According to the listing at Wikimedia Commons, the photo above was made the night before Obama's swearing in on January 20, 2009. Since the riot, one thing I can't stop thinking about is the outpouring of joy 12 years ago — a degree of celebration I had never seen in my lifetime and frankly don't expect to see again. I annoyed a lot of people in my circle back then by not being as happy as they were about Obama's win. I was happy about it, make no mistake — just not ready to jump up and down with joy and let go of my rage at all we'd seen in the decade prior.
And yes, I'm a little sorry now that I didn't let myself partake of that joy more fully. But I was afraid of our complacency, afraid that we were congratulating ourselves too much and would give Obama a pass on too many things. We did give him a pass on things we shouldn't have, not so much out of smugness as from a sense of being embattled once the rightwing backlash took hold. Now here we are, feeling far more embattled than we could have imagined in 2010 or 2012, and I can't help noticing that one of the effects of our anxiety is intolerance for any criticism of the incoming administration. I have found myself increasingly turning away from dissenting voices on our side, few as they are — not because I disagree with them, usually, but because now is not the time. But when will be the the time?
***
"Therefore, however much you exceed in wealth, so much so do you fall short in love." ~ Basil of Caesarea*
It echoes the civics lessons we all got as kids — “the people’s house," etc. But that notion of a common stake in democratic government is not what the rioters meant. They weren't saying, "This is our government, too." They were saying, "This government is OURS." That is to say, theirs alone — as white people***, as Christians, as so-called "real Americans."
I think this is a nuance that too often gets missed when we talk about white supremacy and nationalism. The ideology of white supremacy isn't fundamentally a belief in racial superiority, although that belief may be present. It's not, at its core, about hatred, although there is plenty of hatred attached to it. White nationalism is really a deep belief in ownership — of the culture and the country.
Whenever I've sparred with hardcore Trump cultists online, I've always been struck by the proprietary way they talk about America and how obsessed they are with rights of ownership. The concept of property is sacred to them. I remember an exchange I had last summer, when stores were being looted, with someone who took real offense at my statement that no decent human being would shoot a person for stealing a TV. It seems self-evident to me that any human life has more value than a material possession, but the cultist felt otherwise: Thieves — at least, some thieves — deserve death.
The "Stop the Steal" slogan isn't really about the election. It's about what the cult sees as the theft of their country by people who have no rightful claim to it. For several generations now, we've preached to white American children about racial tolerance and equality. We've shamed them for racist language and told them racist is the worst thing they can be. But white folks have had very little to say about this poisonous, anti-democratic ideology of entitlement buried deep in white identity.
We throw around the word “entitled” as an insult, and if we’re good liberals, we recognize our “privilege,” but we always avoid articulating exactly what that privilege rests on. It is, in fact, this culturally enforced sense of ownership, so ingrained in us that we are — mostly — not even conscious of it. Like
the prisoners in the cave or
David Foster Wallace's famous fish, we're blind to the full truth of our condition. It's a condition we share with the cult, and I think our reluctance to accept that fact is one reason it's so hard for
us to understand what the hell is wrong with
them.
***
*** Yeah, I know there were a few people in that mob who weren't white. That's a discussion for another day. And no, I don't think racism is by any means the sole motivating factor for the cult. I'm not even sure it's the primary factor. But if you're thinking the racist aspect of the riot wasn't obvious, this might not be the blog for you.
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