Just like the neocons before them, they are bewitched by the prospect of war with an enemy they believe poses a threat to their way of life. The only difference is that this deadly menace doesn’t live in some far-off land, but right at home. They might even live next door.

As The New York Times put it in an editorial last week, “the Republic faces an existential threat from a movement that is openly contemptuous of democracy and has shown that it is willing to use violence to achieve its ends”. And there is only one way to survive this threat: to “mobilise at every level”. The NYT was, of course, referring to the attack on the Capitol last January: “Jan. 6 is not in the past,” we’re warned. “It is every day”.

It is hard to exaggerate the feverish excitement with which many progressives responded to the Capitol riot. While the spectacle of hundreds of Trump supporters smashing their way into one of the sacrosanct sites of American democracy generated widespread condemnation, for many progressives the dominant emotional register was one of apocalyptic disgust — and arousal.

Here, finally, was irrefutable proof that they had been right all along: that Trump’s hateful rhetoric would finally become a hateful reality. Here, finally, was a war that could give their lives meaning. There were now Right-wing insurrectionists among them, and they would need to be fought. It was almost as if, on some deep level, they had wanted the Capitol siege to happen.

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The liberal fantasy of the Capitol coup

By Edward Luttwak

Every group that spoils for war needs a wound or trauma to mobilise around. For the neocons and the liberal hawks who supported them, it was the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. That wound would take a lifetime to heal; but it was also massively generative, filling a spiritual void at the heart of American life at the End of History.

In the half-decade prior to 9/11 one of the biggest political stories in America centred on President Clinton’s marital infidelity with a 22-year-old intern. Was a blowjob really an act that existed outside of the realm of “sexual relations”, as Clinton had sought to claim? And should his receiving them in the Oval Office warrant his resignation? In America, the period leading up to 9/11 was, in other words, one of monumental banality and puerility.

The instant the second plane hit the south tower of the World Trade Centre on 9/11 that period came to an abrupt end. America had entered, in Martin Amis’s expression, “the Age of Vanished Normalcy”: idle talk about illicit blowjobs would no longer cut it. This was a time of war, a clash of civilisations. Such was the level of danger that we could no longer wait for threats to gather, but would need to pre-emptively act to stop them from emerging.

It was all very dramatic and clarifying, as Christopher Hitchens acknowledged from the very start: “I am not particularly a war lover, and on the occasions when I have seen warfare as a travelling writer, I have tended to shudder. But here was a direct, unmistakable confrontation between everything I loved and everything I hated.” Hitchens, who confided that he felt “exhilarated” at the prospect of this confrontation, would soon go on to insist that it was a matter of moral principle for the US to topple the Saddam Hussein regime. He was less rousing and persuasive on whether it was the prudent thing to do, but prudence was never Hitchens’s metier.

The storming of the Capitol was to elite liberals what the destruction of the World Trade Center was to the neocons: a bracing vindication that they had been right all along, and a pretext for engaging in a battle that would give their lives a greater meaning and a chance to prove their virtue. What could be more exhilarating than taking on the historic forces of white supremacy now threatening to destroy the republic? And what could be more virtuous?

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The capturing of the Capitol

By Michael Tracey

None of this is to deny the vast ideological differences between the neocons and modern progressives, the most salient of which is that the latter would never support an American-led occupation of a Muslim-majority country. Nor is it to make a false moral equivalence between the events of 9/11, where more than 3,000 civilians were murdered in carefully coordinated attacks, and the events of January 6, where the only person who was shot and killed was one of the rioters.

Yet the parallels between these two political tribes are striking. So keen were the neocons to invade Iraq that they had to drastically inflate the threat-level of the Saddam Hussein regime. They did so by arguing that the threat was “existential”: that if Saddam were to remain in power, he would not only continue to amass WMDs, but would likely use them to attack America. It later transpired that this argument was based on unreliable evidence: no major stockpiles of WMD were ever found and Saddam’s relationship with al Qaeda was overblown. But such was the war fever that had gripped the neocons that they were apt to ignore any evidence that contradicted their conviction.

Today’s liberals are similarly flushed with ideological fervour, believing that they are in a cosmic struggle of Manichean proportions: they are the elect, the chosen ones, and they believe that their responsibility to purge all traces of white supremacy and hateful extremism is a grave one. Indeed, such is their keenness to root out white supremacy that they are apt to find it everywhere, even where it patently doesn’t exist. They are equally apt to inflate its threat where it does exist, like comparing the storming of the Capitol on January 6 to the terror attacks of 9/11.

