“These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West.” You know, “repectable people.” Or maybe not.
Adam Serwer reviewed the CVs of some of the common clay who arrived, at the outgoing president’s invitation, for last week’s overthrow-the-government party. They included business owners, CEOs, state legislators, police officers, active and retired service members, real-estate brokers, and stay-at-home dads. And a few Proud Boys and “militia” members.
In a large crowd, Serwer writes, there were bound to be some of modest means as well as more middle-class Americans. But:
The notion that political violence simply emerges out of economic desperation, rather than ideology, is comforting. But it’s false. Throughout American history, political violence has often been guided, initiated, and perpetrated by respectable people from educated middle- and upper-class backgrounds. The belief that only impoverished people engage in political violence—particularly right-wing political violence—is a misconception often cultivated by the very elites who benefit from that violence.
The members of the mob that attacked the Capitol and beat a police officer to death last week were not desperate. They were there because they believed they had been unjustly stripped of their inviolable right to rule. They believed that not only because of the third-generation real-estate tycoon who incited them, but also because of the wealthy Ivy Leaguers who encouraged them to think that the election had been stolen.
There’s ample precedent for this. When the Ku Klux Klan formed during Reconstruction, according to the historian Eric Foner, its leadership “included planters, merchants, lawyers, and even ministers. ‘The most respectable citizens are engaged in it,’ reported a Georgia Freedmen’s Bureau agent, ‘if there can be any respectability about such people.’”
Respectable people can be very dangerous. President Ulysses S. Grant responded to the outrages of the KKK in the Reconstruction South by sending the military to crush the Klan and the newly formed Department of Justice to prosecute it. For a time, the effort was successful.
For a time. When federal troops withdrew, reactionary white backlash returned against sharing power with freed Blacks (men only at the time). “They terrorized, murdered, and intimidated Black voters and their white Republican allies in order to excise them from the polity and restore Black people to a state of near-slavery.”
And there Black Americans stayed until Civil Rights Era reforms abolished the formal aspects of the Jim Crow laws that followed Reconstruction. The informal legacy remains. The right-wing backlash against reforms of the 1960s persisted for another 60 years, culminating last week in the sacking of the Capitol by self-described patriots, very respectable people.
