Watching the riots of 6th January in Washington DC from across the Atlantic, one cannot help being struck by the expressions of shock and desecration across the whole political spectrum. All Americans seem to share the feeling that the Capitol is in some sense Holy Ground. That was impressive.
For all the hand-wringing over the events in Washington on January 6th, I thought they showed the underlying strength of American democracy. The riot was just a pin-prick, after which the System resumed its old and rather majestic ways, just as it had following the Nixon scandals. It passed the stress tests with consummate ease. The swamp, God bless it, is in rude good health.
Yet the demonstrations have left me with a nasty feeling of personal hypocrisy: that, at least in times gone by, I was there too, and I know where the demonstrators are coming from. The rioters are striving to correct what they see as a monstrous injustice, which Due Process has failed to rectify. What else can they do but take Direct Action? They are suffering from illusion, but we too had illusions, and the same fantasies about revolutions, what Lenin called ‘revolutionary adventurism’. We too wanted to correct injustices that Due Process had failed to resolve.
Older lefty readers might remember the great myth of the Revolution. Somehow, we all believed it, even the environmentalists and mild-mannered libertarian socialists. Somehow, we‘d got the idea that the default state of society is just, ordered and benign, but was prevented from being so by sinister vested interests, mostly capitalists, typically depicted with top hats and cigars. An analogy might be a kaleidoscope: shake it up, and it’s beautiful. We thought society was a bit like that.
We also idolised the common people: the mob, the engine of the revolution, that could sweep aside the capitalists; and we enjoyed fantasising about how this might happen. Take this 1917 poem by Siegfried Sassoon:
“THE boys came back. Bands played and flags were flying,
And Yellow-Pressmen thronged the sunlit street
To cheer the soldiers who’d refrained from dying,
And hear the music of returning feet.
‘Of all the thrills and ardours War has brought,
This moment is the finest.’ (So they thought.)
Snapping their bayonets on to charge the mob,
Grim Fusiliers broke ranks with glint of steel,
At last the boys had found a cushy job.
I heard the Yellow-Pressmen grunt and squeal;
And with my trusty bombers turned and went
To clear those Junkers out of Parliament.”
Did Sassoon mean this metaphorically? Perhaps. But my friend, the anarchist artist Cliff Harper turned it into a cartoon strip with much more literal images, and I remember chuckling over it.
There was something thrilling in the feeling of these common squaddies, cannon fodder, ‘Lions led by Donkeys’, all honest Joes, representing The Good, and The Will of the People, spontaneously ‘breaking ranks’ to wreak revenge, clear out the stables of hypocrisy and entrenched privilege – and indeed to triumph over evil. Goodies and Baddies! Hooray!
From The Education of Desire: The Anarchist Graphics of Cliff Harper, Annarres 1984
But I see all this in the Trumpist mobs too. They feel it in the same way, honest Joes (and Marys) taking direct action because they think they are The People, and the System is rigged against them. They feel they represent the good against transcendent evils.
Outside the Capitol building, the vast majority had come to Washington, often great distances, to bear witness. This is honourable, and just what liberals would do in their place. Over the years, I have supported many lost causes in just such a fashion.
What I am saying is that these are common human emotions and reactions, but they have led to tremendous splits in society. What are we to do? Is it just a fight to the finish, or is there some possibility of reconciliation, of human understanding?
Let me unpick things a bit. Oddly, the Left seems to have moved on, while the Right has embraced revolutionary illusions. There are still believers in the original great Socialist Revolution, but not many. We now understand that the default state of society is not equality, nor even order, but dog-eat-dog, Mad Max, rule of the warlords. It takes a long, long time and much care and sacrifice to create a well-functioning modern state, and it needs careful nurturing to make sure it is not disrupted. Violent revolution is anathema. Even the Left understand the significance of Due Process, and critically, of non-violence. Paradoxically it is now the Left that embraces order, while at least parts of the Right favour disruption.
If the Left has junked violent Revolution; what about dedication to the Working Class? Was this a matter of principle, or were the workers just ‘useful idiots’ for cliques to take power? Read that last sentence again: we now see precisely this: they have been mobilized, but on behalf of the wrong clique. Meanwhile the Left must still confront the question of its relationship to the resentful, exploited and dispossessed part of society: if its programme is not about them, what is it for? While we were scratching our heads about this, they’ve gone off with the other side!
Well, OK, there has been a realignment in postmodern societies. A liberal elite gathers the educated middle classes and has more or less abandoned the rest to the political Right, which attempts to organise and harness the relatively uneducated ‘mob’. I think the liberal view has been to get the mob to shut up and refrain from politics, largely by giving it what it seems to like best, panem et circenses, and shopping. But – glory be – the mob retains some notion of self-regard and from time to time demands a Turn in government, which the complacent political class are not expecting, hence Trump and Brexit. The problem then is to get through the due period without irreversible damage to the state apparatus. The ‘swamp’ must not be drained.
For such reasons, liberals cannot afford to ignore the mob: whipped up by clever demagogues, it can rise up, and can wreck the place and generate violent riots. Or worse.
Is there any way we can get the best out of people wanting to bear active, personal witness on matters they consider very important? Due Process must be the bedrock, but we cannot deny that physical protest and direct action will and should erupt from time to time. The key is that it must not be violent. “Direct Action” of this kind has traditionally been owned by the Left, often under the banner of NVDA: Nonviolent Direct Action. You stand, you bear witness, you accept the consequences. You get beaten up, tried, perhaps go to jail. You do not hurt anyone and you do not damage property, unless in a specifically targeted and symbolic way.
This has been a left-wing tradition, but can we imagine right-wing NVDA? For example, the crowd round the Capitol could have systematically refused to obey the curfew and actually courted arrest. There could have been thousands, clogging up the system, and thereby making their point.
I am serious about this. I must admit the principle of nonviolence sits unhappily on the American Right, with its great attachment to firearms. Nevertheless, I’d urge them to give NVDA a try, because with their usual hand-weapons they cannot possibly prevail against properly-armed (and trained) police and troops. NVDA highlights personal risk and bravery, and seizes the moral advantage. It also delivers a platform to explain their reasoning and the general perspective, in courts of law. This has been cleverly used by the left to make all manner of significant points, bringing out neglected evidence, mainly for the benefit of reporting journalists, but also for judges and juries, who have often seen fit to acquit. It has been an enlightening experience all round, with enhanced respect for due process.
Right-wing NVDA could approach the courts in the same way, with carefully-assembled arguments. Of course, liberals would predict such cases will fall to pieces under cross-examination because they are based on conjured-up notions without evidence. But that is all part of the process. If it is all rubbish, defendants will have great trouble constructing a convincing brief, and attorneys will make mincemeat of them. But if there are real issues, here will be a chance to spell them out in public.
I like this thought. That if the various cases made are poorly-based, this will be a great education for selected members of the Right. They will rub up against the great world of reason and evidence – possibly a novel experience – and thereby get to understand a bit more where liberals are coming from. But if the cases have genuine merit, they will be brought to the attention of liberals who will be forced to engage and will have to move away from knee-jerk disdain – which is a large part of the problem in the first place. We should not forget that a big chunk of the resentment felt by the populist Right is the sense of being looked down on by us, the patronising bastards, the liberal establishment.
We hate them, they hate us. But we’re not so bad, are we? Neither are they.