Note my use of inflate: no one would deny that there is a white power movement in the US, and there is much evidence to suggest that far-Right terrorism in America has increased markedly over the last few years. It is, however, important to maintain a sense of proportion: America is intensely divided right now, but the idea that the country is in the grip of a perpetual far-Right insurgency is catastrophic to a pathological degree.

In his 1989 article The End of History?, Francis Fukuyama declared that the great ideological battles of the 20th century were over and that Western liberal democracy had triumphed. This, he argued, was a good thing. But, concluding his essay, he lamented: “The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.”

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The hypocrisy of America's terror debate

By Simon Cottee

More than two decades later, people in liberal democratic societies such as America enjoy a level of freedom, opportunity and material wealth unmatched anywhere else. And yet, as the response to the Capitol riot shows, they suffer from a deficit of meaning and spiritual fulfilment. This, as Fukuyama observed, fuels a sense of nostalgia for history and all its dramatic entanglements. “Such nostalgia,” he noted, “will continue to fuel competition and conflict even in the post-historical world for some time to come.”

So when The New York Times publishes an editorial on how “every day is Jan. 6 now”, it is hard not to see this as a form of nostalgia for the kind of historical drama and contention that is clearly missing from the lives of the comfortable, Ivy-League educated, New-York based journalists who wrote it and who represent the vanguard of what Wesley Yang calls the “successor ideology”. Their hysteria, then, says more about themselves than the events of last year.

In his memoir, the Vietnam War veteran Philip Caputo reflects on his motivations for enlisting in the war. Preeminent among them was the desire “to prove something: my courage, my toughness, my manhood, call it whatever you like”. For those Western liberals who secretly wish for an impending civil war at home, the thing they most want to prove is not their courage, and it certainly isn’t their toughness or manhood, something which they would no doubt contemptuously regard as toxically heteronormative. Rather, what they desperately want to prove is their virtue — even if it means engaging in irresponsible fear-mongering and flagrant exaggeration.

It was the most serious riot since the time of the Vietnam War. It was the most shameful day in the history of the United States since the Civil War. It was the worst desecration of the great citadel of American democracy since the British had torched it in 1812. The stunned invocations of these episodes reflected the degree to which Americans, far from living solely in the present, as the stereotypes so often have it, are in truth profoundly conscious of the distinctive character of their past. For Trump is being judged — by both his supporters and his enemies — at the bar of how Americans, over the span of their country’s existence, have understood what it means to be the citizens of a free republic.

In the immediate aftermath of the storming of the Capitol, no one articulated this perspective more powerfully than the senior senator from Colorado, Michael Bennet. Only a few hours after he had been bundled to safety by anxious security agents, he returned to the Senate floor, and there, surrounded by the wreckage of the day’s attack, gave a speech in which he placed the scenes of chaos in the broadest possible context. “One of the things I was thinking about today,” he said, “is something I often think about when I’m on this floor, which is that the Founders of this country, the people that wrote our Constitution, actually knew our history better than we know our history.”

Specifically, Bennet went on to say, they had laboured to fashion a republic in full awareness of the fact that they were not the first to embark on such a project. The existence of a senate and a Capitol in Washington speaks as loudly today as it did back in 1800 of the particular model at the forefront of the Founding Fathers’ minds. The neo-classical splendour of the Capitol – columns, marble portrait busts and all – was consciously designed to evoke the example of ancient Rome.

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The day QAnon captured America

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

The parallels, of course, are not entirely reassuring. If Rome has always provided the West with the supreme archetype of a great empire, then so also does it serve us as the exemplar of an empire that declined and fell. Photos of Trump’s goons carrying spears and sporting horns have had all the greater an impact for the gilded marble that provided them with their backdrop. It gave to the invasion of the Capitol a flavour of a sword-and-sandals epic. Selfie after selfie was touched by a hint of the menacing flavour that, from Hollywood to Las Vegas, has long been a feature of how Americans popularise ancient history. Here, it seemed, was a Visigoth climbing the pediment of a statue; there a Gaul slouching on the seat of a senator. To look at them was to imagine that the rioters had not merely invaded the Capitol, but – in the manner of authentic Vandals — put it to the sack.

