January 6th, the Brooks Brothers Riot, and How We Can All Stop Entertaining This Absurdity
The "Unity" being sold to us is bad, actually. Here's why.
Wednesday, January 6th — the day Joe Biden was set to be certified as the next President of the United States, and just hours after the Georgia runoffs officially assured Democratic control of the Senate — was instead a violent manifestation that put on full display the attitudes of grievance and undemocratic entitlement constantly stirring within this country. Hundreds of people, actively abetted by members of congress — business owners, elected officials, private jet-riding real estate brokers, former and active members of both the military and police departments, among others — invaded the nation’s Capitol in a violent, haphazard attempt to overturn any democratic process that did not favor what they felt entitled to: power.
There’s a lot at play here — deceptively, given that you’re likely viscerally outraged one way or another — but much of it can be engaged with by considering the very American exceptionalist notion that “this is not who we are.” That this kind of thing only happens “over there.”
The knee-jerk insistence by some Americans to implicitly believe that undemocratic mobbery is strictly endemic to Central America or the Middle East, or anywhere else euphemized as “over there” is pervasive — the reaction seems almost automatic. If you were watching the news last week, you might have heard some of this instinct: CNN’s Jake Tapper asserting he felt he was “talking to a correspondent reporting from Bogotá.” ABC News’ Martha Raddatz proclaiming live from the Capitol: “I’m not in Baghdad. I’m not in Kabul. I’m not in a dangerous situation overseas. We are in America.” And — in a dash of irony (I’ll get to this soon) — George W. Bush stated “This is how election results are disputed in a banana republic - not our democratic republic.” These attitudes overlook both the violence embedded in America since its conception, and American intervention that brings chaos abroad in the first place. I will briefly touch upon the former here, and I encourage you to start here to begin exploring the latter.
It is not just that this turmoil can occur here — constant turmoil is constitutive to America. No material feature or historical fact of this nation can lead one to honestly believe that America is “better than this.” “This” is who we are. Writers and politicians often romanticize America’s founding as some fragile yet persistent experiment for democracy. It’s important to acknowledge that this experiment for democracy hinged on methods reserving the experiment’s supposedly sacred products for a select few.
The golden story as we know it of course began with the colonists who invaded and pillaged the Native people. These colonists brought and enslaved masses of people to cultivate the fields this country would be built upon. Soon enough the colonists who reaped the most wealth would continue this violent social agriculture, planting the seeds for a developing economy that would pit lower-and-middle-class white people against any non-white Others.
All the while, the rich would get richer, while the most exploited were stuck below both a privileged ruling class that hated them, and a larger, relatively less privileged class that was indoctrinated into a malicious, woefully insecure inferiority complex. The so-called Great American Experiment would wholeheartedly violate colored people, and degrade masses of white people into following along with it all. This dynamic would instill the social atmosphere with a colonial attitude that made poorer whites suspicious of those they felt they were competing with, and made middle and upper-middle class whites protective of the privileges they began to feel entitled to. As Keri Leigh Merritt explains, the Southern planter class worked diligently to avoid any potential unities between enslaved people and poor whites, an alliance conceivably equipped to look beyond the Big Lie that constantly drove the wedge of Otherism amidst prospective dissidents.
This colonial attitude — this entitlement not only to a certain kind of life, but also to dictate the lives of others — has always fortified the broad white public’s trained and ingrained willingness to demand the state apparatus maintain social control over any of these Others. You cannot pinpoint an era of time for which the supposed City Upon the Hill was genuinely a shining beacon of hope for everyone. Indigenous displacement; slavery; Jim Crow segregation; voter intimidation; lynchings; racist massacres; Japanese internment; anti-worker policies constantly being pushed forward by big business; and all the continuing and compounding effects of these inequalities, as oppressive systems only beget more disadvantaged future generations.
Undoubtedly, the most consistent element of this country has been the arbitrary and socially-constructed definitions of who belongs, given that those drawing these definitions have often been offspring of outsider invaders themselves. Constitutional to America is the violent and haphazard exercise of democracy-by-exclusion; some people’s votes and voices matter, some just don’t.
