Someone at some point is going to write an article or a book that tallies all of the insider corruption related to the January 6 coup attempt. Like Watergate and the Kennedy assassination, the event will be discussed indefinitely. I mention some of the known insider perpetrators in Bernie Bros Gone Woke, and I posted the relevant material on this blog on June 14.1 This posting does not add any further details on the matter and I have not done further research. However, based on what I do know, which was common knowledge since the first days after January 6, and which has only been confirmed since then by the House Select Committee hearings, there is no reason for the American public to allow Donald Trump and his cronies in government get away with their illegal efforts to change the results of the 2020 presidential election. Regardless, that is exactly what is happening. My concern is that much of the American left, in a quietistic and self-justifying manner, has accepted that this will happen. Below is a slightly modified reprint of a comment that I left on the Jacobin YouTube channel in response to the August 5 interview with Branco Marcetic about the left’s response to January 6.2
This is the PLAY-IT DOWN take on January 6. Jan Pen is correct to say that she takes the “cynical” view on this issue, which is unfortunately all too common on the para-Democratic Party left. There was a better discussion on the Ralph Nader Radio Hour with Bruce Fein, on July 30, but there too you find Steve Skrovan going out of his way to do the work of the defence rather than the prosecution.3 The liberal-left take is that it was not a serious coup attempt, referenced here by Marcetic’s focus on the reaction of the Trump mob to the killing of Ashli Babbit. Contrary to what Marcetic implies, it’s known that the crowd was not comprised of ordinary working people, but mostly gung-ho types, former police and military, actual far right militia members and pro-business conservatives. It’s estimated that about 10 percent of the crowd was regular working-class Trump supporters, presumably misled about the election results. And the rally was called ‘Stop the Steal.’
This begs the question: how much of a coup attempt would the left prefer, before it takes the fascist right, and its allies in the pro-WWIII Democratic Party establishment, including its populist members, seriously? It was not an armed revolution, obviously. This is called hypostatization - a strawman argument to make your case seem more sensible. It was an attempt to change the result of the election, and it came very close to killing the Vice President in the process. Even Pelosi, escorted to a safe space, called the Pentagon to ask what the hell was taking them so long to arrive on the scene. If high-ranking officials had not been stripped of their authority days before the event, the National Guard would have been on site in twenty minutes, not four hours later, but they were deactivated and given stand down orders days before January 6 because the fascist right, and the establishment that shares its capitalist, anti-socialist authoritarianism, wanted its spectacle to counter the 20 million who participated in the BLM/George Floyd protests in the summer of 2020. The mayor of DC, Muriel Bowser, was also given the runaround by DC Metro police. You could say that “only” five people were killed on that day – a low number considering the weapons that were taken to the Capitol – but the real question is why and how did the riot manage to get as far as it did. And the answer to that is a concerted and planned stand down by government and police insiders, in the Pentagon, the Department of Defense, the CIA and the FBI, the Capitol police and the DC metro police. It wasn’t only two people in the Capitol police who were complicit with the rioters. Marcetic suggests that the stand down was an error and the result of two bad apples. That's a joke. Moreover, the Democrats rewarded the Capitol police for their corruption with additional funding.
With everything we know about the Capitol police stand down, Marcetic is not even trying here. The entire US police force had access to open information exchange memos that alerted all US police about what was going down in Washington DC days in advance of January 6. The only people who acted appropriately were in the Department of Justice and these are the people that Joe Biden has focused on because it’s convenient for him to ignore Pelosi’s Big Strong Man inside and out of the GOP. Now her Big Strong Man is starting a war with China, as if a war with Russia is not enough to scratch the back of the military contractors and to keep people from agitating against economic inequality, ecological catastrophe and the need for basic social services in the midst of an ongoing pandemic. Countless government departments were aware of the plan to steal the election days in advance of January 6. Reports were sent in from across the country through police tracking of far-right groups that were armed to kill on that day. The topic of stealing the vote was even part of the debates between Biden and Trump.