Except, of course, that the rioters were themselves Americans. More than that — they were Americans who had invaded the Capitol in the conviction that, by interrupting the business of the Senate, by hunting down the enemies of the President, they would be helping to make America great again. It was this reflection, when Michael Bennet looked about him from the Senate floor, that turned his thoughts to Rome. It was not the fall of the Roman empire, dismembered by invaders, that perturbed him. The senator was looking back much further in time.

Originally, in its earliest days, Rome had been a monarchy; but then, freedom-loving, patriotic and resolute, the people had risen up and expelled their king. Liberty — the liberty of a people who had no master — had duly been consecrated as the birthright and measure of every Roman. The freedom of one was the freedom of all. Only by seeing himself reflected in the gaze of his fellows could a citizen truly know himself a man. Public business — res publica — came to define the kind of state that Rome had become. This, in the wake of the American Revolution, was the model of a republic most familiar to the classically educated men who drafted the Constitution.

Yet the history of the Roman Republic, even as it provided inspiration, also served as a warning. For many centuries, the great ideal of shared citizenship had encouraged the Romans to temper their competitive instincts for the common good. To place personal honour above the interests of the entire community was seen as the behaviour of a barbarian — or worse yet, a king. Gradually, however, over the course of the centuries, this taboo began to lose its hold. The more of a superpower the Roman Republic became, and the richer the potential pickings on offer to its most powerful men, so the more it began to totter under the weight of its own greatness. The bonds of shared citizenship stretched, then frayed, then snapped. Rome imploded into civil war. The venerable edifice of her republican system of government was reduced to rubble. And in its place an autocracy emerged: the rule of the Caesars. The lesson offered was a sombre one, and weighed heavily on the minds of the Founding Fathers. Last week, as he spoke to his shell-shocked fellow senators, and sought to rally them to a consciousness of their place in history, it weighed as well on the mind of Michael Bennet.

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America is the greatest story ever told

By Tom Holland

It was hardly surprising, in the wake of an armed attempt to frustrate the legal election of a President, that the senator should have focused on one particular dynamic in the troubled final decades of the Roman Republic: the readiness of rival factions to whip up mobs. This, it turned out, was a game that anyone could play. In 121 BC, the attempt by an elected official, Gaius Gracchus, to push for radical reforms in favour of the poor, and recalibrate the balance of power between the elites and the people, was met by conservatives with a murderous display of violence. Twelve years after an attempt by Gaius’ brother to push through similar reforms was foiled by his assassination, Gaius himself was clubbed to death with a stool-leg. His corpse was decapitated, and lead poured into his skull. In the wake of his murder three thousand of his followers were executed without trial.

It was to prove a fateful step. Conservatives were soon finding that they had won a pyrrhic victory. Since political divisions in Rome were a matter less of policy or ideology than of style, there were plenty of senators who preferred instead to address ‘deplorables’ over the heads of the traditional elite. These populares, as they were called, tended to be no less wealthy or aristocratic than their opponents; but they did, almost by definition, display a talent for speaking the language of the common man. This enabled them, in the wake of the murder of the Gracchi, to follow where conservatives had led.

It is no coincidence that Julius Caesar, the most successful of all the populares, also proved the most effective at intimidating rival senators. Mobs were employed to empty buckets of excrement over them; to howl them down whenever they tried to speak; to drive them into exile. The most charismatic of the mobsters employed by Caesar to serve his interests, an aristocrat-turned-plebeian named Clodius, blazed a particularly flamboyant trail. Shrugging aside accusations of incest, sacrilege and cross-dressing, he displayed an innovative talent for organising rioters into paramilitaries. His enemies were forced to do the same. Rome became the scene of endless street battles. Clodius’ murder in one of these clashes brought them to the very heart of the Republic. His followers, outraged by the fall of their hero, went on the rampage. They invaded the Senate House, plundered all its records, then set it on fire. The flames consumed not only the Senate House itself, but also Rome’s first permanent law court. The Capitol, seen in the light of such history, can be reckoned to have got off lightly.

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Restorations always fail

By Peter Franklin

Naturally, America is not Rome. The chasm of difference that separates the two republics is immense. Any parallels drawn between them are bound to be hazy at best, and at worst grotesque. The United States may boast senators, but it has none of the consuls or praetors mentioned by Michael Bennet in his speech. Was what he had to say on the floor of the Senate, then, merely tendentious? Not at all. This was because, eloquently and appropriately, it drew attention to the way in which, from the very beginnings of the American Republic, there has always been an element of role-playing about its politics.

