Supporters of defeated U.S. President Donald Trump cheer the breaching of the U.
Supporters of defeated U.S. President Donald Trump cheer the breaching of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Via Wikimedia.
The U.S. Capitol was stormed on January 6, 2021. Thousands of right-wing protestors, fueled by an onslaught of lies and fabrications and conspiracy theories surrounding the November 2020 elections, rallied that morning in front of the White House to “Stop the Steal.” Repeating a familiar litany of lies and distortions, the sitting president of the United States then urged them to march on the Capitol and stop the certification of the November electoral vote. “You’ll never take back our country with weakness,” he said. “Fight like hell,” he said. “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”1 And so they did. They marched on the capitol, armed themselves with metal pipes, baseball bats, hockey sticks, pepper spray, stun guns, and flag poles, and attacked the police officers barricading the building.
“It was like something from a medieval battle,” Capitol Police Officer Aquilino Gonell recalled 2 The mob pulled D.C. Metropolitan Police Officer Michael Fanone into the crowd, beat him with flagpoles, and tasered him. “Kill him with his own gun,” Fanone remembered the mob shouting just before he lost consciousness. “I can still hear those words in my head today,” he testified six months later.3
The mob breached the barriers and poured into the building, marking perhaps the greatest domestic assault on the American federal government since the Civil War. But the events of January 6 were rooted in history.
Revolutionary technological change, unprecedented global flows of goods and people and capital, an amorphous decades-long War on Terror, accelerating inequality, growing diversity, a changing climate, political stalemate: our present is not an island of circumstance but a product of history. Time marches forever on. The present becomes the past, but, as William Faulkner famously put it, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”4 The last several decades of American history have culminated in the present, an era of innovation and advancement but also of stark partisan division, racial and ethnic tension, protests, gender divides, uneven economic growth, widening inequalities, military interventions, bouts of mass violence, and pervasive anxieties about the present and future of the United States. Through boom and bust, national tragedy, foreign wars, and the maturation of a new generation, a new chapter of American history is busy being written.
The War on Terror was a centerpiece in the race for the White House in 2004. The Democratic ticket, headed by Massachusetts senator John F. Kerry, a Vietnam War hero who entered the public consciousness for his subsequent testimony against it, attacked Bush for the ongoing inability to contain the Iraqi insurgency or to find weapons of mass destruction, the revelation and photographic evidence that American soldiers had abused prisoners at the Abu Ghraib