Is Trump making a last-ditch effort to create a state of emergency? (Reflections on the events of Jan. 6)

Someone asks, in response to today's events: "Why not just invade the White House and put Trump under arrest for this?"

Because Trump and his supporters might find that fits their playbook, which is to create a constitutional crisis. The function of the creation of a constitutional crisis would be to strengthen police powers and possibly declare a state of emergency, which could be, like the response to 9/11, far-reaching and with more negative consequences than positive ones, including for activists on the liberal-left.

I don't think Trump and his supporters believe they can change the results of the election or ignore them, but they can create a crisis. The media then would likely exaggerate it, in part because that is just part of the logic of how such things work.

Do Trump and his supporters think that a crisis created before Biden and Harris (and the new Congress) are sworn in could enable the creation of a state of emergency that would enable Trump himself to stay in office 'temporarily' as much of the constitution is ('temporarily') annulled? That is perhaps an interesting question, but without his doing something like that, what happened today looks less like a coup d'état than a riot by some of his supporters.

I worry that liberals and Democrats will play into the hands of whoever might want to declare either a state of emergency or something approaching a true coup d'état, partly by making this into more than it is (so far). Of course, it is alarming, and Trump's statements are much more alarming than the riot in the capitol. It is certainly worth noting in these respects that while Biden is of course far less likely to declare a state of emergency, and then try to use in relatively extremist, escalatory ways, lovers of liberty and democracy cannot want that either.

The last decade and more has seen an alarming wave of right-wing terrorism and mob behavior, and it is entirely possible that the Reichstag Fire that as media event would be used as an excuse to declare a state of emergency would be done under the watch of a centrist and liberal Democratic administration. It would on that basis be sold to liberals, but buying such a story should be refused if possible.

I would resist credulity towards the prospect of a liberal Democratic pressure to use enhanced police powers on their behalf and against the right, however they are framed. Since Trump has no moral authority with thinking citizens, those who do should aim to minimize a sense of escalating crisis, to slow it down and not stir the pot.

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Trump's public posturings were clearly the most important effect of his presidency. In their entirety, they represent an attempt to shift the space of American political discourse into a disregard for any public discourse that maintains any connection to rational thought, including its referential character. Trump's proposition has been "politics is lies and manipulation, and has no norms except expediency." The effects of this are meant to be destabilizing, and they are far more important than any policy initiative the President has advanced in his four years in office, though the nastier ones, like attacking immigrants and stoking white racism, are of course consistent with it.

His gambit is to create a crisis and escalate conflict. The obvious extreme towards which this points is the possibility of something approaching a coup d'état, which would be a declaration of a national state of emergency, suspending (duly elected) constitutional government and/or civil liberties. Such a declaration would likely be preceded by overnight arrests of many activists, most of whom would be on the left, though those on the right might get more attention.

Without supposing any conspiracy, which societies like ours do not usually need in order for events to fall in place in ways that work well for ruling economic and political elites, it might be worth asking here, cui bono?, who would benefit from this? Are there corporate or other interests who would benefit from this, while liberals are expected to follow their own leadership (and the liberal press) in attributing it to the narcissism of a madman? It would be a way of forcing changes that some in the national power structure must want.

Biden was elected presenting himself as representing a return to normalcy backed by patriarchal wisdom and common good sense. Liberal elites and many Americans fear Trump for these very reasons. The setup or mise-en-scène here is one that the right has set and liberals are reacting to; the right has retained the initiative.

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Trump's gambit is not a bid for legitimacy but for the rationale of forcing what his faction seems to want, which would be realized in a recognition of illegitimacy seized as basis of something else. The state of exception would be presented as not so much legitimate as necessary, or perhaps legitimate in a kind of negation of the negation. The revolt of resentment which asserts that I am good or right only because you are bad or wrong. It would be a propriety or necessity outside law, and this would appear to be a consequence of Trump's relentless assault on his authority's refusal and negation of all normalcy above all in use of political language. It as if to say: All politics is a lie, and what matters is only what 'we' want. Trump relentlessly sought a politics above politics as normal, which he tried to delegitimate. This strategy knows that it will be perceived as illegitimate in its turn, and to that it says: so what, fuck you, this is our défi, an in-your-face challenge. Trump has spent his four years in power trying to delegitimate politics as rational discourse, including reason's dependence on the evidence of fact, as distinct from what the authorized speaker in his will to power claims because he wants. The populism that Trump appeals to likes and wants this; as in "Taxi Driver," with its cynical populist candidate, "WE are the people" and "We ARE the people"; all that matters is the play of forces, by which people who suppose themselves to be supposed to be privileged are happy to see such a will to power asserted. By far the most important and troubling theme of Trump's presidency was this assault on the normalcy of political discourse in a nominally democratic or even republican space, if republicanism is understood to mean a rule of citizens at least representational in a framework of laws and not mere persons, of right and not mere might, reason and not will, discussions that appeal to some impersonal authority of discourse and not only to the will of the speaker, etc. Trump seems to have wanted to use his presidency to remake the American political space in a blatantly abnormal way, and so to create a sense of crisis, and the unease that attends the notion that political authority rests on nothing but its own will. He is a figure of a radical right not because of his particularly policy initiatives and programs, which are, at least in American terms, far more moderate if only because within credible political normality. And in this he is utterly singular. Some thought Reagan was crazily disconnected because he uttered ideas that were equivalent to fantasy scenarios from his own career in cinema, but Reagan was sincere enough to appear on the level, believing in what he said, and evoking rhetorically morally stirring concerns. Trump is the “fuck you” president. It's very remarkable. This is surely what he will be remembered for. He probably does want now to provoke a constitutional crisis, and is probably smart enough and not a madman enough to recognize that he will probably not be able to overturn the election results and stay in office for four years, but he clearly thinks that he can accomplish something important by creating the havoc that then forces liberals and even left-liberals to want to appeal to notions of normalcy, which Biden ran on, as if in a way he is the true conservative and Trump a seemingly mad radical.

