Comic by Reilly Branson, reillybranson.com, Instagram: @rad_reilly. By permission.

How the terrorists won
It was a failed coup, but the terrorists’ assault on Congress was the kind of failure the “losers” can boast about. True, they didn’t manage to hang Mike Pence or capture or kill any representatives or senators, or seize the electoral college votes or stop the count. And the attack has become a crushing political reversal for Trump and his House and Senate enablers.

But maybe not so bad for the terrorists. They showed how easy it is to “breach” the heart of government, a display of power that shocked the world and gives them credibility. Far from being cowed by their crowdsourced exposures and arrests, they are riding high, planning new attacks on state capitals and again on Washington to disrupt the inauguration and, still trying, to overturn the election.

They walked out of the Capitol laughing and carrying souvenirs. The only bars they were behind were in DC hotels. After the mayhem, they could be seen lounging at the Willard Hotel smoking cigars. How could you call this anything but a triumph for them?

When movements contest state power, victory and defeat can be ambiguous; triumph can inhere in defeat, a tactical defeat can be a strategic win. The terrorists’ are using the spectacle to recruit new members and project their credibility as serious defenders of the white nation.

The experts argue about what to call it. If it wasn’t a successful coup, it looked like the dress rehearsal for one. This was Coup 101 for every white supremacist and fascist actor, a performance that could teach better than any manual or tweet thread. We saw in its “failure” how it could have succeeded in its maximal objectives.

The mob was an undisciplined assortment of all kinds of Trump supporters. Protest tourists taking selfies swelled the ranks, happy to go along with armed and disciplined terrorists who had police and military experience. It’s a mistake to think they are all alike, and we’ll learn more about the people in between those extremes. The more activist among them seemed a combination of DIY and militants capable of detailed planning, somehow well-informed about the location of obscure offices of key Democrats.

Like and unlike a coup
As in classic coups, there was apparent coordination between the insurgents and strategic allies: their political enablers, who called the election results fraudulent; authorities in the security bureaucracy who made sure the Capitol police were vastly outnumbered; communications centers (social media and right wing TV); and official informants in the Capitol police or even Republican representatives and their staff. It looked like part of an inside-outside strategy, with conventional politicians allying with the terrorists — an alliance that tells us we have arrived at a very dangerous time.

Like but also unlike the classic coups. There wasn’t active, open participation by the military and federal agencies. But there was a long-planned and relentlessly executed “collapsing and emptying out” of security forces and federal agencies.* Command decisions were made to deploy less than a fifth of the Capitol police and deny requests and offers of reinforcements.

I won’t describe the scenarios to overturn the election that Trump might have imagined. We have been obsessing over them for years, and they are easy to find in mainstream media. Were any realistic? Clearly some conditions were missing — mainly, the election was not close. Trump also lacked sufficiently subservient military, law enforcement, judiciary, and key Republican officeholders, despite four years depleting government and replacing professionals with lackeys. He could rely on police and national guard holding back, but not on their organized participation. Yet holding back was close to enough. The terrorists came within minutes of reaching House members before they were evacuated.

So some pieces were not ready on the chess board. But in 10 years, or 20, they may be in place, because the conditions that led to the assault will be here long after the passing of Trump and this cohort of insurrectionists. The weakened federal agencies may be rebuilt, but white supremacy and the other deep cultural and social divides that shaped the fascist base of support will be here at least for decades. That base is baked into the Republican coalition, the result of decades of the accumulation of cultural and social power.

So this time conditions weren’t quite ripe. Maybe the Trump insurgents will go down in history as “premature fascists.”

Left strategy for the inauguration: Stay home!
We knew there would be a white supremacist march, but we were at home watching it on TV. After months of direct action in the George Floyd movement and tireless mobilization in the elections, the mass movements and activists stayed aside waiting for the authorities to defend the Capitol.

Even knowing Trump had been working behind the scenes, waiting at home seemed quite sensible. We spend hundreds of billions on security — how hard could it be to deploy the Capitol police, the DC police, the many federal law enforcement agencies, the national guard? It was always easy enough when it was Black people or leftists demonstrating.

Relying on the authorities didn’t work out so well. Still, it’s good the left stayed home, and they should stay home this weekend and on inauguration day. That’s the advice of American Prospect editor Robert Kuttner. “Stay home, follow it on TV or social media, and watch the far right overreach, get arrested and take all the blame. … The spectacle, and the story, will be right-wing thugs versus the police, getting busted. It just doesn’t get any better than that.”

Kuttner is assuming that law enforcement, “massively embarrassed by the security failure at the U.S. Capitol, will be out in force.” Staying home isn’t passivity, it’s not disengagement — it’s so strategic that Kuttner could quote Napoleon: “Never interfere with your enemy when he is making a mistake.”

