No significant pro-Trump protests, much less attacks, at the state capitols, as was threatened. Apparently an Antifa protest in Sacramento, but that was not pro-Trump. Was it all bluster to begin with, lack of support, or change of heart given the reinforcements rolled out by the government?
Pretty much I suspect, partly because Trump betrayed them by speaking out against them and not pardoning them for their acts. When you think the leader-hero has arrived to deliver you to the promised land and he throws you under the bus most will learn that he may have been not the right one.
They’ll go underground to burble for a while until they find another reason to be collectively irrationally angry and violent.
Frankly I’m more worried about what individuals might do, left without a specific focus but still with the anger and the violence and the right-wing delusions and the glavin.
Frankly I’m worried about the further erosion of basic rights and freedoms these people put in jeopardy. They are playing right into the hands of furthering the cause for a police state.
This is a lot of it. Like almost every individual or group that has ever aligned themselves with trump, they eventually got betrayed by him.
The Proud Boys, or a least some of them, have turned against trump. Many QAnon believers, I’ve been hearing, are now saying “waitaminute…was all that ‘Storm is Coming’ stuff BS?” Yes, a lot of these people will find some other cause to be fanatical about, but in a sense it’s like a bubble has popped. Without the constant supply of oxygen feeding the movement from the top, a lot of fight and focus will be drained from it, I think.
trump demonstrated just how powerful a cult of personality figure can be. Case in point- he just didn’t feel like wearing a mask to protect from Covid. He had no real ideological reason not to, I don’t believe. So his followers refused mask-wearing. His sycophants made up a bunch of reasons for not wearing a mask-- “Fauci said not to at first- he’s a hypocrite! It’s our right as Americans not to wear a mask- freedom of choice!” And then trump echoed some of these excuses after the fact, in true echo chamber fashion.
Think about it-- the only reason mask-wearing became a culture-war issue is because trump didn’t want to wear one. If he had shown an iota of true leadership and made a point of wearing a mask in public from the start, it would have become a sacred duty among trumpists to wear it.
Same with the rise of overt racism-- look how much more common stories like “Hispanic guy cuts his own lawn, passerby yells ‘GO BACK TO MEXICO’ at him” became in the last 4 years. My personal favorite-- a customer at a restaurant hears the manager speaking Spanish and yells at him to speak English. The punchline? It was a Mexican restaurant. Anyway, like mask-wearing, the tacit permissiion to be overtly racist came directly from trump.
trump is gone now, and as his influence fades, so too will the emulation of his bad examples and terrible ideas. At least that’s my hope.
Obviously, the insurrectionists were a collective wrang-wrang that sparked a vin-dit in the Trumpist Granfalloon, thereby enabling their saroon to jettison that sin-wat and curtail the pool-pah that certainly would have otherwise come. Busy, busy, busy…
Yes – for now.
They are also without a figurehead, which hurts them even more. Losing Trump is akin to Al Qaida losing Bin Laden.
Agreed - I think you nailed it in that post. Some of the absolute nuttiest of the nut bars are going through withdrawals and having a serious hangover right about now. I think MAGA is going to go through an identity crisis now that it has largely been de-platformed (wish it would have happened sooner).
I would be careful about believing that this is over, though. Trump exposed a very disturbing reality about this country, which is that white America is itself suffering an identity crisis and struggling to cope with the inevitability of losing its status as an ethnic majority. Trump made it clear to any would-be right wing authoritarian populist that there is a market for an ethno-nationalist political campaign. It’s just a matter of time before another one picks up the flag and marches on.
We have to push it back by strengthening institutions so that they serve the public interest, and we really have to do something about economic inequality and the pandemic in a way that convinces most white Americans that cooperation and egalitarianism are good ‘isms’, not ‘communism’.
Literally immediately, the phrase “If you want to know what’s in a Granfalloon, open the skin of a toy balloon” popped into my head. Thank you for today’s obscure literary reference.
The only one they listen to is Trump. Trump said “come to DC on Jan 6th!”, so they came. Trump DIDN’T say “come to DC and state capitols on Jan 20th”, so they didn’t. No one else can organize or motivate them.
I think it’s as simple as that.
I think a better way to put that would have been:
On Jan 6 nobody else could organize or motivate them as well as or differently from how Trump did.