None of the rioters who invaded the Capitol last week, not even the QAnon shaman in his buffalo horns, was more strikingly dressed than the sculpture of George Washington that back in 1832 was commissioned by Congress to mark the centennial of the first President’s birth. Horatio Greenough’s statue, now in the National Museum of American History, originally sat in the Rotunda of the Capitol, and portrayed Washington as the physical intersection point of twin republics: the American and the Roman. His wig is off-set by a toga; his raised right finger by the sword he holds in his left hand. It is comical, but also oddly moving.

To play at being a Roman was not, for the Founding Fathers, mere affectation. “Soon as this great work was done,” wrote Parson Weems, author of the first biography of Washington, “he took an affectionate leave of his gallant army and returned to cultivate his four acres.” Weems, when he wrote this, was not describing Washington but a Roman. Cincinnatus, a statesman summoned from his plough to save Rome, and who, after his duty done, laid done his office and returned to his fields, was a figure who served his countrymen as the very archetype of civic virtue. Gruelling and implacable though the contest to excel in Roman politics always was, there could be no place in it for ill-disciplined vainglory. The example of the past created a sense of responsibility that prevented a Roman’s sense of competition from degenerating into mere selfish ambition.

America’s Founding Fathers, looking to the nobility of this political tradition, did their best to transplant it to a continent undreamed of by the Romans. The desire to root it deeply so that it would not succumb to the blights of mob-rule and autocracy was indeed, as Senator Bennet said, what they “were thinking about when they wrote our Constitution”. Yet so accustomed are we to associate America with excess that it took the events at the Capitol to bring home to many of us that its political culture has, above all, always been marked by the acknowledgement and acceptance of limits. Those limits were what Trump, impatient with anything that frustrates his vanity, so heedlessly sought to trample down last week.

Fortunately, he is no Caesar, and the American republic is not the Roman. If anything, the attack on the Capitol, precisely because it was so shocking, has served Americans as a bracing reminder of just how fortunate they are to enjoy the political traditions that they do. The greatest punishment inflicted on Trump is likely to be, not a second impeachment, not prison, not even banishment from Twitter, but one far more enduring: to serve as an object of obloquy, and a standing lesson, in the annals of American history.

This scene was broadcast across the globe — and I imagine many people looked upon it with a certain kind of awe, as I have looked upon footage of the botched Gullenist coup in Turkey in 2016, or the live-streamed terrorist attacks around Paris in 2015. This is history, live. A state is being challenged. But this time the world got to see it happening in the most important country in the world, the United States. The added frisson must have been delectable. Not only “this is history”, but perhaps, this is a symbol of a changing world order. Or, maybe, this is a fate richly deserved, comeuppance for a puffed-up hegemon who arrogantly elected an obnoxious oaf as the leader of the free world.

Every which way it was gripping to watch; the whole ragtag look enjoyably daft. And the world learned: this is what the world’s superpower looks like right now. The most powerful country on earth can see its Senate dispersed, its election results delayed, and its Vice President fleeing for protection from a relatively small rabble that was entirely unarmed, save for their memes.

One could say that Q Shaman and his friends had been sent to the Senate by Donald Trump himself, to hunt out the Vice President. In the day before these events, Trump had taken his White House pressure campaign public. Having failed to uncover evidence of voter fraud, the Trump campaign had tried to disqualify votes or whole states from the 2020 presidential election with bizarre legal theories. Maybe the election violated American civil rights, or wasn’t scrutinising mail-in ballots differently at least? American courts, many of them staffed with judges Trump appointed, rejected these theories.

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Whose weird world are we living in?

By Mary Harrington

The latest idea, one that had been circulating widely among conspiracy theory social media accounts associated with QAnon, focused on the Vice President. The Queueties held that Mike Pence had the power to keep Trump as president. The 12th Amendment specifies that the President of the Senate — the Vice President — counts the certified votes of the Electoral College. Pence, they believed, could simply refuse to count the votes from Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia and so on. Technically, the sitting Vice President could annul all 50 states and disenfranchise 150 million or more voters. Couldn’t he? Trump warmed to the theory.

It’s not even clear whether Constitutional interpretation interests QAnon. For those who don’t know the conspiracy theory, Q holds that Donald Trump is confronting the malevolent people — many of them paedophiles — who want to politically enslave us, and that he is succeeding. Most of the news is just a shadow of the real events: the pandemic, the death of a GOP Congressman from Covid-19, and the harassment of Senator Josh Hawley were all planned volleys in this ongoing shadow war between good and evil. In this black and white moral battle, Mike Pence was the only character whose ultimate loyalties were unknown. One could tally the evidence up either way. Stay tuned!

