Two years ago, January 6 2021, the US Capitol Building was sieged by far right militia groups, conspiracy theorists, and other supporters of Donald Trump. The mob forced their way into the D.C. edifice after Trump falsely declared the 2020 election to be stolen, resulting in the deaths of five people and hundreds of injuries.“Stand back and stand by,” Trump told the white nationalist chauvinist group The Proud Boys in an election debate prior. And they did. But what might have been the closest these groups have come to a full-scale coup, may have also been their biggest own goal.
The attack was a culmination, the final sanding off of the veneer that varnished an undercurrent of right-wing extremism that had been brewing online in hate forums. It may have seemed, in the drunken hope of Obama’s terms, that the far right had faded into obscurity and become a rare-to-find-niche in a modern and liberal world. But as we now know, fascism had never gone away, it was merely standing back and standing by, looking for an opportune moment.
Extremists lingered in dark and taboo corners of the internet, all the while learning how to wear the mask of civility politics. The name of the game was plausible deniability: belts and braces were swapped for a tidy hair cut and button-down, swastikas for wry humour and
internet slang. The attempted coup brought an unmasking of the very real threat that these groups pose and how very prevalent they are. Ten years ago, “white supremacy” for many people would conjure images of skinheads and Klan members, something that was commonplace years ago but not today. But January sixth brought us face to face with the
ubiquity of it, and has forced us to interrogate where else it might be hidden.
When I call the aftermath of January 6 ‘Positive Politics,’ I don’t just mean the justice that has been served against the insurrectionaries since, or even the subsequent appointment of Joe Biden. Rather, I mean the fact that the mask has slipped. After years of cryptographically analysing pundits and politicians, I would like to think we are now more
primed, as media and the voting public, to notice the signs. And indeed, the justice is nice, one standout piece of schadenfreude was the $1.5bn fine that bankrupted Alex Jones in December. Of course, the threat of right wing extremism has not gone away and it probably never will, but we have a new weapon in our arsenal. To misquote Sun Tzu (as
every good column should) by “knowing ones enemy” we may stand a chance of keeping fascism deep beneath the dirt.
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