Gunfighter Nation
America's Coming Civil War
Students of the American Civil War may remember the incident that took place in the US Senate on May 22, 1856, when the pro-slavery southerner Representative Preston Brooks beat the anti-slavery northerner Senator Charles Sumner unconscious in the Senate Chamber with a cane. This vicious assault was a response to a speech by Sumner attacking the ‘Slave Oligarchy’ in the South and demanding that Kansas be admitted to the United States as a free state.
It may seem astonishing to present day readers that no one intervened or tried to stop Brooks as he walked out of the chamber, or that the senator faced no legal or political penalty apart from a $300 fine for what he himself described as a ‘simple assault and battery’, even though Sumner was so seriously injured he was unable to take his seat for three years.
At the time however, this incident was not as egregious as it might seem. It took place at a time when America was sliding towards civil war, in a century in which American congressmen often carried pistols or bowie knives onto the congressional floor. In 1838 – a Democrat congressman was killed in a duel by a Whig opponent in a duel. In 1837 the Speaker in the Arkansas state legislature stabbed an opponent to death during a debate in 1837.
Compared with this history, it might seem like a little frivolous amusement that Arizona Republican Representative Paul Gosar posted a 90-second doctored clip from the ‘Attack on Titan’ anime series last month, in which he appears as a superhero slashing the throat of a character with the superimposed face of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Or that the sinister Mean Girls bigot Lauren Boebert should be cracking jokes accusing Ilhan Omar of being jihadist and an ‘evil’ terrorist, or Omar a member of the ‘Jihad Squad’ in Congress.
Funny right? But we aren’t dealing with lapses of taste here. Gosar, like Boebert, is a repellent character located on what used to be the far-right Republican fringe, and which has now become the Republican mainstream. In a powerful speech during the debate on whether to censure him on November 17, Ocasio-Cortez described his video as an act of ‘nihilism’ and asked the house ‘ What is so hard about saying this is wrong?’
It turns out it was very hard for Republicans, only two of whom supported the censure motion. Even when it was eventually carried, some Republicans, including the QAnon Trumpite and insurrectionist cheerleader Marjorie Taylor Greene, joined Gosar in the well to show their solidarity when the motion was read out. Because like, what’s the world coming to when a congressman can’t post a sado-video in which he cuts an opponent’s throat? Cancel culture gone mad.
Once again, some of you snowflakes out there might be tempted to attribute the Republican refusal to condemn Gosar to misguided partisanship or political cowardice. But as AOC suggested, the rot runs deeper than that, because we aren’t talking about bad manners or disrespect here.
Politicians like Gosar, Greene and Boebert are as close as you can be to Nazis without actually strutting round with stiff arms and black uniforms, and increasingly the same can be said of the Republican Party as a whole. This is not just a party that rejects bipartisanship and ‘losers consent’, or which seeks to change electoral rules, remodel institutions and gerrymander boundaries in order to perpetuate itself in power.
All that is clear enough. But the GOP is not just an American version of Orbanism or Erdogan. The GOP is not just bending rules, it is openly embracing violent insurrection in order to overturn the rules. It condones and glorifies acts of violence directed against the federal government, the left, or uppity minorities.
In September 2020 the counterinsurgency expect David Kilkullen, one of the architects of the Iraq ‘surge’ described America as a country facing ‘incipient insurgency’ following the summer of protests, riots, and militiarisation.
On January 6, these tendencies ceased to be ‘incipient’, when Donald Trump and his team, and a number of leading Republicans openly encouraged the deadly assault on the US Capitol. One of them was Lauren Boebert, who tweeted on the day ‘Today is 1776.’ Since then leading Republican politicians and commentators have refused to condemn the assault, or even to criticize the insurrectionists who called for the hanging of their own vice-president.
Not all Republicans use the language of representatives like Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz, who depict arrested insurrectionists ‘political prisoners’. But Republican Senators have blocked calls for a bipartisan committee to investigate the assault and Republicans have remained silent about Trump’s involvement in the Capitol assault. Not only have they refused to condemn Trump’s bloated sidekick Steve Bannon, who told his podcast listenters on January 5 to ‘strap in’ because ‘we're pulling the trigger on something’ and ‘we're on the point of attack tomorrow.’
Instead of condemning Bannon’s refusal to appear before the congressional investigation into the assault, they are ‘rallying around’ him and promising to ‘go after’ Biden’s aides if they win the midterm elections. Meanwhile Bannon has called for ‘shock troops’ to ‘take over the administrative state and ‘deconstruct it’ in the event of a Republican victory.
God’s Army
And Trump’s supposedly disgraced former national security advisor Michael Flynn - the QAnon general who endorsed the prospect of a Myanmar-style coup in America last May - has now gone on to promise ‘One nation under God’ during his ‘Reawaken America’ tour which may be a prelude to relaunching his own political career.
None of this seems to bother the Grand Old Party. Last month the Ohio state treasurer and Senate candidate Josh Mandel tweeted
Mandel’s endorsement is not surprising from a politician who also regards evangelical Christians, Jewish conservatives and Catholics as members of the Republican ‘army’
Last, but by no means least, Republican politicians and commentators have fallen over themselves to celebrate the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict and the militiarisation of American society that he was part of.
None of this is normal, but it’s where the Republican Party and the broader far-right movement that surrounds and permeates it is going, and it means that America is headed towards a very dark place.
In the 1920s the Nazi Party was a fringe far-right party, that came to power through a strategy of destabilisation through streetfighting in order to create the impression of a national emergency to which it was the solution. This combination ultimately brought it to power through parliamentary elections, whereupon it abolished all the trappings of parliamentary democracy and the legal structures that underpinned it.
The Republican Party, by contrast, is a democratic party that has allowed itself to be transformed into a religio-fascist party, and which either through cowardice, a lust for power, or ideology, is no longer willing to observe the rules of the democratic game that it once adhered to.
This transformation combines a number of features that are familiar to the development of fascist movements: the collapse of empire; the hollowing out of the middle class; the loss of faith in democratic politics as a means of solving political and social problems; a devastating social crisis - in this case the pandemic; the perceived loss of status by a white majority and the growing persecution of foreigners and minorities that accompanies it, and last but by no means least - the blind adherence to a single messianic leader who trades in lies, violence, and fantasies of restoring lost ‘greatness’.
In a country awash with guns and former military veterans, it is very easy to imagine a situation in which a Republican candidate loses, and Republican-majority states simply refuse to accept the result, declaring some kind of de facto seccession or ‘independence’, backed up by the bearded militia slobs who we have seen so much of in the last few years.
Some states may do the same thing in response to Biden’s vaccine mandates, or, if Bannon’s aspirations are borne out, a victorious president might unleash ‘shock troops’ to impose a Repulbican gleichschaltung and impose some kind of quasi-theological white supremacist dictatorship.
All these dire possibilities, that once might have belonged to what if? films like Frankenheimer’s Seven Days in May, are now feasible, ina country where the main opposition party has become a direct threat to American democracy and indeed to the survival of the American republic.
To defeat it will require the broadest possible coalition of democratic forces, and a government prepared to use the full panoply of legal and political measures against those who are trying not just to bury the Biden administration, but to bury and American democracy which may well be flawed, but remains so much better than anything the new breed of Republican fascists have to offer.