Fascism and Bad Faith

Insurrection Or Non-Event? It's Up To You.

The history of January 6 cannot be muddled. We saw what happened and we won’t be gaslighted.

My son was wearing a blue cape adorned with an orange X, and he kept flashing in and out of the living room, his attention drawn to the chaos of the TV more with every brief visit.

A couple hours earlier, I had driven to the nearby MVA to have the family van’s emissions tested, and on the way back home I saw a small plane flying overhead with a big white banner with bold black letters: STOP THE STEAL. I thought it strange for someone to continue the fascist cry six weeks after the fascist had lost his reelection bid. Oh well, I thought, sour grapes and all that. They’ll have to get over it.

I sat behind my laptop hours later amid a bunch of moving boxes in the living room, trying and failing to get some work done while an anti-democracy army descended on the United State Capitol like slimy maggots descending on a rotting animal corpse. Eventually, on the fourth or fifth trip across the living room during his playacting game, my then 8-year-old son asked me what was happening on the TV screen: Why was there so much smoke and why were people climbing over walls and why were they breaking windows and hollering into megaphones? Why were they carrying Trump flags?

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Explaining a coup to a child, it turns out, is not easy. And as the insurrectionist crowd became more emboldened and more violent, I figured it was only a matter of time before police or the National Guard or some branch of the military responded with force, perhaps the deadly kind. Probably an 8-year-old shouldn’t see insurrectionists getting mowed down on live TV; such are the considerations of a parent in the third decade of the 21st century. I asked my wife to come get my son and proceeded to watch the rest of the insurrectionist coverage with limited commercial interruptions, which was nice.

I waited for the troops to arrive, for some kind of response to this unprecedented siege of the American government. There was none. They were left free to rampage, to destroy, to threaten and, just maybe, overturn an election that had not gone their way. A nation of cops had no answer to a violent insurgency against its own government.

For a brief moment, before the right-wing media machine began whirring and the history of January 6 began to be rewritten by a media apparatus that now controls history in real time, we all recognized what had happened because we saw it happen. Before the gaslighting, before the obscuring of who did what and for what purpose on January 6, Americans understood the gravity of what took place and, I think, were largely supportive of a strong response to the betrayal of the insurrectionists and the day’s plotters. We saw what happened with our own eyes and we were horrified.

There was not yet an alternative version of January 6 – a choose-your-own-adventure version. There were only real events. There were dead insurrectionists and dead cops and a burning Capitol and lawmakers cowering in closets, praying they would not be found and their blood spilled on the marble floors. There were law enforcement members who killed themselves after being trapped in Donald Trump's fascist war zone.

I watch replays of the insurrection and I boil inside. None of them should have been allowed to get on with their lives after slaps on the wrist. But they did, and for that we will pay dearly.

I take no pleasure whatsoever in reminding Bad Faith Times readers that I predicted the failure of the January 6 commission as a way to move the political needle and inform the American public of the true threat it faced in the country's burgeoning fascist movement. The Democrats' strategy might have worked in the 90s or early 2000s: Using primetime TV to communicate with Americans about the near-end of self governance in the United States. Their messaging would have been filtered through mainstream media outlets and the public (likely) would be reasonably informed about what happened on that dark day.

Instead, Democrats' charts and graphs and videos were funneled directly into the gaping maw of right-wing cable news and podcasts and YouTube channels and fascist Instagram and TikTok influencers and the public was left clueless about what had actually transpired on January 6 because the right-wing media machine is a well-oiled thing. I recall talking to my dad a few months after the insurrection and staring at him with disbelief and ice running through my veins as he described the assault on the Capitol as a walking tour of Washington, D.C.

Even conservatives who later soft-soaped January 6 as a non-event were shaken by what they had seen that day – a rabid mob breaking down the doors to the seat of American power, seeking blood, seeking the immediate end of democracy. As Seth Myers says in the video above, every single member of Congress and every member of the Trump administration should have worn the shame of January 6 around their necks for the rest of their lives. Their names should have gone down as enemies of the United States on par – even worse, perhaps – with our most determined foreign enemies. There should have been no barrier to these people facing the full force of the law.

Whatever happens in the coming years, however many America-hating insurrectionists are pardoned and held up by right-wing media as patriots, however many of them join the Trump administration or win political office, we – the anti-fascist coalition, whatever that is today – must always reject the far-right framing of January 6 as a glorious day in which freedom-loving citizens took matters into their own hands and fought back against shadowy forces who had installed a new president. Bad faith is most powerful when it concocts a new and politically-convenient narrative, and therefore history.

You and I, for as long as we live, must push back against anyone who so much as suggests January 6 was not a violent attack on the nation itself. I had to do this during a Christmas party a few weeks ago: Four Whiteclaws deep and after a couple sips of someone's tequila, I was forced to argue with a Bolsonaro-adoring Brazilian guy who first claimed January 6 never happened, then conceded it happened but said it had been a deep state or Antifa project to land Trump in prison. I said no, you're wrong, and you should feel bad for being wrong. You should have great shame about that, I said, made brave and yes, a little belligerent by the booze.