So don’t be fooled — this is exactly what the systems that make up America are and always have been. If you want a touchpoint almost too on the nose, look no further than the products of our “democracy” from just about twenty years ago.
November 2000: the election between Vice President Al Gore and George W. Bush. The race’s razor-thin margin and irregularities such as the confusing nature of the state’s butterfly ballots, and the hanging chads — dimpled voting cards that were not clearly marked — brought about chaos and confusion. The Gore campaign was pursuing every legal channel to conduct recounts in counties where irregularities seemed especially consequential, if not successfully initiating the state to conduct a state-wide recount.
November 22, 2000. The official canvassers in Miami-Dade County, Florida were conducting a recount, as some of the tabulation machines may have improperly counted — or not counted at all — upwards of 10,000 votes.
The Bush campaign and its surrogates put it upon themselves to, as Republican Congressman John Sweeney put it bluntly, “stop them,” and “shut it down.” Masses of Republican staffers, elected officials, and sympathizers charged to Miami in order to carry out Sweeney’s mission. This mission culminated in what became known as the “Brooks Brothers Riot,” characterized by the distinctly white-collar appearance and actual occupations of the protestors who were posturing as representatives of the American people as a whole.
Those leading the charge claimed benevolence, maintaining that they were simply vying for transparency in response to the canvassers moving to a separate room that would hold less space for observers and media members — though the canvassers made the change in order to speed up the counting process to meet the recount deadline.
This moment was not a simple he-said, she-said — numerous Republican operatives in the crowd of raucous protestors took Sweeney’s order to “shut it down” to heart. As TIME reported, operatives conducted phone banks rallying area Republicans to storm downtown. These schemes were led by none other than Roger Stone, who eventually served as an advisor to Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and cozied up to groups like the Proud Boys.
The rallying and protesting quickly grew violent — protestors were screaming at canvassers and other officials. After a canvasser had given Miami-Dade Democratic Chairman Jon Geller a sample ballot so he could test the theory of whether voting machines had failed to tabulate thousands of votes, a flock of protestors descended upon him, accusing him of trying to steal ballots and influence the election (the canvasser attested that this was merely a sample ballot). Democratic observer Luis Rosero claimed he was punched and kicked by the protestors. Though the rioters often denied accusations of violent activity, security cameras caught numerous instances of violence. The canvassing board soon voted to shut down the count, partially due to the violent interference itself, and due to the public perceptions that the interference created.
The aggressive rioting was part of a broader three-pronged legal, PR, and organizational strategy by Bush and his surrogates to delegitimize the recount. Notably, and poetically relevant to today, Ted Cruz was among the lawyers involved in the legal battleground to fortify Bush’s case and stop the Gore campaign from seeking legal recourse in the face of numerous instances for which comprehensive recounts would likely have been justified.
Years later, Brad Blakeman, one of the operatives who took charge in organizing the riots, told the Washington Post that he rejected the notion that the protestors “were rewarded for [their] thuggery with prime positions in the White House.” Indeed, numerous operatives participating in the riots went on to work in the White House.
“We got some blowback afterwards, but so what? We won,” Blakeman told The Post. “I became a member of [George W. Bush]'s senior staff. That’s hardly a job for a thug.”
So, for what it’s worth, violent entitlement expressed by people who are not necessarily average, everyday people — but often wealthy or well-connected and explicitly supported by insider officials — is not random, or an aberration. What we have just seen in the nation’s capital was in fact a crescendo in an ongoing political movement that views democracy as a tool not for empowering the masses to participate in the creation and functioning of our government, but rather a means for acquiring and gatekeeping power — with no genuine regard for the undergirding rules or romantic ideals that supposedly define this democracy in the first place.
While some of these rioters may have been under the pretense that their violent storming of the United States Capitol was in defense of the People, it in fact was a grave violation. This kind of barbarity does not meld with, as Dr. Martin Luther King described, riots being the language of the unheard. This contrasts with much of the violence that erupted in previous months during the principally non-violent–until–provoked–by–the–authorities Black Lives Matter protests. Why? Well, join me in stepping away from the YouTube and TV wing-nuts that profit from us thinking everything is a conspiracy, so we can ground ourselves in the contradictions right in front of our faces.
