American history's many insurrections

MAGA is just the latest iteration of something very old

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One of the most clarifying things that the MAGA movement does is its defense of Confederate iconography - the statues, military bases and other pieces of Americana named after members of the pro-slavery side in the American Civil War. It’s very useful for them to so clearly identify the part of the American political tradition that they identify with - to admit that they see their own project as in some way a continuation of the project of Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee.

And this is what I think about nowadays when I think about the insurrection that occurred four years ago today.

One way of telling the story of January 6th is that it was some great aberration, some breaking of long-standing tradition often called “the peaceful transfer of power”. But this is only true in a narrow sense. It’s true that there has never been another instance when the technical, legal procedure which actually certifies an election result has been interrupted through violence in the same way it was in 2020. But there have been plenty of times when political violence in the United States has challenged electoral outcomes. There have been other insurrections.

The Civil War, of course, is the most well-known. Technically it didn’t interfere with the “peaceful transfer of power” because the election of 1864 was still peaceful - it just didn’t take place in the Confederate states. But we can hardly call it a peaceful transfer of power when it occurred at a time when American armies were killing American armies all across the continent. And we can point to even more direct examples than this, such as the Wilmington Insurrection of 1898, in which a mob of white supremacists overturned the “Fusionist” (African-American and white Republican) government of North Carolina. The end of Reconstruction was hardly peaceful, and involved bitterly and violently contested election.

What all of these events had in common was their grounding in a particular idea of the relationship of race to American citizenship. They were based on the idea that all of the legal and democratic niceties of the American constitution could legitimately be discarded if there is a real risk that the supremacy of the white race would be undermined. If you believe that America is an idea - a country, in Lincoln’s phrase, dedicated to a proposition - then you should believe that the constitution comes first. If you think that America is really a country which exists to deliver the best life for a particular racial or ethnic group, then you are willing to throw the constitution away whenever the supremacy of that group is threatened.

This brings us back to January 6th, and the relationship of MAGA to that deeper history. Few mainstream commentators or politicians portray January 6th in this context. If you read Nancy Pelosi’s memoir, you’ll hear about how January 6th was a grave assault on the institution of Congress. If you listen to Joe Biden, you’ll hear about how it was a battle between democracy and dictatorship.

But these takes are very abstract. Why exactly was MAGA assaulting Congress? What exactly does the dictatorship that MAGA seeks to construct want and value? Trying to answer these questions without making reference to race is like discussing how Joseph Stalin liked to have camps built in Siberia without mentioning who he wanted to send there and why.

Trump’s effort to overturn the result of the 2020 election was very explicitly about race. The votes he wanted to have thrown out were from heavily-minority cities - Philadelphia and Milwaukee and other places full of African Americans and Hispanics. When he gave a speech outside the Capitol just before the insurrection, he accused his opponents of stealing the election using “third-world practices” and with the help of illegal immigrants.

These actions and rhetoric unmistakably echo past generations of nativists, racists and white supremacists - not just the mobs in Wilmington and the rebel government in Virginia, but also the nativists of the early twentieth century who warned that immigrants from Ireland and Eastern Europe were unfit to be American citizens and would destroy the country. Trump made it clear that the votes of only some Americans counted, while others didn’t - and the ones who didn’t happened to be the same ones who have been told that they don’t count again and again, from the Great Compromise over slavery at the Founding to the Civil War to Jim Crow.

The fact that Trump just won an election in part by harnessing the votes of minorities who are displeased with the economic situation of the last few years shouldn’t obscure this continuity. When Trump eventually assumes office in a few weeks and sets about pardoning the January 6th insurrectionists, he will be telling us again who exactly he is exactly what part of the American political tradition his movement represents. The lynch mob that came for American democracy on January 6th, 2020 was not something new, but something deeply old. The mobsters winding up in charge is not new either. This is the deeper history that MAGA does not want you to remember.

Got an idea for a topic? Perhaps a deeper dive into a historical episode mentioned in this post (or one not), or a particular question you have about the incoming Trump administration? Leave a comment below and I’ll look into covering it.