renegades, excoriating those who would grant Joe Biden the presidency on the basis of an electoral travesty.
There was talk of “patriots kicking ass,” and exhortations to “Fight, fight, fight!” Trump wept tears of rage, tears of grief, reminiscent of Bob Dylan and The Band’s lyrics from Music from Big Pink (1967–68): “We carried you in our arms on Independence Day / And now you’d throw us all aside and put us all away / Oh, what dear daughter ’neath the sun could treat a father so? / To wait upon him hand and foot and always tell him, ‘No.’”
The Motley Crew
The election, Trump claimed, was stolen from him and, by extension, from them, his loyal subjects. They were a motley crew: overwhelmingly white, the old and not-quite-so-old, if not too many who were young. Donning the colors of the Proud Boys, biker gangs, and white supremacists, many were the kinds of human material it is easy to loathe, including neofascistic combatants trained in the paramilitary wing of the far right.
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