These Capitol rioters were not seeking actual legal recourse — otherwise they may have recalled that the Trump campaign’s legal efforts to challenge the election’s results have resulted in a 1-61 record in the courts. Despite their candidate of choice losing by 7 million votes, the rioters could not conceive of not getting their way. They were breaking — or rather exploiting — our social contract which should warrant an equal agreement on the part of all of us to participate, engage with, and accept the results of a democracy that genuinely functions for each of us.
Obviously, this contract has never been fully functional or universal. Given America’s actual nature — one that reminds us this attack on the Capitol is who we are — we can see why this contract is flawed. And we can’t afford to continue following it. Rebecca Solnit sharply lays out the stakes of doing so, asking “What do you do with people who think they matter more than other people? Catering to them reinforces that belief, that they are central to the nation’s life, they are more important, and their views must prevail. Deference to intolerance feeds intolerance.”
Moreover, America’s nature is why we are entertaining this discussion about these rioters at all, instead of resolutely treating them — and crucially those who support them — as fundamental antagonisms to a functioning democracy.
Every day seems to reveal darker details of what transpired last week, each further demonstrating the roles officials may have held in inciting and even directly supporting the riots. Massachusetts Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley’s office panic buttons were inexplicably ripped out. Congressmen Andy Biggs of Arizona, Paul Gosar of Arizona, and Mo Brooks of Alabama may have played direct roles in planning the January 6 protest that culminated into the violent riots thereafter. New Jersey Congresswoman Mikie Sherrill is leveling charges that members of congress gave “reconnaissance” tours of the Capitol the day before the insurrection.
These and other details of last week’s riots suggest a sinister plot at play — a disturbing partnership between chaos agents both in and outside politics. If the riot is indeed the language of the unheard, these rioters — these groups whose biases and fears have not only been constantly heard, but have blared throughout America’s history — are not rioters at all, and they’re speaking gibberish.
Conversely, the Black Lives Matter protests were in fact challenging this flawed social contract itself. In understanding how America has historically operated on a constant level of exclusion — that its foundational nature is one that has constantly exploited, ignored, or violated certain groups of people — then we can readily see how a broad-based movement against oppressive systems bolstered by people of every age and background is indeed the “language of the unheard.” While the Capitol stormers and the Brooks Brothers Rioters used violence to subvert or exploit democracy, the Black Lives Matter protestors sought to better democracy. And we need to be candid enough to make that distinction.
Even given that, again, the Black Lives Matter protests were largely non-violent–until–provoked–by–the–authorities, ideally we simply would not have violence. But this requires a meaningful commitment to ameliorate and address the forces that inspire these protests in the first place. Putting an end to uprisings against exclusion and exploitation requires an end to the exclusion and exploitation — the original violences.
Black Lives Matter protestors join a long legacy of mass movements vying for progress — preceding marchers and protestors vying for racial inequality; labor organizations fighting for more just working conditions and rights; women’s rights organizations rallying for suffrage, gender & sex protections, and socio-economic equity; LGBTQ+ activists putting their lives on the line for the right to live and love just as others do; cross-class and cross-racial movements rallying for a nation that cares for and treats people as equal members and beneficiaries of society. However — and this point is crucial for anyone who might take America to be fundamentally good, or self-improving — in their respective moments, these actors of progress were (and still are) constantly maligned, attacked, and, at bare minimum, discarded as radicals in the way of unity.
And now, in the coming days and weeks, we will be bombarded with centrist and Conservative officials calling for “unity” in order to “move forward.” Heck, we are already seeing this rhetoric from Republican politicians who just days ago were telling people to “get ready...it’s time to fight.” As in, to be clear: a fair chunk of the elected officials now clamoring for “unity” are the same ones who had no concern for unity while they fanned the flames of electoral conspiracy just days or weeks earlier. Instead, the people who often deplore ideals of collectivism now ironically insist on redistributing blame among the country at-large when it's actually time to claim responsibility for the ends of their violent delights. Even now it remains unclear what the original culprits themselves are doing to meaningfully foster this “unity” that is apparently so suddenly urgent.