The history of January 6 cannot be muddled. We saw what happened and we won’t be gaslighted. Will holding firm in this stance matter in the face of a media landscape dominated by right-wing interests determined to fashion an alternative history for its warped consumers? I don't know.

Prioritizing Justice Somewhat

Expanding the Supreme Court, undoing anti-democracy state-level laws, creating a public healthcare option, extending the COVID-era social safety net programs that briefly made the United States a less barbaric place: I thought all of this, in some order, should have been the priority for the Biden administration.

I was wrong.

Punishing the January 6 insurrectionists and bring to justice all those who planned the (barely) failed coup attempt should have been the top priority for Biden officials. It should have been swift. It should have taken precedence over everything. In a functional representative democracy, trying to overthrow the government after a free and fair election has to come with serious consequences. Examples must be made of those who plan and carry out the coup – and foot soldiers who follow orders – so that future coups are unthinkable. Coup-curious Americans needed to be made afraid.

Quick and orderly justice for those who would threaten the fabric of the nation: This should have been the guiding lights of Biden’s Justice Department, of his entire administration. That it was not means we now have an insurrectionist president taking office in a couple weeks, guided by an unelected fascist billionaire determined to turn every western democracy into goo. Biden and his top lieutenants tried desperately not to appear political in the prosecution of the coup-doers, which makes little sense considering this is an explicitly political issue. The insurrectionists refused to recognize the results of an election and the transfer of power; it was Biden’s job to do anything and everything to make them pay a steep price for their sins against democracy.

Norms respecters dominated in the weeks and months after January 6. Their question seemed to be: How can we get back to normal politics? The answer, of course, was that there was no freeway exit that would take us back to pre-Trump American politics. We will never get back there. Democracy, by 2020, had curdled to the point where thousands of red-pilled Americans believed themselves justified in destroying the U.S. Capitol and threatening death for duly elected lawmakers whose job was to certify the results of the 2020 election. It had become so brutally clear we were done with norms, yet the norms lovers won the day and the response to the most significant American event of at least the past 150 years was toothless, ineffective, and worked to legitimize the unforgivable acts committed by coup plotters and their suburban fascist soldiers who had heart attacks as they climbed the Capitol stairs, all for the glory of the Big Boy.

Biden and his officials lacked the proper and necessary spine to do the hard work of defending American democracy. They also – and I think this is crucial – refuse to see the Republican Party for what it has become: A big-tent political operation based entirely on a disdain for democracy and all its trappings, an organization that deems anyone outside their tribe as an illegitimate leader of the United States. If democracy is understood as a political system “in which election results are respected, transfers of power uncontested, and violence refuted as a means of solving political problems,” as anti-fascist writer Ruth Ben-Ghiat wrote this week, the Republican Party has fully radicalized into an anti-democratic force the likes of which we have not seen in modern history.

“Authoritarians view the absence of restraints on them as a sign of weakness,” Ben-Ghiat wrote.

Never in recent history has an authoritarian strongman been so emboldened as Trump, who spent the past four years watching with perverse glee as his country’s government refused to do what was necessary to stop the erosion of democracy. With the help of John Roberts – who has positioned himself nicely as the most dangerous figure in American history – Trump beat the January 6 charges and now knows for sure there are no limits to his power – or rather, no one willing to enforce those limits. Before January 6, he only suspected as much.

Biden and congressional Democrats needed to spend years delegitimizing the GOP as a viable party that deserves to exist in a multiracial democracy and emphasizing what a danger the party represented to free and fair elections (both here and abroad, where American fascism is already being used as a legal argument by wannabe autocrats). Instead, Biden waited too long to drop out of the race and watched Trump glide to victory and then took hideous glad handing pictures with the guy he claims represents an existential threat to the country. He (along with every single member of his party’s failed leadership) either will not or cannot come to grips with one of the nation’s two major parties morphing into something that seeks to end the country as we know it and realign the US with other autocratic countries that long ago gave up on self governance.

The only reason I’m not watching another violent insurrection today, as Kamala Harris prepares to certify her opponent’s win – a humiliation without equal – is because Trump somehow won all seven swing states. If Harris had kept running an oddball, deeply online campaign that professional Democratic consultants managed to ruin in the fall, she might’ve won three or four of those swing states and Trump would have suffered a second straight narrow electoral loss and we would have right-wing vigilantes and avowed fascists trying to intimidate lawmakers and take down the government before another centrist Democrat could have her victory confirmed by Congress and serve as caretaker of the empire for a little while.

The only reason blood is not spilling today is because the blood spiller won in November.

Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.