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What to do with Trump terrorists
[Atlantic] At noon tomorrow, our four-year experiment in being governed by the political equivalent of the Insane Clown Posse will finally end. It is ending in Juggalo style (some have called it “Trumpalo”), violently and pointlessly, with a handful of deaths, the smearing of various bodily fluids, and a riot on the way out. After any bacchanal of this magnitude, the sober dawn is almost as disorienting as the hysteria itself—and the most urgent task, after wiping the shit from the Capitol hallways, is to prevent a repeat performance.Not terribly erudite beginning, there, Graham First, the Senate must convict Donald Trump. I confess bewilderment that the Senate will have to deliberate at all: Inciting an insurrection that threatens to kidnap and possibly murder members of the Senate (including the vice president of the United States) seems to me the kind of activity the Senate should frown upon. Enemies of Ted Cruz like to point out that Trump called Cruz’s wife a hag and insinuated that his father killed John F. Kennedy, and Cruz cuddled up to Trump anyway. Any senator who excuses his own near lynching by a shirtless, horned shaman will make Cruz’s self-debasement look dignified by comparison. There was no insurrection. Antifa and BLM destroying towns and beating random people, while being paid an hourly wag, and having their taxes deducted from their net pay doesn't make them insurrection. Nor does a small coterie of people at a protest who did commit acts of violence, including the cops, doesn't not make the capital protests a riot. Second, law enforcement should hunt down and charge all of the insurrectionists, from the flex-cuff guys to the grannies posing for photos. The vigor with which federal prosecutors have been pursuing them proves that the United States has not been corrupted completely. Prisons exist to hold people such as these. If this was an insurrection, the feds will never make it back to lockup with their presumed prisoners. Here ends the easy part. Options for what comes next are harder to imagine, and have left everyone casting into a dark, vacant pool for the right paradigm. The Federalist Papers do not contemplate a Juggalo-in-exile postpresidency, so we search in unlikely places for comparably miserable predicaments to guide us. MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan argues that we should think of Trump’s followers as if they were al-Qaeda members, who move freely among us because they are white Note, the author of this dribble is white rathe,r than brown and Muslim. The former DHS official Juliette Kayyem agrees that we should treat MAGA as a terrorist movement and Trump as its Osama bin Laden. What do we do with terror movements? “Decapitate” their leadership. In this case, she says the decapitation should be figurative: Isolate Trump; embarrass his followers; make Trump repudiate them. As I have said/written elsewhere, decapitation never works. The US has tried it for 20 year, Russia even before that. The problem for fascists like the writer is that the MAGA movement is leaderless, and 4th generation warfare. So, decapitate away, but the idea of returning to the freedom enshrined in the American Constitution won't go away and it will never die, not matter how many are killed or imprisoned. Whiteness, as Hasan suggests, is one difference between MAGA and al-Qaeda. Another is MAGA’s failure thus far to murder 3,000 people in a single day and promise to keep it up until the survivors surrender. So disappointing when your political opponents don't commit the genocidal murders that you would. The U.S. did not kill bin Laden because he prayed to Allah instead of Q, and the latter is going to be much harder to neutralize. (Thomas Hegghammer also notes a strange tension in Hasan’s position: If Trumpism is like al-Qaeda—or worse—and the authorities are giving it a free pass, why is the Trumpalo-terrorist body count in the single digits?) Because bin Laden still looms as the villain par excellence in the American imagination, to bin Laden we turn for analogy when trying to impress upon one another the gravity of a threat. But when the analogy guides policy and is wrong—and here it is not even close—it leaves the real threat unbothered, and everyone as defenseless as the Capitol was two weeks ago. The comparison fails even though the mob in the Capitol included at least a few honest-to-goodness, unambiguous terrorists, who came there with the express purpose of violently scaring the hell out of politicians in an effort to change policy. It fails because the category of terrorism is diverse, and so is the category of MAGA. What? Even if we agree that Trump is a “terrorist,” consider how unlike other terrorists he is. Trump resembles bin Laden not at all: One was an ascetic who gave up riches to live in dangerous and squalid isolation; the other avoids even mild danger or physical discomfort, and will humiliate himself to add mere pennies to his bank account. One commands the military of the United States, for at least a few more hours, and the other never had more than a few thousand men swinging on monkey bars in Afghanistan to his name. Trump had powers bin Laden only dreamed of (and that if he had, he would have used genocidally). I consider Trump the biggest threat to American democracy since