This rhetoric further prescribes some sort-of official valence, dubbing those seemingly mature enough to call for ill-defined “unity” as somehow benevolent actors. We’re supposed to take these people seriously and honestly. This socially-constructed permission obfuscates the basic fact that these apparently serious people are really just among the agents of chaos that foment such violent, undemocratic plots in the first place.
And so, if we accept these projects of faux “unity” as consensus — to seek normalcy rather than radical change; a hardening of status quo, rather than an explicit demand for an entirely new vision of American social relations — we will only “move forward” insofar as we will continue to insist on progressing through life as if things are automatically meant to resolve themselves. Everything will end up okay! Not sure why or how, but they will! And every few weeks we will continue to confront yet another crisis that urges us to insist “this is not who America is.”
Moreover, to foster false or superficial unity with forces that fundamentally threaten social harmony is to also grant these forces credence, and literally give them license to continue inflicting harm upon society. Once more, as Rebecca Solnit said, “Deference to intolerance feeds intolerance.” Instead, we could heed Professor Henry Farrell’s advice to push for accountability, in spite of — or in fact because — it’s divisive. As he puts it bluntly: “Damn right it’s divisive — this is what it has to be.” He goes on:
“If some actors think they would be better off defecting from the democratic bargain, they will. In other words: democracy and armed factionalism are far closer than we think, or we would like them to be. This means that it is incredibly important to police the boundaries between them. Allowing some to turn to violence can lead to expectation collapse and cascading ruin. When we allow the divisions to become blurred, that means that we are running the perpetual risk of things getting fucked up. If a major faction turns to violence, and no-one responds, things can get really fucked up really, really fast... It is the main cause of our current crisis - and of the difficulty in solving it. Today's Republican party is one where it is considered divisive to take decisive action against a faction that was trying to hunt down Democratic and Republican politicians a few days ago…”
Given reports of potentially even more violence to come across the country in the coming weeks, Farrell’s warning of armed factionalism is worryingly justified.
Even aside from those so endearingly focusing on “moving forward,” there are others who, instead of perhaps quietly shrugging away accountability, directly attack the notion of it. New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik attempted to do just this, formulating a Leviathan-esque equation that conflates holding President Trump accountable for fomenting conspiracy with “shaming millions of Trump voters.” This false equivalency completely rejects any notion of maintaining a check on the executive; it actually draws out a relationship wherein individual voters cannot be understood as independent from the candidate they voted for. As writer Jamelle Bouie explains, Congresswoman Stefanik is proposing that, for those who voted for Trump, he “is somehow the literal embodiment of their will, and that any attempt to hold him to account constitutes an attack on them.”
The alternative to shirking responsibility by pursuing superficial unity, or by outright rejecting responsibility, is simply, to take responsibility. This moment beckons us to instate a social contract that we all are a part of. The first step then is to embrace distinction — to radically reject the forces that have long deluded some of our fellow people into believing they alone are entitled to representation, power, and autonomy over their lives. Newly-elected Congressman Jamaal Bowman makes plain how these forces do not just harm the excluded, but also those entangled into being agents of these degrading forces:
The key forces behind these myths and lies are ones that wedge the vast majority of people who share common interests, struggles, and experiences away from each other. Big business, exploitative media, corrupt politicians and professionals — all these and more serve as forces of white supremacy that work double-time to delude people into constant suspicion of their fellow human beings, if not outright entitlement to certain privileges not afforded to their fellow human beings. These dynamics coalesce to create toxins like social media platforms teeming with disinformation and white supremacist trash; big corporations that actively prevent unions or workers’ organizations from gaining power and cultivating solidarity; opportunistic and flatly dishonest media figures who are more interested in the grift of peddling hollow cultural grievances than actually figuring out what a better, more loving and meaningful politics looks like.
So our moral imperative is not to simply erase or attempt to look past the forces that have led to this moment — especially under any false pretense of seeking “unity.” Rather, we are urgently called to actualize a reality that protects the lives of the excluded and saves the humanity of the included. Only through such action can we move beyond the cyclical crises that force us to bleakly insist “this is not who America is.” Instead, our North Star is “This is what America can be.”
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