Anthony Crider, via Wikipedia Commons
As ever, history moves in cycles. I formed my own experiential basis for this conviction back in 2008 when, following the election of Barack Obama, the Tea Party movement arose. I could smell what was coming then, I just didn’t know how long it would take to get here.
Even prior to the Tea Party I’d been sort of expecting something of that nature. A lot has been written since the start of the pandemic about how Americans, right wing religious ones in particular, no longer trust scientific, medical or political institutions. But really, that process was well underway decades prior to the pandemic.
There were milestones along the way to where we are now, like Roe v. Wade in 1973, Kitzmiller v. Dover in 2005, or Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015, which didn’t seem connected to one another while they were happening, but which I can’t help but look back on as pivotal steps on the path to January 6th and beyond.
A country in which science, politics and medicine had long served the interests of white supremacy and either affirmed or treated Christianity with kid gloves had become increasingly secular. Christians, Evangelical ones in particular, were losing their influence over government at the same time that they were losing adherents at an accelerating pace.
Anthony Crider, via Wikipedia Commons
The erosion of the white, conservative, Christian hegemony in the US via immigration, deconversion and a shifting Overton window resulted in their diminished trust in government, science and medicine. The core of Evangelical religion is mortal anxiety. Most, from the moment they realized their own mortality at a young age, leapt into the open arms of the first belief system they were exposed to which promised an alternative to death. As if you can vote on what’s real.
Having chosen to build their worldview on that premise, making an untenably presumptuous leap rather than confront their mortality and emotionally mature in the process, they recoil from anybody who pokes holes in their security blanket, per fight or flight.
They experience something like an uncanny valley effect; as they have integrated their metaphysical assumptions inextricably into their lives and associate it with everything good in the world, anybody who doesn’t make the same assumptions must be lacking in many fundamental capacities without which they’re not fully human, and potentially dangerous.
This is the essential basis of their incurable mistrust of apostates, and the “secular world”, which is the abominable reality outside of their comforting ideological bubble that constantly threatens to intrude any time they put it to a practical test.
…Refusing vaccines for example, which shouldn’t put them in any danger if they are indeed “protected by the blood of the lamb” and by their team of prayer warriors. Likewise, Ivermectin, Betadine and Hydroxychloroquine shouldn’t harm them at any dosage if Mark 16:18 is true.
DrRandomFactor via Wikipedia Commons
It’s also the basis of Dominionism and related political attempts to “retake this country for Christ”, when it was never intended to be an officially Christian country to begin with. The perception is that ever since the Scopes trial and subsequent court cases affirming evolution, abortion access, gay marriage and so on, science and the government have turned on their former masters and become unfriendly to Americans of faith. Now that shit list includes doctors.
It’s been said that when you’re used to getting your way all the time, loss of privilege feels like persecution. So, if these institutions were no longer explicitly controlled by WASPS, for the benefit of WASPS, it had to be assumed they were now hostile to WASPS. This is the same mindset which gave us the mantra “anti-racist is code for anti-white”.
The next substantial development was the emergence of the Occupy counter-movement, whereupon our political situation in the US began to take on an even more recognizable (and historically analogous) shape. Organized, grassroots far left and far right populist movements, the modern evolutions of which now regularly brawl in the streets.
I’ve watched as the Tea Party became MAGA, then Proud Boys and Qanon. I’ve watched as Occupy sowed the seeds of BLM, although Antifa was already around for decades prior. But it takes more than that for civil unrest to boil over into a civil war. People were still much too comfortable and had too much to lose.
Marc Nozell via Wikipedia Commons
Enter Covid. It’s been keeping people indoors, glued to social media, scared and increasingly frustrated, looking for scapegoats and a way out. As r/hermancainaward and r/covidatemyface exhaustively document, Q-people are dramatically over-represented among Covid casualties. 90% of US atheists are vaccinated, 57% of US evangelicals are. The political divide in vaccination is also lopsided, if not as severely.
I’ve watched the right’s narrative go from “Covid is a hoax to see who will submit / preparing us for the mark of the beast” to allowing that covid exists but downplaying its severity while playing up vaccine harms, to finally noticing it’s mostly their own people dying, speculating that Covid is an engineered bioweapon targeting right wing Christian voters.
Twitter, Facebook
This is comprehensible only if you understand that in their mind, nothing is ever their fault. Anything that goes badly for them is the result of a sinister plot by their many enemies (everybody outside of their race and religion). If you put yourself in the mindset of someone who truly believes the election was stolen, that our leadership are satanic pedophiles and that they’re now killing off their opposition with an intentional plague, it’s not hard to see how this could make them fearful and angry enough for organized violence.
The other significant dimension to Covid, for the purposes of this analysis, is that the professional consequences of vaccine refusal have steadily impoverished religious, right wing American voters. They’re understandably quite angry about this. If comfort and having something to lose are what keep the pot from boiling over, would-be revolutionaries walking away from lucrative multi-decade careers (or being fired) removes one, if not both of those restraints.
Separate means of communication/organization are also key to a revolutionary effort. Mainstream social networks have attempted to disrupt their propagation of political and vaccine related misinformation, but Qpeople have responded to this by constructing their own parallel social media networks. This is yet another step in the ongoing cultural divorce taking place, as right wing Americans laboriously disentangle themselves from their neighbors, even their own family members. When this process completes, there will be two separate Americas ready to fight to the death.
Mind you, these people may be incompetent but they’re heavily armed. A dummy with a gun will kill you just as dead as an equally well armed engineer, doctor or mathematician. I expect, like Jan 6th, that when they finally “shoot their shot” it will be a messy failure. But not before they do an awful lot of damage and commit plenty of targeted killings.
Don’t forget how widespread the Q brand of conspiracy minded, far right evangelical Christianity is in US police departments and in the US military, the air force in particular. They’re all around us, already in positions of considerable power.
Owen Yancher via Wikipedia Commons
Hence my suspicion that January 6th was a dress rehearsal and “testing the water”, to see how far they could get with the help of complicit insiders (cops, politicians, guards, etc.) It was their beer hall putsch. It failed but revealed how many people we might entrust to stop them are privately sympathetic.
They lost their shit collectively when Biden won, they’re never ever ever going to accept that reality. Sincere belief in a stolen election is nearly enough by itself to motivate and justify (if it were true) an attempted revolution, even apart from the government imposed loss of livelihood and other pandemic stresses. With those factored in, we’ve just about got a perfect storm.
Will the pot boil over sooner, or later? Will it never? Can we walk this back from the brink? It remains to be seen. I think a lot of it rides on the outcome of the 2024 election. I don’t think the Q crowd will take another loss lying down. I would love to be wrong, and could’ve easily been convinced that they’re all just a bunch of yappy little dogs whose bark is worse than their bite. But Jan 6th changed my thinking on that matter.
I think it would be a good idea to prepare for the worst, whatever that might look like. If you’re averse to arming yourself or stockpiling food & medical supplies (lest we come to resemble too closely those we’re preparing against), some other ideas might include preparing hideouts for LGBT, PoC and other targeted groups in your home.
If the worst does happen, it might pay dividends to figure out in advance who your neighbors are, the political/religious demographics of your county, what the traffic and infrastructure/utility interruption situation is likely to look like and whether it’d be a better idea to leave for someplace else or hunker down where you are.