Trump brought the well-known but too little remarked instrumentality of the right at least since Buckley and Goldwater into a potentially ugly light. His politics are escalatory, and that is obviously a risky gambit. This is remarkable because one has to wonder if it is true that broad forces in the American economic and political scene would like to create a constitutional crisis in order presumably to facilitate some kind of (greater, as we have had one at least since 9/11) state of exception, presumably in order to force changes that most of the American people are elites would be unwilling to swallow otherwise. My fear is that such a crisis gets provoked somehow and then used, then it will inspire a broad political clampdown, mostly affecting the left, but inspired partly by doings of the right (that includes virtually all terrorist crimes in the last 20 years or so, at least aside from the Islamicist ones, rarer except for 9/11 itself, which seem to me rightist in a different way, though one that proved complementary-- what was ISIS but the war on the West that its most cynical leaders could only have dreamed of, performed in the rhetoric of pure technological nihilism?).

I also think it matters a lot less who is in the Oval Office or in Congress than most people think. Not or not only because of a "deep state," but because a moderate administration might react not so differently to the same kind of crisis, though I suppose we can say that rhetorically Biden and Trump have very different styles, and that does matter. What is interesting to ponder is whether the Trumpian right is correct in their betting as they obviously have done that crisis or polarization, which his administration certainly provoked, relatively mildly, it seems to me, will benefit them or backfire. The strategy seems to be to want to provoke crises that enable bringing out in force the military-police apparatus. I fear that that, which liberals and moderates may easily call for, is the real danger, and not the direct effects of Trump's wildly unconstitutional and blatantly dishonest shenanigans. I think he is not a stupid person, though maybe a reckless one, who is a strategic actor doing what he does for a well-considered purpose. And, qu'est-ce que c'est?

The balance of popular political forces between left and right, which might well favor the liberal Democrats if not their party's much strengthened (thanks in part to Trump, in part to economic crisis) left wing, might matter a lot less than the ability of those in command of the executive branches (federal, state, and local) to bring out military force against unruly citizens and the perhaps exaggerated threat posed by them (the assault on Congress yesterday was spectacular, but the actual threat posed by such mobs is exaggerated; a coup d'état or other catastrophe would be caused not by them but by a government response). Part of what is involved in the attention-getting events is a politics of spectacle. Political actors may do things that get attention, then the media (over-)reacts, then the government does, as Trump did last summer in response to protests against policing (using them as excuse for more of just that). Trump is on the level on at least this one point: He says crazy things, but then says, hey, listen, guys, the police and the military are the good eyes, we (act like posturing madmen saying things designed to provoke reactions, but) are the party or faction of law and order. And that you can believe. Law and order of course meaning law enforcement, and not based on any legitimacy that lies outside of or prior to it. Enforcement as law’s legitimacy rather than the other way around.

In this way, the right doesn’t have to be stronger popularly than the left or liberal center; to get what it wants, it may only have to do something shockingly extreme that gets attention, then wait for the clampdown. Its rationale would be independent of left vs. right in terms of policy; it would only need the appearance of crisis. The logic would be to either provoke the left to do something that can be cited as the basis of a crisis, or for the right to do this itself; and it would little matter which. In that way, polarization benefits the right, and it does so because the state apparatus is stronger than any social movement.

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There may be a series of consequential mornings after. In the first, giant companies that alone and together have more power than any government react, and it is the technology companies that control the flow and access of public discourse outside official media channels that communicate with publics unidirectionally.

Private companies with permanent customer clients exceeding in number those of any state, intervening governmentally to sanction leaders in the official ('public') government, heroically (articulating and) enforcing norms by virtue of which the populace is supposed to be grateful to those companies that use their clientele to make enormous amounts of money through the services they provide them --- set against a government whose personnel are understood by everyone to be contingent, fallible, culpable in ways that owners of monopoly business entities are not -- this is as ominous in its way as the prospect of some elites with access to state authority acting to rescue 'the people' and the state from another faction that is now thought to be criminal -- and in the process creating a state of emergency seemingly needed so that one or two factions of the elite can rule more decisively after attacking another. Nothing in this is happy. The losers will not be the components of the ruling political center, even if that center is recognized as a center-right (or center plus right); the losers will be activists and 'intellectuals' on the left. One faction of the elites another defeats, and the society as a whole loses.