The Storming of the US Capitol Building

If ever there was a symbol of America’s decline, it was last week’s storming of the Capitol Building in Washington DC by an angry mob of Trump supporters who have inverted fact and fiction and sincerely believe that the election was stolen from them.

What is interesting, too, is that it at last took something like this—as opposed to all the other countless other infractions—for many, even some from within his own party, to at last call for Trump to be forcibly removed from office. His first impeachment obviously went nowhere in trying to accomplish that, but what has struck me as remarkable was that there was no similar call for his removal when—which example to choose from?—he encouraged his supporters this past summer to vote by mail and in-person (a felony that barely made a blip in the news and would have seen any other Western leader out of a job); nor was there any call for his immediate removal after the recording of his conversation with a state official in Georgia urging him to find another 11,780 votes were released. There was no call for his immediate removal after the violent suppression of Black Lives Matter protestors this past summer in order for Trump to proceed with a photo-op. Not even his complete mismanagement and response to the pandemic, which has resulted in the deaths of some 400,000 Americans and counting, rouse calls for him to be forcibly removed from office. What it took, in other words, was the siege of the Capitol Building, which, like many things of late, reminded me of Nietzsche.

In section 10 of the second essay in On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche writes that as a community grows in strength and confidence in its own power, it ceases to take individual transgressions as seriously because they don’t pose a threat to the community. But with any weakening or imperilling of the community, he says, comes harsh punishment that is often incommensurate with the crime. Take North Korea for example: a country so completely lacking in confidence in itself that the smallest perceived threat to the regime will land three generations of the offender’s family in a labour camp. Recall, too, the kind of swift and massive mobilization, lockdown, and all-out, high-tech manhunt that resulted when two kids in their twenties blew up a bomb in Boston in 2013: a sharp contrast to the almost indifferent, disorganized, half-hearted response by the administration to the far more deadlier threat of the coronavirus. A terrorist attack: Unthinkable! We’ll never stand for it! But a pandemic: Oh well, whachagonna do? But again, as long as the offence doesn’t pose a threat to the institutions of the community, outrage is far more muted.

Which brings me to the language that is frequented invoked in the case of last week’s storming of the Capitol Building. An “attack on the temple of democracy” is how Biden and others have described it, its most “sacred of institutions.” As mentioned in an earlier post regarding the morality of mores, because so much of the American political system is deeply entrenched in tradition, that which is traditional invariably becomes imbued with religion and, therefore, morality. Consequently, an attack against those institutions is an attack on the ancestors who have not only established them but over the course of time have become deified; it’s the greatest sin, to extend the religious metaphor, and will result in the greatest indignation, the loudest outcry, and the strongest response. If it wasn’t obvious before, it’s become obvious just how dangerous Trump is, and what it took was the storming of the Capitol Building for many to at last realize it. Let’s hope that this week’s events will see Trump removed from office and prevented from ever running for office again.