We Didn’t Fix It

A year on, there’s been no attempt to address almost any of this. Democrats and corporate liberals have destroyed a right-wing social media competitor and banned Trump and others from tech platforms, but done nothing about the role of corporate television news. The closest has been some idle talk about getting Fox and Newsmax dropped from cable providers, but anything concrete to address the issue looks dead in the water, since — to avoid being simply a partisan move to silence a competing faction’s own corporate loudspeaker — any serious effort would require taking on the corporatized news industry across the political spectrum.

At least some of the cops who were involved in the riot have been arrested and charged, but there’s been no investigation of or measures to rein in law enforcement’s infiltration of and collusion with the Far Right, even though we know for a fact both are extensive. In fact, it was in the wake of January 6 that we learned that the leader of the Proud Boys was a longtime police informant, and more information about such collusion has popped up. No matter. Like much of Joe Biden’s agenda, the president and his party simply quietly stopped talking the paltry police reform they’d promised, and have instead funneled more money and resources to the police to help them fight terrorism — however they define that.

Apart from more threats of investigation, impeachment, expulsion, and prosecution, the elite Republicans who were doing the actual work of trying to overturn the election are unscathed. In fact, their efforts have only advanced, as they pass laws and maneuver loyalists in place around the country to do it again in two years, this time properly.

The big companies that pledged to stop funding these “insurrectionists” have reopened the money tap now that the cameras have stopped rolling. They can do so, because neither Congress nor the president has even bothered to attempt to curb the poisonous influence on money in the US political system, nor was that ever on the table. How could it be, when both parties rely on the very same system of corruption for their own political success?

Meanwhile, despite what seemed like a promising start, Biden and the Democrats have left untouched the deeply exploitative and unfair political economy that’s reigned for decades, and which the great mass voters have been rebelling against in various ways for the past decade and a half at least. The minimum wage is still nowhere near $15, the superrich still barely pay taxes, health care is still a dysfunctional mess, and the average American is still crushed under a phalanx of ruthless creditors. While worker militancy is growing, aided by the unique conditions of the pandemic and the expired forms of government support Biden can’t or refuses to extend, the precarious financial picture hasn’t fundamentally changed for most Americans.

What we’ve gotten instead is the one thing — the only thing — that the Washington establishment and, depressingly, many rank-and-file liberals clearly still believe the country is capable of doing: ramping up the national security state. In response to the Capitol riot, the Capitol police have become a national, un-FOIABLE anti-terrorism squad, the FBI has doubled the number of its domestic counterterror agents (and consequently, its domestic terrorism caseload), an explosion of anti-protest laws, and there’s talk of more security state expansion to come. All this, even though none of it would have prevented either the breach of the Capitol (which happened despite copious foreknowledge of what was going to happen among authorities) or the GOP’s attempts to prevent the certification of the election in Congress.

Try and find a clearer example of modern liberalism’s haplessness and inability to respond to structural crises, or its anti-populist strain in action. All the underlying issues that led to January 6 have been left to keep festering, and low-level, rank-and-file Capitol rioters who were accused of little more than trespassing in a government building have been severely dealt with (it would be no good, after all, if failing to punish them ended up inspiring a mass protest that wasn’t centered on bullshit, like universal health care, poverty, or climate change). Meanwhile, the politicians and entities that quite consciously manipulated them have faced next to no consequences or constraints in their power, all just in time for round two in 2024.

For all of Biden’s warmed over platitudes about never counting America out and the like, the last year’s worth of responses to the Capitol riot have embodied not just the continuing decline of liberalism, but the wheezing death of any ambition it had left. Many have pushed hard to turn January 6, an event where all but one of the five people who died on the day were the actual “terrorists,” into a second 9/11, a tacit admission that the horizon of political possibility is now purely limited to more arrests, more jails, more cops, more bureaucrats snooping through your private things.

By contrast, even as an event magnitudes deadlier and more impactful than 9/11 — the pandemic — was happening at the same time, the army of Democrat-aligned politicians, lobbyists, and media figures has been unable to translate more than eight hundred thousand deaths into even piecemeal reforms to a health system on the brink, let alone a “war on terror”–style government expansion and reorientation of national priorities centered on health. The latter isn’t even an option any of them can imagine.

Whether it comes in the form of another riot of deluded Trump supporters, another GOP effort to institutionalize election theft, or both, another January 6 is entirely in the cards, since substantially nothing has been done about the structural factors that made it possible. It’s much easier to throw a few boors in jail and call it a day, after all.