If Trump is silenced, IMO many somebodies will be competing for the opportunity to lead that same mob on that same crusade (plus/minus some nuance points). And the faster any given somebody comes to the fore, the more of the old MAGA mob is still of a mindset to join. Speed is of the essence when picking up the shards of Trump’s shattered mantle. And all the RW wannabe tyrants know that.
It’s fair to say that Trump had a lot of enablers in the RW media & RW politics. He wasn’t a mere figurehead, but if the rest of RW-dom had just pointed, laughed, and turned their backs in 2015 he’d have gone nowhere.
All those enablers want the gravy train to continue now. Both the money train and the power train. They are probably not a single coherent shadowy cabal, so they don’t have a single pre-planned successor. It’ll be an unseemly Battle Royale over this very valuable greased pig. But rest assured the various backers are moving even today to advance their various chosen champions.
This. Exactly this.
Four years of exalting blinkered abject selfishness to the highest ideal of the land has not done our collective psyche any good. Them successfully labeling as “communism” anything less than that abject selfishness was a masterstroke of evil. Just as was remaking the American flag into the rallying symbol of the forces of anti-democracy.
I think there are a couple of Republican Congressmen who opportunistically see this as a vacuum they can fill by taking pages out of Trump’s playbook. Ted Cruz comes to mind but I think he’s too incompetent to pull it off.
The funny/sad part is with Trump’s mindset, they betrayed Trump. Anything that damages Trump’s reputation and puts him in a negative light will get you labeled a traitor or disloyal or a leaker in Trump’s book even if that was never the intention.
I always thought it was kind of amazing that they basically passed on the opportunity to mass-manufacture red MAGA masks and have people wearing them ALL THE TIME, just because Trump personally didn’t like the idea. Had he taken the greedy tack, he could have sold tens of millions of those masks or more.
I agree with what is being said here and will add that as the economy starts recovering from the pandemic people will have something more productive to do. I would not underestimate the rage power of large numbers of unemployed individuals sitting at home surfing right-wing websites getting all worked-up over stuff. One way the Biden administration can tamp-down some of this rage is to do things that can reduce unemployment.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard his problem is incompetence. He’s just not charismatic at all. When he’s selling you bullshit, it’s not fun like when Trump does it.
If I had to guess, I have a feeling that the next Trump will have some of the same Trumpian qualities. He’ll be an ‘outsider’, bashing the system from outside Washington. He’ll promise to be an agent of radical change. He’ll promise to defend heritage (White heritage, to be exact). He’ll be a toxic capitalist, and he will probably present ‘evidence’ of his capitalistic ‘acumen’ (from the world of business, or entertainment, or professional athletics, or the military - or televangelism). He will try to pass himself off as ‘extraordinary’. He’ll brag and bloviate.
QAnon, Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, and related groups are scary because of their commitment to violence in the name of nationalism, but they’re not the ones who keep me up at night. What does keep me up is the thought of another Trump-like figure but less delusional and a little more disciplined and intelligent when it comes to building and running an ideologue’s factory, if you will. And by that I mean, having the ability to bring attention to himself in such a way that goes beyond merely grifting but instead attracts people who have a fucked up view of ethno-nationalism not as a backwards looking worldview, but one that sadistically looks forward.
At the risk of milking the Nazi example to death, Nazi Germany was partly rooted in an idea of returning Germany to the glory of its past, but it was a movement that attracted people because it tried to pass itself off as ‘ultra modern’ in some regards. Communism was also a radical forward-looking ideology- utopia is always about the future, not the past. When we discuss ‘utopia’ we tend to pejoratively associate it with liberalism run off the rails, but there are conservatives who have radioactive view of what utopia means to them as well. That’s the kind of danger I’m looking for on my radar screen.
While I am concerned about a future “smarter Trump,” I do think they’ll also have a lot of disadvantages in having to try and be more palatable. A lot of what was Trump’s “superpower” was his irrationality–how little he cared if what he did made sense. It left him less constrained than most.
A lot of what were his flaws that kept him from succeeding were the very things that attracted his audience. I think the next Trump will have to actually try to court people who were alienated by Trump in order to succeed. At the very least, they’d need to actually court the military, and that would restrain some actions.
I don’t know that any of the Jan. 6th insurrectionists were unemployed. Nearly all of them seem to be employed, some quite well so. If you’ve got the resources to travel to Washington, you’re probably not unemployed.