Reluctantly, as someone who only recently managed to wean off a daily diet of news/propaganda (choose the right word, because in the British press particularly they mean the same thing), I have been intruded upon by News this week. And I don’t appreciate it, not just because it is unpleasant News that was both foreseeable and preventable, but also because, much like this past year’s Covid pandemic, it has rendered scared leftists little more than cheerleaders for the muscular arm of the state. So I feel compelled to break it down here, though contributing to the fever pitch surrounding the News is generally ill-advised, especially with something so undeniably partisan as a failed beer hall putsch in my former country.
A week has now passed since the confederacy of dunces invaded the US Capitol building, left unguarded except for its normal presence of Capitol police. And this is my first point of contention: we know why the National Guard didn’t show up – why would the executive branch, still tenuously controlled by the Cheeto Benito, call off its own coup? But. The FBI could have deployed proactively, given the big red flags being waved in front of its face, and chose not to. Why? The whiteness of the crowd is certainly one reason, as we already know what the response would have been to an armed BLM protest, but it is not – cannot be – the only reason.
My second point of contention is that the tech behemoth has only now been mobilised against the far right, and that the actions they are taking to suppress it – which would be decried as corporate fascism were they deployed against the far left – have the full-throated support even of supposed anarchists. Guys, this is hugely problematic for two reasons:
1) It shows that American checks and balances have failed to such an extent that a clearly unstable sitting president was unable to be removed for the entirety of his lamentable term, except once he’d managed to incite a failed coup.
2) The partisan rot goes so deep that leftists are now cheerleading Silicon Valley billionaires for very, very belatedly suppressing a movement that they have not only funded and algorithmically fuelled, but that they have benefitted from within the legislative sphere.
Social networks can never again claim to be mere infrastructure, unable to exercise editorial prerogative over the posts of their users. No, this exposes them as broadcasters – unlicensed, unregulated broadcasters, free to spread propaganda and lies at will, so long as the advertising money keeps coming in. Both solutions to fix this – incorporating them as charities, or imposing broadcasting regulations upon them – also conveniently bring them further under the aegis of state control. Cui bono?
And yes, despite the immensely satisfying schadenfreude of seeing Parler unceremoniously booted from the tech community, I do think that it’s an immense problem that American discourse has degraded to such an extent that it has driven the creation of a far-right walled garden in the first place. Not to mention that a social network which actually did try to be infrastructure rather than crypto-broadcaster is now homeless, and is loosing its fascists on secure messaging software such as Telegram, where they’re not only harder to monitor and reincorporate back into the public discourse, but also providing a convenient excuse to crack down on secure messaging software.
Cui bono, indeed.
Which all makes me wonder how much incentive there was to actually act on intelligence and prevent the putsch. It vividly exposed the right-wing threat, brought the left wing, tech companies, and most of Congress to heel, and set a self-evident agenda to further regulate and control the tech sector.
I remember reading an article on China’s view of the 2016 presidential election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, and though I can’t find the specific article, I remember distinctly that an unnamed Chinese diplomat described Clinton as a ‘smiling tiger’: conciliatory on the outside, but extremely dangerous to drop your guard around. By contrast, Trump was a ‘barking dog’, making a lot of noise but with questionable ability to back it up. I cannot help but think about this characterisation now, with a man very comfortable with the reins of state power about to assume the American presidency.
Trump’s ill-judged coup failed precisely because of his own incompetence, his inability, throughout four years in office, to comfortably pull the levers of power. There again, had he been more competent, imagine how much more damage he could have done to the body politic, and to the victims of his racist policies. So the line goes, and it is hard to disagree with. And yet.
We are about to have a president who is far more competent. Far more comfortable exercising executive power. Far more subtle in his ability to wield it. And therefore, potentially far more dangerous in what he is capable of achieving during his time in office. Indeed, Biden would never need to stage a coup – he would only need to skilfully navigate America’s highly-inequitable electoral map, alongside her patchwork of voter suppression and propaganda dissemination, tools available to any skilled statesman who sits at the presidential helm.
Bear in mind, too, that the office of the presidency has been remoulded immensely over the past twenty years. George W Bush brought in executive orders in the wake of 9/11, and this power was expanded upon by Obama in the face of warnings about its potential abuse which came to fruition under Trump. The sitting president will continue to hold a huge amount of power, especially with both houses of Congress now balanced in his favour.
My point being, that any leftist who thinks that the past four years of overt fascism is the worst that America could possibly get, is in for a very nasty surprise in the near future. The incoming president and his party are now capable of decimating political dissent – on both sides, muscling out opposition with the collaboration of Big Tech, and cracking down hard on holdouts such as Telegram. Things could be, and probably will be, a lot worse.
Beware the smiling tiger.
Sonya Blanck writings 