The insurrectionist mob that forced its way into the Capitol on January
6 was markedly white and, for the most part, male. It was also
thoroughly unpatriotic. Beyond that, who were these vandals?
You may recall a 2016 campaign speech in which Hillary Clinton used the phrase “basket of deplorables”:
You know, to just be grossly
generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the
basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic,
Islamaphobic—you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And [Trump]
has lifted them up.
Republicans pounced on her words and tried to present Clinton as contemptuous toward all Trump supporters. But the Republicans were lying (yet again) when they did this. By “deplorables” she clearly meant bigots. About other Trump supporters Clinton said this:
“[They] feel that the government
has let them down”…they’re…“desperate for change.” “[W]e have to understand and empathize with…”
these non-bigoted Trump supporters.
I recall this voice from the past not only to express for the hundredth time
my disgust for the Republicans’ dishonest caricature of Hillary Clinton, but
also to connect the desecration of American democracy on January 6 with Trump’s
deplorables. The people who trashed the Capitol building, broke windows, stole whatever
they could haul away, and smeared feces on the inside walls were mainly male
and overwhelmingly white. Their Confederate flag and brazenly antisemitic slogans
tell us they were also overwhelmingly bigoted. These were the deplorables at their seething,
snarling worst.
Their hatred for what America has become was evident both in their assault
on the electoral process and in their brainless chant of
U S A!
U S A!
U S A!
They seem to think this chant makes them patriotic, but it does not. It
amounts to nothing more than a tribalistic invocation that says “Us against
you! Us against you!” Whenever I hear this chant I can’t help but recall the similarly
tribal German chant of the 1930s “Seig Heil! Sieg Heil!”
I would consider it a great blessing to never again hear a mob shout “U S A!”
Meanwhile, about 500 miles to the south democracy roared forward driven by the force of genuine patriots. With the amazing Stacey Abrams taking the lead, voters in Georgia lifted an African-American pastor and a Jewish journalist into the Senate, putting an end to Mitch McConnell’s stranglehold there. The deplorables are truly on the run while American democracy surges.
In a way the victories of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, along with Georgia’s Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, represent crucial victories in America’s ongoing Civil War. It’s not a coincidence that five of the six senators who objected to Biden’s Electoral College victory were from former slave states as were about two thirds of the objecting House members. The foul odor of the former slave-based southern patriarchy remains pungent in its old haunts.
America’s struggle to realize its ideals has been long and hard and certainly it’s not over yet. But the tide is with the real patriots and, despite the nastiness that Trump’s deplorables promise to stir up in the near future, their glory days are unequivocally behind them.
