History repeats itself but it's important to be clear what history. Last week's failed coup attempt by MAGA and QAnon reactionaries on behalf of President Trump has already been likened to a "putsch" or even the infamous Kristallnacht. These comparisons are natural as Trump and his supporters are fascists - absolutely and beyond any reasonable doubt - but as detailed in such histories of World War II like William Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, when the Brownshirts had their own riot the rest of the Nazi Party was already well connected to the Conservative Party within the Reichstag as well as German business leaders. That's how Hitler ascended to the chancellorship despite the Nazis never gaining a plurality of political support.
Rather, the attack on Capitol Hill of 6 January is most comparable to Al Qaeda bombing the USS Cole.
In late 2000, the US Navy destroyer USS Cole was anchored off the coast of Yemen. Prior to this, Al Qaeda had already placed itself on the FBI's radar with the embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya, leading then President Clinton to reportedly develop a fixation on shutting down the terrorist network. This doubled after a small boat loaded with munitions slammed into the Cole, killing fifteen American sailors and injuring a further 37. FBI investigators, with lackluster CIA help, were closing in on Osama bin Laden in late 2000 and into early 2001, then the new Bush administration ordered everyone to drop this Al Qaeda nonsense and turn their attention to Iraq.
Then September 11th happened.
The United States is currently in such a liminal space as it was between the USS Cole Bombing and September 11th. Without the latter, the war against Al Qaeda would have remained a shadowy business of investigations and interrogations. After September 11th, the world got the War on Terror. Either scenario ends with Al Qaeda demolished as it was never a sustainable model for an irregular force but the scenario we know came with tremendous destruction and pain.
Like Al Qaeda, QAnon is unsustainable and born of a delusion. The paranoid ravings of pizza sex dungeons and turning the frogs gay are as grounded as the global holy war Osama bin Laden and his other Mujahideen buddies fantasized about. And also like Al Qaeda in 2000, QAnon thinks they’re winning. The storming of Capitol Hill looks like a victory because you didn’t see anyone stop them on TV. Over 80 people have since been arrested by the FBI and are facing felony murder charges, but the dream that Trump shall soon enact his master plan and all the evil Democrats will be swept aside for some glorious Patriot Reich still animates the thousands threatening to descend on Washington DC and state capitols before Joe Biden’s inauguration a week from now.
The scale of this upcoming armed revolt will determine how this second War on Terror plays out. If there are sporadic clashes, pipe bombs that go off or not, the next few years will see a low-key counter-insurgency waged by the FBI. A darker and more dystopian retread of the 1990s, when Timothy McVeigh and other homegrown bin Ladens made brief splashes in the national consciousness before being swiftly ground under by the federal security forces. And while a relatively more peaceful scenario, this will also see QAnon’s principles nursed by a Republican Party that has no other option for protecting their own jobs and transferred to later generations in a slow, ugly spiral into an ever more vicious and dangerous society outside increasingly over-policed urban enclaves.
Still, this is the best case scenario for the next week.
The worst case scenario is QAnon stages some real tactical victory. Not in DC - anyone making a run at the inauguration will be vaporized - but in state capitols in Michigan or Pennsylvania. A MAGA militia could conceivably occupy a state legislature or governor’s mansion by force of arms and could even hold it until a federal response - and there would have to be a federal response, as so many American police have drunk the QAnon kool aid.
This is the more dramatic scenario and arguably a very likely scenario because American reactionaries really think they can win a civil war - which in their imaginings is always fought against baristas and gender studies departments, not the National Guard. For all the shock and horror, a QAnon “victory” like this will be swiftly crushed because the interests that really matter in America cannot allow such insurrection and because the basic logic of power demands such threats be crushed as a message to the others. It would be horrific, a national trauma, and over much faster than the first scenario with QAnon designated a terrorist organization and the GOP collapsing as a viable political party. Like the first scenario, the FBI would spend years hunting down every last Parler account but without the sideshow of political nihilists trying to flirt with a terrorist base. The entire national conversation would go in one way and the de facto military totalitarianism that really dominates American politics would be laid bare.
Impeaching Trump a second time, while good and right, will not change his followers’ minds. They are diving all in on a civil war they believe they can win but simply cannot. No action on your part will affect the coming days and we are all now at the mercy of history.
