“These are people with brain damage, they’re f***ing retarded,” Albert Watkins, who represents the “QAnon Shaman” Jacob Chansley – the face of the January 6 pro-Trump assault on the US Capitol – told Talking Points Memo in an interview published last week. “But they’re our brothers, our sisters, our neighbours, our coworkers – they’re part of our country.”
The comments – which are too salty to repeat in their entirety in a family newspaper – are shocking on many levels, but their candour resonates most profoundly on a fundamental level. They attest to the unsettling reality that America’s body politic is now vulnerable to a life-threatening variant of political extremism.
Republicans in the House of Representatives threw Wyoming Republican Liz Cheney out of her leadership role for criticising former president Donald Trump’s insistence that he won the 2020 election, and the GOP leaders of both congressional chambers are opposed to a commission to investigate the January 6 attack.
05:17
End of Trump presidency leaves Chinese-American community deeply divided
End of Trump presidency leaves Chinese-American community deeply divided
These developments reveal how the variant has transformed one of America’s two major political parties, one which must be recognised at least as an important check on the Democratic Party, into pro-Trump zombies.
This might seem like a purely domestic political matter, but Beijing is surely watching closely as this plays out because it knows that a country is weaker when required to fight a war on two fronts.
Washington is doing just that. The first is the new cold war of democracy versus authoritarianism – a complicated, international effort that requires assiduous diplomacy.
The second is Trumpism versus the American political system, a battle that many of us thought would have been over once control of the White House and Congress reverted back to the Democrats.
Electoral politics had historically sent America’s more extreme ideological movements, such as the country’s Communist Party in the first half of the 20th century and the far-right John Birch Society of the 1960s, into the wilderness.
03:48
US House impeaches Trump for inciting deadly Capitol attack
US House impeaches Trump for inciting deadly Capitol attack
But in a world full of social media bubbles and networks such as Fox News, which peddled lies about the election without offering a shred of evidence that would hold up in a court of law, those who have given up on America’s system of political checks and balances have embraced the “big lie” that the election was stolen.
As with methamphetamine, you cannot embrace Trump or Trumpism in small doses, pretending as though it can be grafted into a political orientation that works within the system established by the US Constitution. It’s not like having libertarian inclinations on particular issues within an otherwise liberal or conservative outlook.
For example, some liberals might support the privatisation of municipal recycling programmes, seeing that new technologies make recycling profitable and private capital can leverage these breakthroughs more efficiently than the state.
You would be hard-pressed to find a liberal who would support complete privatisation of other functions, such as education. They know that the private sector will never have an interest in ensuring that all Americans – rich or poor –have equal accessto learning or other resources.
It’s also not inconceivable to imagine a conservative supporting a shift to a more community-based model of law enforcement, simply because such an initiative might create a more business-friendly environment and even lead to lower municipal expenditures.
Peaceful street-level commerce and lower taxes! The idea fits within the paradigm of traditional American conservatism even though it sounds liberal at first blush.
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Trump pardons Steve Bannon and grants clemency to 142 others in final moments of presidency
Trump pardons Steve Bannon and grants clemency to 142 others in final moments of presidency
These two hypotheticals require both a degree of nuanced, critical thinking and a desire for guiding principle No 1 in the preamble of the US Constitution: a progression towards what it calls “a more perfect union”.
Trumpism has the opposite objective: discord and disintegration. Its leaders, including former White House adviser Steve Bannon – whose “flood the zone with sh*t” misinformation strategy nurtured the “brain damaged” folks Watkins is defending – want nothing less than a Cultural Revolution for America.
They know that electoral politics, played by the rules, will end their bid to stop multiculturalism, feminism and all of the other “isms” that they see as civilisational rot.
A bipartisan, independent January 6 commission could potentially halt the mutation of the Republican Party and stop the civil war that the world’s autocrats are no doubt relishing. Then, America could begin treating its brain-damaged brothers and sisters with the compassion that Watkins is asking for.
Robert Delaney is the Post’s North America bureau chief