Robert E. Lee—a terrorist who had at his disposal a great army and used it to great effect. Trump’s strategy, by contrast, was to keep and maintain power, by gathering, very loosely, a gang of self-marginalizing anti-Semites, cosplay brownshirts, and flabby gun nuts, plus others who may be high-functioning in normal life but on January 6 were too stupid to refrain from geotagging their crimes on Facebook. Robert E. Lee was no terrorist, you idiot. Seventy-four million Americans voted for Trump, and tens of millions believe his lies about a rigged election. These numbers do not suggest that this credulous minority is on to something—but they virtually guarantee that treating the post-Trump problem like a terrorist movement will fail. If you think MAGA is a terror movement, you will trick yourself into thinking that the United States can subdue and destroy it using the tools that have destroyed al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, and many terror groups before them. MAGA is far more entrenched, and impossible to eradicate using any means dreamt of by counterterrorism. But the democratic federal legislature is damned sure going to try. This problem cannot be decapitated like a terrorist movement, and it will not go away when one man is droned to bits or apprehended and perp-walked in his underpants. First thing the author has gotten right. Besides, contrary to Kayyem’s suggestion, even terrorist movements do not reliably end with decapitation, and one trait that makes them resilient against decapitation is having extensive popular support. Of course those who murder cops and raid government buildings should enjoy a long, leisurely prison stay, similar to those meted out to terrorists. (Someday they can emerge and tell their grandchildren that they committed sedition because a bat-faced incompetent named Rudolph Giuliani told them to, and he was very persuasive.) But you cannot treat tens of millions this way—and that means we need to lure back many of the 74 million, including some whose brains have been pickled by exposure to QAnon and 8chan. Start by distinguishing among MAGA subtypes. In the past week, some erstwhile Trump supporters have turned on him. In Congress, most of these disavowed him when doing so became pragmatic—Mitch McConnell, for example, saw his majority slip away because of Trump’s Georgia strategy. To the extent possible, their repentance must be accepted, even with some light denial of their former MAGA fervor. “When this is all over,” David Frum prophesied, “nobody will admit to ever having supported it.” You're using Frum an a conservative exemplar? That is the way of many sheepish ex-radicals. Plenty of reformed hippies prefer to remember the free love, doobies, and social justice, without dwelling on the gonorrhea, heroin, and murder. If Trumpists are embarrassed enough to deny what they have done, then fine. When their denials shade into wistfulness, we have pictures and tweets to remind them of what they said and did. (I would rather have gonorrhea than a record of passionate and convinced #MAGA tweeting.) I'm sure someone will come right along and deliver unto you a fresh, steaming load of veneriel disease. Opportunistic amnesia is, like terrorism, a manageable problem. Far worse—and, I believe, nearer to the source of the disease—is a mental defect afflicting MAGA extremists as well as normal people: a near-total vulnerability to the hyperstimulation of our political senses. The proper response to these extremists isn’t counterterrorism. It is mental hygiene. Now he's dipping into the Soviet Union playbook. A young, successful politician once told me that at his events, he always deals with shouting protesters in the same way: He sends staff to escort them to the front of the audience, where they can shower him with spittle and fan him with their placards. The fight makes better TV, especially if a protester loses it and says or does something really crazy, such as disrobing. Wild TV clips are a source of endless attention, which is a currency fully convertible into power. Unless the camera is on you, you lose. That is the lesson of Trump, in a sentence. This annihilating tactic has rendered truth irrelevant, and like some horrible viral variant, it has rapidly come to dominate as a hysterical style in American politics. To see the MAGA insurrection and the dissociative, unhinged words of full-blown QAnon believers is to observe the hysterical style as a way of life. It resists persuasion by ordinary argument, because it persuades instead by domination of attention. The left's "ordinary argument" is to resort to invective, which this article is chock full of. When Trump said in his inaugural that “the forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer,” it turns out his most fervent supporters thought that the best way to resist oblivion is to dominate others’ attention for attention’s own sake—for example, by prancing half-naked wearing body paint and pelts and threatening violence if their attention flags. Nothing matters more than the production of images too bonkers to ignore, and ensuring that everyone is looking at you and not at someone else. Some subset of the population lacks natural immunity to this performance and surrenders entirely. More crazy drivel at the link Posted by: badanov 2021-01-28 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=592667 |