The Telos Press Podcast: Roundtable on the U.S. Capitol Riot

In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with Jay Gupta, Mark G.E. Kelly, and Timothy W. Luke about the U.S. Capitol riot on January 6, 2021. Their discussion covers a range of topics, including the main causes of the riot, the cultic character of Trump’s supporters, whether the breach of the Capitol was more about symbolism or substance, the declining legitimacy of U.S. political institutions and the loss of faith in the Constitution, the rhetoric of democracy, populism as a rebellion against the administrative deep state and managerial capitalism, the changing politics of race and racial divides, and the realignment of Democratic and Republican coalitions in the wake of Trump. Telos 194 (Spring 2021) features a group of essays on the U.S. Capitol riot, excerpts of which appear below. Click through to read the full articles at the Telos Online website (subscription required). To learn how your university can subscribe to Telos, visit our library recommendation page. Print copies of Telos 194 are available for purchase in our store.

From Telos 194 (Spring 2021):

January 6, 2021: Another Day That Will Live in Infamy?

Timothy W. Luke

Often increasingly isolationist, if not wholly nativist, many U.S. citizens today have embraced the “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) movement. Like President Trump, they question the country’s basic civic consensus. They doubt the post-1991 “New World Order” that has led to endless unwinnable wars. They condemn how new wealth gushes up to the top “one percent,” and they decry how few dollars drop in dribs and drabs to the bottom “99 percent” left behind in the dust from the cosmopolitan elite’s unparalleled prosperity. These shifts are clearer now, but such illiberal attitudes and popular anxieties have been growing since the economic dislocations, racial strife, and cultural shocks of the 1960s. As Adorno observed in 1967, “something like this can be observed to a varying degree in every so-called democracy in the world . . . in terms of its content, its socio-economic content, democracy has not yet become truly and fully concrete anywhere but is still formal”; hence, one can detect what might be authoritarian, or even quasi-fascist, tendencies “as the wounds, the scars of a democracy that, to this day, has not lived up to its own concept.” Such failures in democracy’s “formal content” endure in the United States. Long-standing constitutional amendments that granted legal equality and the franchise to women, the poor, and African Americans have still not been fully realized. Instead, increased gerrymandering, campaign finance changes, public misinformation, and other voter-suppression measures have intensified in recent years, especially in states where many GOP-controlled legislatures essentially select their own electorates by mapping safe districts with the income, racial, and ethnic mix they find the most supportive.

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Torches, Pitchforks, Smartphones, and Mass Delusion: An American Insurrection

Jay A. Gupta

Though Trump lost the election, the sheer number of his feverish loyalists is sobering. The overtly cultic features of Trumpism may indicate the mere surface of a genuine and deep-brewing political legitimation crisis that reveals a fracture in the American self-understanding of “democracy.” The two senses of “democracy” discussed above—democracy on the one hand understood as a particular kind of allegiance to laws, institutions, processes, and traditions, and on the other hand democracy understood as the sheer power of the demos—bring into view Max Weber’s discussion of political legitimacy, particularly his distinction between legalistic and charismatic authority. Legalistic authority depends on a set of political habits and beliefs that compel recognition of the validity of rule-governed norms, whereas charismatic authority depends on belief in the mysteriously compelling personal attributes of a leader. What if it is the case that the “depoliticized masses,” alienated from the processes and Bildung of our legalistic democracy, nonetheless retain some vague idea of its importance, and indeed understand themselves and their “charismatic” leader to be the protectors of it? Perhaps the storming of the Capitol represents a witches’ brew of cultish fanaticism, alienation from democratic processes that are perceived to have been coopted by “the largest secret state bureaucracy in history of the world,” and a dangerously one-sided conception of democratic power that is surfacing in such a way so as to reveal the heretofore unsuspected depths of a serious, intractable political problem.

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Trump l’Oeil: Ceci N’est Pas un Coup d’État

Mark G. E. Kelly

Ludicrous and dangerous though the QAnon phenomenon has been, I would suggest that its double, anti-Trumpism, is more dangerous, partly because it is so much more organized and effective, but also because it is arguably more delusional. Where QAnon adepts posited concealed events in the absence of evidence, Trump’s opponents simply posit visible realities that are not there, demanding that everyone agree with their version of reality. Where Trumpism was ultimately a farce, a grassroots movement longing for leadership from a leader who sought only sycophants, the movement behind Biden was concentrated around political apparatchiks and media operatives who mounted an effective bid to capture state power. Where Trump’s supporters were people who identified the power elite as their enemy and fantasized that they had a powerful friend in Trump, Biden’s supporters have a good deal of power and fantasize their enemy, in the shape of Trump and his followers, into a real and present danger to democracy in order to justify their hold on it.

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