I hope that’s what will happen.  But I’m not quite as confident as Kuttner about law enforcement, especially with threats of armed mobs at 50 state capitals and who knows how many racists and fascist sympathizers in local police. DC’s acting police chief said there will be more than 20,000 National Guard, and there are fences around the Capitol. But 70 arrests in the week and a half after the assault isn’t much of a deterrent. (This may be changing.) Journalists haven’t even had a serious briefing by any of the federal agencies, and there have been few shows of determination and threats of serious prosecution from authorities.  Even city police and mayors know how to flood the media to put the scare into would-be protesters — they have done that often enough against our movements.

“Who Do You Protect?” Cartoon by Eric J. Garcia, by permission. 

This boldness of armed fascists poses a very new challenge for the progressive movement. The Capitol assault was not like the white supremacist demonstrations in the aftermath of Charlottesville; then, the progressives could outnumber the white supremacists and make them look weak and foolish. Those actions were before the armed occupation of the Michigan State Capitol in April, the plot to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and bomb the Capitol, and armed fascists at the home of the Michigan Secretary of State in December. This is a new period for street action, at least when the armed right is coming to town.

So maybe Kuttner is right, the left had better watch the inauguration from home. Not very heroic.  But if they go into the streets, the cops would be so busy chasing and beating them, that the terrorists would be free to burn down the Capitol. The police vans would be so full of “Antifa” there wouldn’t be room for the fascists.

The left is organized to build mass movements, to win teachers strikes, to fight for police or housing reform, and to win elections. But we’re not organized to fight armed fascists in the streets. So what should we do?

Or should we “put our bodies on the line”?
Eric Mann, speaking out from decades as an organizer, argues for “direct action organizing including the right of self- defense … we in the civil rights, Black, Latinx, Indigenous, human rights, women’s environmental, and climate justice movement have to put our bodies on the line and directly confront the white fascists through the most strategic and carefully constructed tactical plans.” He talks about “very tight tactical leadership to prevent provocateurs and self-appointed anti-fascists … from having any tactical role in our actions.” He sees it in “some excellent leadership from Black Lives Matter L.A.” who show “that a demonstration can and must have disciplined leadership and marshals to enforce the laws of engagement.”

Mann is vague when it comes to “the complex ‘how and when’ question of tactics,” deferred “to a later point.” But his call for “expanded tactical confrontations” must echo what many serious activists are discussing. Calling for people to be ready to put their bodies on the line the way serious movements always have —  that may seem to belong to a more advanced stage of the movement. But the movement is always more advanced in places, and many serious activists must be thinking this way.

This isn’t to frame resistance to fascists in a narrow way. It’s not just meeting them in the street, or even preparing for serious confrontation when Black Lives Matter marches to protest a police murder. It’s the long-term and hard work carrying on all of the struggles where we live and work that have been transforming our politics and culture. It’s doing what we’re already doing, but understanding that the stakes are so high they demand new levels of organization and strategic thinking.

We need a lot more discussion than I’ve seen in our media about how to go beyond our base, learn more about how movements build coalitions and strategic alliances. Many of us have been focused on elections in the last five years, where you only need a coalition that brings you 51% of the voters. But if we want transformational social change, we need far more than the third of eligible voters who voted for Biden.** Social movements outside of institutional politics use a different math than political parties.

How to unite movements, have movements reach outside their bases to form broader alliances — that’s something we had in the thirties and the sixties, in those great social movement upsurges. We may need that level of power to defeat fascism; we certainly need it for the deep transformations we envision.
—Paul Elitzik

*  The phrase “collapsing and emptying out” is from David Runciman, British political scientist and editor of London Review of Books, in an interesting podcast with historian Jill Lepore. Lepore talks about the right’s decades-long “accumulation of cultural power” through the media, the universities, and the judiciary.

** Biden received 51.5% of the vote, and the turnout rate was 66.5% of eligible voters.

The cartoonists:
Reilly Branson, BFA School of the Art Institute, won the Pacemaker Award from the Associated Collegiate Press for Best Editorial Cartoon — also the Pinnacle Award from College Media Association for Best Editorial Cartoon, Best Magazine Cover from MSU/Society for News Design, Best Front Page Design from the Illinois College Press Association. Look at his work at reillybranson.com, Instagram: @rad_reilly, and at F Newsmagazine.com, the award-winning student newspaper of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Eric J. Garcia recently published a collection of political cartoons, Drawing on Anger: Portraits of U.S. Hypocrisy. More of his work is on Instagram at elmacheteillustrated and on his website https://www.ericjgarcia.com/.