What happened on Capitol Hill on Wednesday was uniquely bizarre and unwonted, but perhaps not in the way it looked at first. It was not a coup,... llegal and violent the day most certainly was, but there was no question of seizing power by sending a cosplay gallery of motley characters to the Senate chamber...
I would not object to calling it a “coup,” though, and that takes me to what I find most interesting about the events. We cannot interpret them within the framework of the American political tradition. They are significant because they signal a more radical shift. While a literal coup would have a precise meaning within that tradition, what happened Wednesday leaves us speechless.
Look at the most-shared photos from inside the Capitol. There is the one where a figure wearing a horned Viking helmet poses on the Senate dais while his companions snap photos. One lies pensively on the floor, seemingly on the phone. (The horned Viking turned out to be Jake Angeli, a professional actor.) In another, a gleeful insurrectionist sports a pom-pom woolen hat as he carries off a podium bearing the seal of the Speaker of the House.
 |
Leninoid poseur shouting
from Senate dais
TWITTER PHOTO IGOR BOBIC |
I was also struck by the image of the mob outside wearing a clothing line emblazoned with “Civil War, January 6, 2021,” referring to the very production in which they were now playing a role. By the end of the evening, as the Senate reconvened in somber tones, the insurrectionists were spotted having cocktails in the lobby of the Grand Hyatt. Meantime, and as events on Capitol Hill developed, the Dow rallied 400 points to close at an all-time high. Not bad for a coup.
Would it be better to replace fantasy with a proper sense of the real world? Ideally, yes, perhaps, but we’re now seemingly past that. The real world is almost a figment.
We live surrounded by the Internet—we live inside it—and the institutionalized truth of the past has lost its hold...
James Madison argued in The Federalist that the way to break the violence of faction is to create a greater variety of interests and parties, so that a majority is not allowed to arise. The lesson remains valuable today, when the violence of fiction can be broken by multiplying its sources and, paradoxically, giving it freer rein — as Madison wanted to give faction a free rein, and was deemed mad for saying it. But a new James Madison and a new Alexander Hamilton would have their work cut out for them today because the institutional framework of the virtual society—a political theory of virtualism—still waits to be developed."
Macaes City Journal essay displays a familiarity with nations skilled in the art of the coup , the former colonies of Spain and Portugal ,especially, but he overlooks the theatrical semiotics of Wednesday's events in Washington.
The last few centuries of political history teach that much can be done with a coup de theatre, from an incendiary attack on a Capitol, occupied or empty, to a mass march that accelerates into a cavalry charge led by the unhinged.
The genre of misadventure that began with Cardigan’s Light Brigade and Custer’s Cavalry, has reached its apex in a Commander in Chief badly educated in the art of war. One whose highest pre-Presidential rank was Chief Cadet of a Pay-for-Play Hudson Valley military reformatory across the river from Sing Sing. His most illustrious classmate was New York mafia don John Gotti.
On Wednesday, this wannabe Rough Rider dispatched a mixed corps of Comic Con and Braveheart re-enactors to a charge not up San Juan Hill, but the Capitol steps. This brigade-sized crowd of couch potatoes made it over the top in large measure because it was spearheded by a platoon or so of fit former soldiers, wall climbers and rugby players with initiative enough to exploit the scaffolded Capitol façade as what it was: a treasure trove of siege materiel.
Armed with sections of wrought iron railing and crowd fencing that hey deployed as scaling ladders and battering rams they turned the marble clad inaugural rostrum into a paintball assault course of farcically low difficulty.
Some few of their followers broke bones in the attemp, but those indisposed to climb the crude ladders simply took the stairs and wheelchair ramps. The Capitol is less a fortress than a stage set for public celebration, and as such it proved about as defensible as an opera house.
As the most touristed building in town- a fair fraction of the nation’s high school graduates have been photographed on those steps, the Capitol has few exterior secrets. Routes to its unbarred windows could be scouted by joining the anonymous crowds of selfie takers that festoon the building’s exterior, or casing the joint during business hours at the invitation of any one of hundreds of constituent-friendly representatives
Once the march was in motion, the crowd fractionated by walking speed- the fit fatigue-wearers soon outdistanced a majority whose conception of the art of the siege wasforged by binge-watching Vikings and Game of Thrones.
Those wanting to play the point of the spear got their wish by double timing to locations, presumably mapped beforehand, where a hundred pounds of cold iron swung in unison by a squad could demolish windows designed to stop bullets rather than battering rams and SWAT team tactics. A few hours later the nation saw the Senate’s architectural defenses fall as fast as a drug dealer’s front door. Some of this bravado was clearly 'Roid Rage: beside pumping architectural iron. the perps fatally bludgeoned Capitol Police officer Brian Sicnic with a heavy metal fire extinguisher.
Until en masse the arrival of armed backup for the Capitol Police from the FBI, Secret Service and ultimately the National Guard, many of the invaders seemed overwhelmed by their surroundings. A few embarked on acts of vandalism or pillage, but most got out their cell phones and started taking selfies like provincials agawk in the lobby of some not very grand Trump hotel. Thousands of pictures were posted on Twitter by marchers seemingly unaware of their new status as accessories to murder, pillage, and breaking and entry , or the counterattack brewing in the secure subterranean reaches of the complex-- there is , after all, a private subway system and a commisary fit to feed an army down in the legislature's hundred acre basement.
Perhaps most bizarre was the sight of hundreds of rioters forming an orderly self-organized crocodile between the velvet guide ropes that ordinarily steer tourist traffic across the cavernous Rotunda. Now, as in the days of the Praetorian Guard, the Capitol's intimidating architecture may do more to move visitors to gravitas than the presence- or absence- of its guardians.
