How did the US's mainstream right end up openly
supporting vigilante terror?
Richard Seymour
The apocalyptic conspiracy theories of rightwing
groups afraid of losing their power give evil a name, and offer an answer
Tue 1 Sep
2020 09.32 BSTLast modified on Tue 1 Sep 2020 13.51 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/01/us-mainstream-right-vigilante-terror
Kyle
Rittenhouse, a “Blue Lives Matter” fanatic, Donald Trump supporter and militia
member, has been charged with murder. It is alleged that having travelled from
Illinois to Wisconsin to point his assault rifle at unarmed protesters, he shot
two people dead. He was later heard claiming: “I just killed somebody.”
While the
Trump campaign quietly disavowed this enthusiastic supporter, insisting he had
“nothing to do with our campaign” (as though anyone had suggested otherwise),
the president himself defended Rittenhouse, saying he appeared to have been
acting in self defence. Message boards such as Reddit and 4chan are humming
with commentary supporting Rittenhouse. Predictably, every accused lone-wolf
murderer generates an online fan club. Likewise, the Christian right has
already raised $250,000 for Rittenhouse’s defence.
However,
the decision of rightwing celebrity journalists to gleefully defend Rittenhouse
crosses a new threshold. Ann Coulter, the infantile shock-jock of American
reaction, said of Rittenhouse: “I want him as my president.” While Coulter is a
media opportunist mining for controversy, Tucker Carlson of Fox News, a more
doctrinaire far-rightist, offered an emotional defence. “How shocked are we,”
Carlson said, “that 17-year-olds with rifles decided they had to maintain order
when no one else would?”
This, from
a talking head who has spent the Trump years mainstreaming various white
nationalists, inciting racism and portraying the apocalyptic meltdown of the US
caused by immigrants and liberal elites, betrays a conception of order
identical to that of Rittenhouse and other white vigilantes who have pointed
their guns at Black Lives Matter protesters, such as the Three Percenters and
militiamen who have paraded the streets of Philadelphia, Ohio, Chicago and
Albuquerque.
For the
ideologues, law and order in Kenosha is social obedience on the part of those
targeted for police violence, and it would be legitimately upheld by a white
paramilitary who guns people down in cold blood for opposing the racist murder
of black people. This is an ideology of law and order that could come from the
antebellum South, or the frontier west.
Just as
disturbing, for those likely to be on the receiving end of police violence, has
been the convergence of police and paramilitaries. It is not just that
militiamen are hardline supporters of the police who see themselves as
augmenting state repression. Police themselves have repeatedly condoned and
indulged the vigilantes, who have been permitted to roam around with guns out,
attacking Black Lives Matter crowds unimpeded by authorities.
In Kenosha,
police were recorded handing out water to a crowd of white militiamen, telling
them: “We appreciate you being here.” The chief of Kenosha police has defended
the role of white vigilantes in the protests. Police allegedly declined to
arrest Rittenhouse after he’d just shot two people, was pointed out as the
shooter by several witnesses, and was walking towards a police vehicle with his
hands up.
The brazen
overtness of the right’s dalliance with vigilante terror in answer to Black
Lives Matter has been some time in the making. Trump has done as much as he can
to mainstream the violent far right in the same way that he has normalised
conspiracist paranoia with his birtherism, climate denialism and references to
the “deep state”. From his declaration that armed Charlottesville protesters
were “very fine people” to his defence of armed protesters in Michigan, and his
exhortations to rightwing paramilitaries to “LIBERATE MINNESOTA”, “LIBERATE
MICHIGAN” and then “LIBERATE VIRGINIA” from Covid-19 lockdown, Trump lets the
purveyors of armed fury know just whose side he’s on.
He has also
conspicuously refused to disavow the QAnon conspiracy theory. According to
this, he is saving the world from a “deep state” conspiracy of liberal,
Satan-worshipping paedophiles, and hastening the “storm” – a day of violent
reckoning. Its supporters are deemed a domestic terror threat. The American far
right thrives on the prospect of annihilation, and the “end of days” mood
licenses its paranoid violence.
There is a
broader context for America’s turn toward what writer Huw Lemmey accurately
characterises as a sub-Verhoeven dystopia. Rapture-seeking movements such as
QAnon, or those prepping for the “boogaloo”, are working the margins of a
culturally mainstream phenomenon. Although the US has always been immersed in
the fantasy of “regeneration through violence”, rarely has so much of the
country been so thoroughly in the grip of adrenaline-pumping, apocalyptic
excitement and conspiracist paranoia.
In both
conspiracy theories and apocalyptic fantasies, life is reduced to a cosmic
showdown between good and evil. The traumas and disappointments of life are
folded into a millenarian revenge fantasy-cum-death wish, as in the enormously
popular series of Left Behind novels about rapture and the struggle with the
papal antichrist. Such apocalyptic thinking reverberates through a network of
institutions, including white evangelical churches, Fox News and the Republican
party itself.
Trump’s
rhetoric has always invoked gruesome apocalyptic scenarios if his opponents
win. This year’s Republican convention is fully channelling this mania, with
speakers shouting about liberals who want to “enslave” Americans, steal their
freedom and turn the US “into a socialist utopia”, or comparing the Democrats
to “communist China”. Notably, the convention paraded a white couple arrested
and charged for waving guns at Black Lives Matter protesters, who claimed that
the Democrats would abolish the suburbs and let the criminals move in next
door. Truly, the end times.
The
specific American form of apocalyptic thinking is not just Christian but,
historically, anti-communist. In an era of anti-communism without communism,
Trump charges that Black Lives Matter protests are led by Marxists, “leftwing
extremists” and others out to destroy “the United States system of government”.
Thus, the crises that afflict the US are figured as a diabolical plot, much as
past generations of anti-communist blamed worker strikes and civil rights
struggles on what John Rankin of the House un-American activities committee
called “this great octopus, communism, which is out to destroy everything”.
Today’s
conspiracist bricolage thrives on the collapse of consensus reality, and on the
disintegrating authority of older gatekeepers of truth. More importantly, it
milks a fascination with the destruction of one’s enemies and, tacitly,
oneself. In the past, apocalyptic fantasy has been seen as a paranoid reaction
to economic deprivation and political persecution. That was true of peasant
movements such as the Lazzarettists, who launched a violent revolt against the
government and the ruling class in 19th-century Italy, but it hardly explains
the disproportionately affluent Trump base, and it doesn’t explain rich
Washington journalists such as Tucker Carlson rationalising murder in cold
blood.
Apocalyptic
conspiracy thinking is, above all, a theodicy: it explains evil, and says what
will be done about evil. The end times thinking that is sweeping the US, and
justifying every new outrage, is the theodicy of groups frightened of losing
their power and arming themselves to defend it.
• Richard
Seymour is a political activist and author; his latest book is The Twittering
Machin
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