On 2 January 2016, a band of armed anti-government extremists occupied the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in eastern Oregon. Ammon Bundy, the Stetson-wearing leader of a right-wing militia with the anodyne name Citizens for Constitutional Freedom, had been addressing an angry rabble in supermarket parking lot in nearby Burns, OR. The rally, in support of Dwight and Steven Hammond, father-and-son terrorists who had been convicted of arson on federal land, had been organized by the Pacific Patriots Network, a federation of militia groups including the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters.
“Those who want to go take hard stand, get in your trucks and follow me!” Bundy declared to his audience at the conclusion of the rally, and shortly thereafter, a convoy of men in a panoply of western gear, camouflage battledress, and armed with automatic weapons drove up to the wildlife refuge, occupied the buildings, and set up defensive positions on the approach roads.
It all seemed so absurd six years ago; the carnivalesque of toxic white masculinity and the bric-a-brac of American cowboy mythology. Bundy declared that he had been inspired by God himself, and his comrades posed for the news cameras with their chests puffed and their stubbled manly chins jutting out like extras from a John Ford film. They had ridden up in Ford and GMC trucks, but Duane Ehmer made of a point of posing for the media on horseback wearing a ten-gallon hat and carrying the Stars and Stripes. The militiamen had brought the horse through their perimeter expressly for the photo-op.
Social media users ridiculed the Bundy gang as “vanilla ISIS” and, in 2016, they were ridiculous. Yet, looking back across the years, and through the lens of 6 January 2021, Ammon Bundy’s Wild Bunch seem today just as chillingly ludicrous as the pathetic Little Corporal from Graz, and his comical Laurel and Hardy sidekicks who tried to take over the German government in the streets of Munich in 1923.
Covering the Beer Hall Putsch a few months later, the writer Joseph Roth viewed the proceedings as a fever dream of the absurd. “I deny the reality of the significant event which marked Germany so solemnly this week,” he wrote in opening lines of his article in the Social Democratic Party newspaper Vorwärts. “That’s right,” he concluded. “I dream, and this dream of a carnival night is called Germany.”
Roth saw through the carnival night and would spend the next fifteen years of his life warning of the horror it portended. A decade later, writing for Le Mois in Paris, to which he had escaped following Hitler’s rise to power, he could still ridicule the absurdity. The Nazis had proclaimed the “Oak of Wotan” a national symbol of their new Germany. But “there are so few oaks in Germany… far fewer than in France for example,” he wrote. “We know too that Germany is the land of chemical fertilizers and not a clod of earth remains natural; but none of this prevents the most common expression recurring in current literature of ‘the native soil.’”
It was all a show, he observed – a comic theatre. The Third Reich had, after all, placed the nation’s literature and fine arts, from painting to the opera, “in the hands of the Minister of Propaganda!” How could anyone take that seriously? Yet, Roth did take the absurdity seriously. “It is not by some fortuitous coincidence that you see them burning books at the exact moment that they mistreat the Jews,” he warned, “these are merely two separate manifestations of the nation’s spiritual state.”
One year ago yesterday, a neo-totalitarian mob, egged on by a lame-duck president who could not accept the will of the people, stormed the Capitol to stop democracy in its tracks. They failed, of course; Capitol security, albeit dazed by the shock of an actual insurrection, belatedly swung into action and spirited Vice President Mike Pence and Speaker Nancy Pelosi to safe locations before they could be garroted in some Magaist cosplay of William Pierce’s neo-Nazi fantasy The Turner Diaries. Senator Ted Cruz and Representatives Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz, and others looked approvingly on the QAnon Shaman.
But what if they hadn’t failed? What if the Capitol police and congressional security officers had dithered even five minutes more, unprepared to respond to an invasion that they never expected? Vice President Pence and Speaker Pelosi doubtless lie awake nights reflecting on how close they came to the end of a rope. So should we all as we consider what might have followed a successful Capitol putsch and the inevitable lynchings.