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QAnon is indestructible

By Gavin Haynes

Donald Trump spoke about Mike Pence exactly this way at the pre-riot rally, emphasising the forthcoming turn of the plot and heightening the drama. “If Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election… ” Trump said: “All Vice President Pence has to do is send it back to the States to recertify, and we become president, and you are the happiest people.”

Pence released a letter confirming that he obviously did not have constitutional powers to overrule the people in an election. Within a few hours, he would be rushed out of the Senate chamber for his safety. And Trump tweeted:

The American public is in many ways inured to Trump, having long internalised his generally high level of bullshit. But in a day of many strange happenings, the president publicly accusing the Vice President of participating in the overthrow of the American form of government has to rank in history somewhere.

Most of the MAGA occupiers were not violent. They simply walked into the Capitol building after the initial violent wave caused the overmatched Capitol police to retreat.  Many were unlikely to know the stranger menagerie of second and third-tier internet rabble rousers who strolled into Congressional offices with them. Legislative staffers who remained in their offices boarded up their doors, waiting for an all-clear from the police. In an affray near the Senate Chamber, a young woman was shot and killed by Capitol police; Trumpers are now echoing their BLM counterparts with demands to “say her name”.

Her name was Ashli Elizabeth Babbitt. She was 35 years old and a veteran of the Air Force. Three others died of medical complications in the melee.

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National Populism is here to stay

By Michael Lind

Here I must admit that, like several other contrarians, I believed that the danger for America was likelier to come in the form of resistance to Trump, rather than from Trump himself. I read the many prestige publications fantasising about “toppling” Trump as child-like fantasies, the liberal inteligentsia’s vain hope for the villain to finally reveal the depth of his wickedness at the culmination of the story. By doing so, Trump would justify not just his removal, but discredit all his supporters forever.

And forgive me but I still believe it.

Had Trump narrowly prevailed in the Electoral College, I believe hundreds of thousands of the resistance would have gathered in Washington DC and a reprise of the summer’s unrest would have flamed out across the country. This demonstration would have sought to provoke the kind of precipitating events that led to a government losing “moral legitimacy”. The sentiments of this resistance would have had the backing of the powers and principalities in American life. As bad as the brief reign of Q Shaman was, I still think that this Wednesday’s ragtag farce of an insurrection was easier to put down than the alternative.

And yet, the bedlam in Washington D.C. cannot be unseen. A relatively small rabble quickly seized the Capitol from retreating law enforcement. They ran wild in the offices of our elected government. If any rival power was lucky enough to have a capable operative and a thumb drive in DC today, our Congress got pwned today. America’s friends, frenemies and rivals saw these events. You think Angela Merkel is having any second thoughts about the investment agreement with China after this? I don’t.

And then there is Q Shaman himself, and what he represents. Q types will simply present their followers little snippets and clips of the news in a slightly twisted context. The story of the congressman who died of Covid and the story of a protest — maybe an Antifa mob‚ at Senator Josh Hawley’s house are linked to events like the Electoral College certification. And the human mind, talented at pattern formation, will fill in the gaps, and construct for itself the impression that there is a shadowy war between the forces aligned with Trump and the forces that oppose him, with real drama and real casualties.

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When will my fellow liberals learn?

By Mark Lilla

What Q is doing is just intensifying and slightly re-shaping the common experience of social media, where snippets of outrage and fear are torn slightly out of context and linked together across the most addictive parts of the platforms like Instagram “stories”. Our pattern-making minds work on this constant stimulus, leading us to ever-more adamantine convictions, unshakable suspicions and disquieting fears.

Perhaps my own belief that a liberal insurrection would have been worse than this is one of these confected convictions, imprinted on me by the collision of my biases with the overstimulation of internet media. I can’t discount that possibility.

No one should forget the disgrace and danger that President Trump inflicted on America yesterday. But the thing that will keep me up at night is the knowledge that, in an instant, these confected beliefs and lurid fantasies can leap out of Facebook and Instagram and cause my countrymen to simulate the overthrow of my government. This is a psychological weapon, and somebody is going to learn to use it more effectively. Q Shaman reigned for an instant, and I’ll always wonder if he’s coming back.