Nayan j Nath, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
By Mark Mamerow
Anybody who’s spent any time in the kitchen has experienced a pot boiling over. You fill the kettle with water, add the pasta, cover the pot, set it on the stove, and turn up the heat. Then the phone rings, or you check the recipe, just for a moment. And sure enough, within minutes, the pot erupts! The lid rattles, steam erupts, and water streams down the side, spitting and vaporizing on the cooking element..
The January 6th insurrection was a political pot boiling over. We started with a volatile conservative white electorate, staring down a long term loss of power and influence. It’s commonly accepted in this group that a kind of cultural ethnic cleansing, driven by minorities and immigrants, is unjustly displacing whites from their perch atop American society. White conservatives have marinated in this resentment for years. Meanwhile, Fox News, the talk radio yakkers, and social media have fanned a growing flame of anger and grievance. Then, in November 2020, Donald Trump lost his re-election and proceeded to turn the knob to High.
The violent occupation of the Capitol on January 6th was not some kind of carefully planned precision operation. It was a spontaneous eruption by ordinary Americans, goaded into action by right wing force that can only be described as sinister. Analysis of the rioters arrested for their role in January 6th reveals that only about 10% of them were members of far right extremist groups. Most of those arrested had no history of violence, and little history of real political involvement. In fact, the individuals who acted most violently on January 6th were those people with the least violence in their backgrounds.
What’s happened to conservatives in America can be described as a mass radicalization of ordinary Americans. Recent polls indicate that only 21% of Republicans accept that Joe Biden’s election victory was legitimate. Forty percent of Republicans believe that violent action against the government is sometimes justified. These levels of mistrust and menace are unprecedented in modern American history..
While Trump and his right wing allies were effective at turning up the heat of anger in their base, their efforts to actually overturn the 2020 election were, at best, scattershot. Trump clumsily leaned on various state civil servants and functionaries, importuning them to disallow enormous batches of votes. His legal minions flailed comically with a series of unfounded lawsuits. Trump allies at the state level launched ludicrous “forensic audits” which turned up zero evidence.
It’s not realistic to expect greater effectiveness or focus from the Trump forces in 2024. But we can certainly expect Trump to forcefully turn up the heat, propelling the political pot to another boilover. Now, it’s unlikely that another January 6th will happen. America’s security establishment has time and gain proven its expertise at fighting “the last war”. Richard Reed packed explosives into his shoe, and 20 years later we are still walking barefoot through TSA checkpoints. So the Capitol will be safe.
But the laws of political physics will hold. The pressure and heat applied by Trump will show up somewhere in the system.
Consider that the US Presidential election is not a single election, but a compilation of 50 simultaneous state-level elections. And thanks to archaic provisions in the US Constitution, we still elect Presidents based on a state-level Electoral Vote counts. It’s well documented that, since Trump lost re-election in 2020, Republican legislatures across the country have been busy writing new rules for the next election. The most pernicious of these new laws wrench the power to administer elections away from civil servants and state-level bureaucrats and hand it over to partisan Republican operatives.
In 2024, the Electoral Vote count will likely hang on the election results from a small number of hotly contested states. And here, at the state level, is where we are most likely to see the pot of right wing political rage boil over. State governments are ill equipped to deal with spontaneous mass political violence. It may become very difficult to impossible for state electoral workers under siege to properly count the ballots. And this could take the election out of the hands of the voters, into the lap of state legislatures, and ultimately to the US House, which is expected to be controlled by Republicans in 2024.
I don’t know if you can really call what we’ve got a democracy, but if Trump and Republicans somehow manage to steal the 2024 election via violence, intimidation, and chicanery, we’ll be in a worst case scenario. Democrats won’t take it lying down, and in the words of Trump himself, we “won’t have a country”, much less a democracy. It will be a pitched battle, and it won’t be confined to the ballot box.
Sources
- “Fears of White People Losing Out Permeate Capitol Rioters’ Towson, Study Finds”. Alan Feuer, Washington Post, 4/6/2021.
- UMass Poll, December 14-20, 2021, cited in “Do Republicans really believe Trump won the 2020 election?”. Lane Cuthbert, Alexander Theodoridis, 1/7/22.
- “The Daily”, New York Times podcast, 1/5/22 and 1/7/22. Featured analysts Alan Feuer, Alexander Burns.