The bigger question, however, and the one that should give us all pause, is why was anyone surprised? It was not like we had not had plenty of warning. The armed, militant, anti-government – and anti-democratic – movement that came perilously close to seizing power last year has deep roots in America that run through the John Birch Society, the messianic-fascist compounds at Ruby Ridge and Elohim City, the Montana Freemen, the “sovereign citizen” movement, and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
At the very least, we should have noticed that something was up when Ammon Bundy and his posse rode in the Malheur Wildlife Refuge, fortified their position, occupied government buildings, and thumbed their noses at democratically-elected authority six years ago. They were risible, to be sure, but less than a year later, almost half of American voters elected Donald Trump on a platform of dissolving the state. The very next summer, legions of neo-totalitarian extremists marched in Charlottesville and murdered Heather Heyer. Yet, even then, we did not take the carnival players, with their tiki-torches and cardboard shields, seriously enough to expect them to almost seize power.
Finding parallels with the past is always a fraught exercise, and despite Karl Marx’s dictum that “history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce,” nothing is ever that simple. The conditions are always different. Yet it is difficult to read Roth’s words today and not think of our contemporary historical moment. “A grotesque dream is forming,” he wrote in 1924, “and all Germany accepts this miracle with indifference, as if it was self-evident.”
One year after the only direct attack on the seat of American democratic institutions since the British torched Washington in 1814, there is an overwhelming sense of indifference in America to the Capitol Insurrection, to the goosestepping battalions of Charlottesville and the cosplaying GI Joes of the Three Percenters and Oath Keepers – all the way back to Bundy’s dress-up cowboys. It is “as if it was self-evident.”
An Axios-Momentive poll released to mark the anniversary of last year’s attempted putsch has found that only 55 percent of Americans accept that Joe Biden legitimately won the 2020 election. That means that more than 40 per cent have embraced the neo-totalitarians’ lie of a stolen election and, if that wasn’t bad enough, fewer Americans accept the legitimacy of the vote today than even in the wake of the insurrection twelve months ago.
The National Commission to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol Complex grinds along, producing reams of evidence that the putsch was sponsored and even planned by prominent Republicans, Magaists, and even the White House. Most Americans (at least those who accept the legitimacy of the election result) even support its work. But it has been chillingly easy for witnesses to stall and dodge subpoenas. Steven Bannon’s contempt of Congress charge has not brought his cooperation, and it is unlikely that he will ever even face real legal consequences. Holding him or other Magaists in “contempt of Congress” seems little more than a statement of fact, “as if it was self-evident.”
It is an open question whether the commission will wrap up its proceedings before the midterm elections this coming November, after which it may be dissolved by a Republican congressional majority. And even if, by some miracle, it does, the Republican Party’s staunch non-participation virtually guarantees that the roiling neo-totalitarian masses will simply dismiss its conclusions as illegitimate. No Republican even participated in the commemoration of the attack held yesterday in Washington.
It is no secret that the 2021 putsch will not be the last, and most Americans expect an imminent do-over. Yet, apart from a minority of public figures, commentators, journalists, and private citizens who continue to sound the alarm in Congress, the media, in social media, and around family dinner tables, there is overwhelming sense of fatalism. The Magaists welcome the prospect of their political apotheosis and the death of democracy, their opponents fear it… And most Americans, it seems, shrug.
“The most abominable ‘atrocity story’ which our great grandchildren will still recount is the transformation of the world through stupor into a non-world,” Roth wrote in 1938, after the Anschluss and just before Kristallnacht, “as if absurdly it wished to plead the case that it wasn’t born in the word of God, but through a printing error of Satan.”
By the beginning of 1939, having watched from Paris as his beloved Vienna fell to Nazi jackboots and international indifference, Roth sought a new homeland in an obligation to speak truth like Cassandra to a deaf world. “Whether we move from ‘left’ to ‘right,’ or remain in the ‘centre…’ we’re all children of the epoch whose mark or stigma we carry,” he wrote. “Our epoch is our homeland…” And the obligation of all people committed to civilization, “our principle, for the future, is to act as patriots and to reside in the domain that we know is inhabited by good and there listen to its call.”