The crowd that showed up at the Capitol Building on January 6, 2021 was mostly (but not entirely) white, middle to working class. It is my understanding that they had taken the trouble to get permits for a lawful protest. Whether or not that was their actual intention, I don’t know. Trump egged them on (as he is wont to do) and by the time they reached the Capitol Building they had run amok. It was then only a matter of time before the National Guard would show up and end the party. The major media are playing this up, calling it an “insurrection” and a “coup attempt” (and thereby tacitly approving the heavy National Guard presence in the Capitol). But the best description I have seen was by a friend of a friend who called it a “tantrum.”
The motives of the people involved were no doubt mixed. On the part of many of the whites there is a recognition that their race-based political hegemony is coming to an end. This is due to demographic shifts and changes in sensibility that have been occurring in the U.S. since the end of WW2 (the “browning” of America).
Correlated with those changes has been the transfer of wealth from the middle class to a very thin strata of the population at the very top of the economic scale (set in motion by the Reagan revanchement). So the pain that these people are feeling is real—but they confuse correlation with causation.
In other words, the job insecurity and income inequality they experience have not been caused by the browning of America but by the thin strata of the population at the top of the economic scale who are predominantly white and who have loyalty to no one but themselves (i.e., their socio-economic class, which is a taboo subject in the U.S. Part of the myth of American exceptionalism is that we have a virtually classless society. Marx was “proved” wrong with the fall of the Berlin Wall). Lower to middle class Trumpites aspire to be part of that thin strata at the top and so it never occurs to them that the people they admire are, in fact, the source of their pain.
The media and most academics eschew any sort of class-based analysis of the problem, opting for versions of identity politics that allow them to apply their critiques within the parameters of the myth of American exceptionalism. So long as that myth goes unchallenged, the true nature of the problems we face as a nation will go unaddressed.
