Jan. 6 was only one symptom of the brutal assault on morality, history and justice. It’s time to fight back
The brutalizing horrors of a fascist past are with us once again. This is most evident in the growing support for bigotry and white nationalism among Republicans and their base, buttressed by the increased presence of armed militia and an increasingly well-armed populace. Within the current abysmal historical moment, a mix of aggrieved agency, a tsunami of conspiracy theories and an expanding culture of lies fuel a massive political effort to legitimate and normalize white minority rule.
Underlying this authoritarian political project is a massive ideological scaffolding reproducing the lethal workings of repressive power and a formative culture solidifying the identities and agents willing to embrace a political landscape of fascist agitation and violence. This is a pedagogical effort to refute elements of the past as a site of injustice, all the while enabling a machinery of exclusion and disposability wedded to the logic of white supremacy and what Kimberly Williams Crenshaw calls “The Unmattering of Black Lives.”
This is a formative culture rooted in hate, bigotry, cruelty, infused with a spirit of vigilante violence. Far removed from democratic values, it has provided the language and political signposts to support the attack on the Capitol, women’s reproductive rights, voting rights and racial justice as part of a broader effort to successfully display its affirmation and merging of politics, white nationalism, imperialism and violence. In addition to these policies, this emerging formative culture has forecasted the “bald political calculus” of a rising unique American authoritarianism.