The investigation carried out by the committee appointed by the House of Representatives regarding the attack on the Capitol on January 6 of last year is still far from a full insight into these events, so it is better to refrain from blanket generalizations about the attackers. Let's hope that the commission will find enough evidence to file charges against the perpetrators and organizers of this attack.
However, I believe that some general observations can already be made that cannot be disputed. For example, we know that many of the people who attacked the seat of American democracy present themselves as defenders of the United States Constitution. Could it be that they are just misinterpreting the facts?
One of the keys to understanding the events of January 6 is a phenomenon characteristic of radical right-wing parties and movements around the world: the promise of restoring the privileged status of white men who believe that women, nature, and the machinery of democracy are ultimately their private property. The attackers who “captured” the Capitol took it upon themselves to shout the slogan “Whose house? Our house!” Commenters who say the usurpers were acting like a group of tourists on a tour probably didn't see the footage we saw. Tourists - especially conservative and God-fearing ones - do not occupy, destroy or defecate in the places they visit.
A deeper insight into these events is offered by the German philosopher Eva von Redecker. Inspired by the medical phenomenon of phantom pain in phantom limbs, she recently coined the term "phantom possessions" which she uses to interpret the new authoritarianism of our time.
For centuries, white men in America have had the right to claim many things - including other human beings - as their private property. They occupied and appropriated the natural environment, and they expected women to provide them with sexual services and various forms of care in accordance with the marriage law by which women were subordinated to men. It was also understood that men have the reproductive rights of women.
North American colonizers occupied territories that were granted status zero ground (a land that belongs to no one) even though there were already many people living there. And although (white) women could not be bought and sold as property, marriage law implied that women must obey men. We should not forget that in some Western democracies women could not get a job without their husband's approval until the 70s of the 20th century, and rape within marriage was outlawed only in the 90s.
As the African-American writer WEB Du Bois noted, the right to oppress certain groups has long been a form of compensation for poor whites who were themselves in a subordinate position. The feeling of relative superiority provided them with "psychological compensation" that contributed to the preservation of dominant social structures.
But things are changing. And although the changes are not fast enough (even in Sweden the difference between men's and women's wages is about 5 percent), the social transformation has advanced enough to cause anger and resentment over the loss of phantom possessions. This is typical of all radical right movements.
One of the features of the modern understanding of ownership is that the owner has the right to do whatever he wants with his property. The great British jurist of the 18th century, William Blackstone, says that property is "the unique despotic right of man which he has over the things that surround him." According to the Napoleonic Code, one of the features of ownership is the right to damage or destroy property.
This legal idea also has a psychological dimension: by the act of destruction, we show that we are the owners of what we have destroyed. That logic becomes chillingly obvious in the case of men who will kill or maim the women they supposedly love before agreeing to their emancipation (which literally means exit from ownership, and comes from the Latin root mancipium).
In this light, it is not surprising that most of the attackers in the Capitol were men. Many of them had military gear and pretended to be doing battle with the enemies of the American Constitution. The man who put his feet on the table of the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, confirmed his "despotic right" with that act. It was an attempt to make phantom possession real.
As long as the radical right claims things that are not really theirs, explaining the nature of democracy and pointing out the fact that they have attacked the very thing they claim to defend will have no effect. If American democracy is not what they imagine it to be - the exclusive possession of whites - then they will rather destroy it than allow it to suit the needs of a majority that includes people of color.
Of course, the political right cannot be reduced to just misogyny and racism. Right-wing voters have always been a minority, and today the key question is whether right-wing parties and politicians can form coalitions that will attract a wider set of diverse groups. Donald Trump, for example, managed to win over some of the rich by offering deregulation and tax breaks.
In any case, as Shirin Ebadi and other women Nobel laureates have noted in a recent essay, the "fundamental autocratic bargain" offers "the restoration of the personal privileges of men and economic and social elites in exchange for consent to the erosion of democratic freedoms." It's a call to attack anything resembling a woman's right to choose, including reproductive rights that are already under attack in right-wing strongholds in Poland, Mississippi and Texas.
Looking at things from a broader perspective, we may be tempted to interpret the fury of the radical right as a sign that things are changing for the better, because the rebels are losing the battle and are forced to resist.
But the victims of Donald Trump, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and Poland's de facto leader Jarosław Kaczyński are still paying a high price, as are the victims and families of the victims of the January 6 terrorist attack. It's possible that the right-wing dream of reversing the process of emancipating women and minorities is nothing more than a dream, but it's also more than likely that we can expect more violent outbursts by angry white men who want to reclaim their unique despotic position.
(Project Syndicate; Peščanik.net; translation: Đ. Tomić)
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