The truth of the matter is that event unfolded under the noses the US public, not unlike the events in the film Don’t Look Up, and people on the left are still in denial, as though the film is ongoing. The liberal left likes that film, but it for some reason can’t bring itself to stop playing on the sidelines and instead agitate for charges against Trump and the government insiders who planned and coordinated this assault on democratic elections (assuming that we can consider the US election system to be democratic). Maybe the journalists on the US left are so accustomed to government and corporate bullying that this seems like just another day of reporting. The activist journalists want to get on to other, more important things, like bread and butter issues – as if that is the sum of leftism. As the journalist Crystal Ball says: If Trump is just a symptom of the rot in the system, then why bother with him? I agree that the struggle for a socialist alternative to corporate capitalism has to take place within the liberal middle in general, but I can’t see how a no-brainer like calling for Trump’s prosecution is a matter of debate.
It’s sad to see the left pander this kind of equanimity. Why should the left be as noncommittal as the House Select Committee? Because they suck we should suck too? The left should use what it has as evidence to press for action against wrongdoing. It’s obviously not moral panic that is required but the fact of the matter is that from day one, the Jacobin editorial line was to play down January 6 – much the same way that the liberal left wrongly played up the lab leak hypothesis – and it seems that even after more evidence has been presented that confirms what we knew in the first days after the coup attempt, it wants to keep this wishy-washy attitudinal – not factual, not legal, not radical – perspective in the public discourse. Why? Because it hesitates to criticize the Democratic Party too much. It takes the attitude of Barack Obama towards torturers and banksters. Not good. Many recent episodes on the Jacobin YouTube channel were better than this one, even if Marcetic’s work is appreciated.
The argument that is being used at the moment to play down the coup plot is that we already know that Trump is bad, that the GOP is bad, and that emphasizing the fact is not the best strategy to win the midterm elections and the next presidential election. The point though is not that you must remind people of how bad the Republicans are, but that you yourself, as leftists, should believe it. To play this down as a Democratic Party effort at winning ratings is simply non-sequitur, like Aaron Maté at times comparing these hearings to Russiagate, in the sense that it is a diversion from more pressing problems. If you think that bread and butter economic issues are unrelated to the rise of fascist ideology, you’re thinking like a liberal. Sanders also spent his time in the 2020 election race reminding people about how bad Trump is. However, Trump attacked Sanders as a socialist, not as a technocrat. He did this because he preferred to run against Biden. Trump would likely have lost against Sanders. What does that tell you? Socialists should be fighting for socialism. The left ignores the fact that many Trump supporters like him because he’s bad. And the US is the Breaking Bad country of the planet. The point is that his badness got him caught. If the left can’t even fight this issue at the level of ideas and rhetoric, and law, what can it fight? I’m not suggesting that the left should spend all of its energy pushing for charges against Trump. The establishment will not prosecute war criminals like most of the recent US presidents. We know that. I am suggesting that the left has nothing to gain by playing down the seriousness of January 6. The reason it does so is because it’s overly concerned with the DSA strategy of winning elections for the Democratic Party so as to advance its reformist agenda. For those young socialists who are new to politics, what this attitude indicates is that the important lessons of 2016 and 2020 have not been learned and the bipartisan circus continues.
Notes
1. Marc James Léger, “The January 6 Coup Riot Was an Inside Job,” Blog of Public Secrets (June 14, 20220), https://legermj.typepad.com/blog/2022/06/the-january-6-coup-riot-was-an-inside-job.html.
2. Jacobin, “Will Dem’s Jan 6th Circus Actually Do Anything? w/ Branco Marcetic,” YouTube (August 5, 2022), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OW6WHd3GXx8.
3. Ralph Nader Radio Hour, “Ralph Nader Radio Hour – Bruce Fein – Live Zoom Taping,” YouTube (July 30, 2022), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnAj4VN0ncY. Note that on the August 6 episode Steve Skrovan selected to read a listener letter that repeated the mantra that we need to forget about January 6 and move on to bread and butter issues.