The American Farce Unravels: Shreds of January 6th

 

Crazy House in Dalat, Vietnam/boodhua

The storming of the Capitol on January 6^th by Trump supporters was an acceleration in the unraveling of the American political regime and the fantastic ideology that sustains it. Unfortunately, the likeliest result, in the short term at least, is that the regime will knit itself a tighter coat of control, with the help, sadly, of a large number of professed “progressives” who are rushing to bolster an imperial center that cannot, and should not, hold.

This event, which featured a cast of costumed characters that turned the Capitol into the Mos Eisley Cantina for a couple of hours, was the culmination of five years of farcical politics increasingly unhinged from the ability to think reasonably about, let alone effectively address, the real dangers and injustices accumulating in our country and the world, The groundwork of that was decades of the Fox vs. CNN/MSNBC universe of mutually-assured ideological degradation.

Third Discussion with Charles Dunaway on His Wider View Radio Podcast (1/25/2021)

This is an almost hour-long conversation I had with Jim Kavanagh on January 24, 2021.  We talk about the storming of Congress, populism of the left and right, keeping the pitchforks away, and various other topics. 

Lawyers, Guns, and Twitter: Gun Battles and Class Struggle after San Bernardino

Kent State, 1970 
14-year-old Mary Ann Vecchio, crying over the body of 20-year-old Jeffery Glenn Miller. Photo: John Filo

As can be expected, in the aftermath of the horrific San Bernardino mass murder committed by Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik in December, the issue of “gun control” and “gun violence” comes to the fore again, highlighted by a teary appeal from President Obama for new “gun safety” measures. I’ve dealt with the issue of gun rights in a comprehensive essay after a previous mass shooting (Sandy Hook), and I stand by the position laid out therein.¹

There are two considerations that, I think, count for something:

1)   The right to own firearms is an important political right. That is not a right-wing position. In fact, I consider the defense of that right part of the populist tradition in left revolutionary politics. Therefore, any necessary regulations on that right – and there will be some – must be as carefully considered as the limitations on any other important right.

2)   The American capitalist state is an apparatus whose main purpose is to protect class rule and its accompanying injustices, and to project compliance-inducing aggression on behalf of the American elite and its favored allies — locally, nationally, and internationally. Any mitigations of these injustices and aggressions are not the products of the liberal state’s inherent neutrality and altruism. They are the hard-won, always-precarious, fruits of social movements that scare the liberal capitalist state into forgoing particular wars, advancing particular minority and civil rights, establishing remunerative social welfare policies. etc.

In most “gun control” discourse, the first point — that gun ownership is a fundamental political right — counts for less than nothing. Most such discourse, in fact, considers it important that gun ownership not be considered a right, but some kind of frivolous luxury. Those who think that should acknowledge it, and advocate openly for the rescission and denial of that right, as do now the major organs of mainstream liberal opinion in the United States, the Washington Post (“The problem with Obama’s promise not to take away your guns”) and the New York Times (“it would require Americans who own those kinds of weapons to give them up”). The strongest, most forthright, statement of this position is given by Israeli-American sociologist Amitai Etzioni in his Huffington Post column, “Needed: Domestic Disarmament, Not 'Gun Control'”.²