The Coming Götterdämmerung
Is America headed for a Twilight of the Gods scenario? Very possibly if the Biden administration and Democrats don't get their act together.
President Biden’s statement at his second State of the Union: “There’s no place for political violence in America. . . And we must give hate and extremism in any form no safe harbor” was met by jeers and name-calling by Republicans. When the Speaker of Pennsylvania’s House of Representatives last month introduced former U.S. Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn and former sergeant Aquilino Gonell as “heroes,” the majority of the chamber’s 101 Republicans booed them; many turned their backs and walked out. In the wake of the January 6, 2021 insurrection, every GOP member of Congress voted against funding the Capitol police.
One-hundred-forty-seven members of Congress (8 senators, 139 representatives) voted not to certify the outcome of the 2020 election in support of Donald Trump’s Big Lie. Trump is recycling the Big Lie in this election cycle. “They rigged the presidential election of 2020, and we’re not going to allow them to rig the presidential election of 2024,” is his boilerplate message now. The New York Times has documented more than 500 instances in this cycle in which Trump has falsely accused Democrats or others of conspiring to “rig,” “cheat,” “steal” or otherwise “influence” the electoral process. Falling into lockstep, a number of Republican members of Congress are again refusing to commit to honoring the 2024 election outcome. V-P contender (and one-time Trump critic) J. D. Vance gives a typical response. “If it’s a free and fair election, Dana, I think every Republican will enthusiastically accept the results,” he told CNN’s Dana Bash. “And again, I think those results will show that Donald Trump has been elected president.”
A Trump supporter told an interviewer this month, “Trump will win in an 82 million landslide. . . If they try to take it from him, we will fight, we will join the militia, and we’ll fight back. The storm is coming.”
In its 2024 Homeland Threat Assessment, the Department of Homeland Security states it “expects the threat of violence from individuals radicalized in the United States to remain high, but largely unchanged, mainly seen through lone offenders or small group attacks that occur with little warning.” More than 20 percent of Americans indicated that violence may be necessary to secure political objectives in 2024 in a recent NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll. Twenty-eight percent of Republicans versus roughly equivalent numbers of Democrats (17 percent) and independents (18 percent) said they see violence as an option. Meanwhile, there are a third more guns in private hands in the United States than there are people.
Fascism scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat states that “the GOP is now an autocratic entity, it has abandoned democracy and its values and aspirations can no longer coexist with or be contained by a democratic structure.”
Based on extensive interviews, The Atlantic’s Adrienne LaFrance writes:
Officials at the highest levels of the military and in the White House believe that the United States will see an increase in violent attacks as the 2024 presidential election draws nearer.
The form of extremism we face is a new phase of domestic terror, one characterized by radicalized individuals with shape-shifting ideologies willing to kill their political enemies. Unchecked, it promises an era of slow-motion anarchy.
Worst of all: National leaders, as we see today in an entire political party, can become complicit in political violence and seek to harness it for their own ends.
The preponderance of evidence indicates that we may be witnessing a replay of 2020. The Republican Party, fully aware its candidate again cannot win the popular vote and very possibly the Electoral College count, plans to engineer an outcome to ensure its candidate’s victory and install anti-democratic minority rule. Call it a slow-moving coup in the making. Add to this Trump’s vow of carrying out “retribution” against his many enemies, and “Project 2025,” a detailed Republican plan to replace democracy with authoritarian rule.
The Democrats are beginning to organize a concerted “Resistance” should Trump win, centering on lawsuits to oppose Republicans’ radical agenda. While that is all well and good, it almost sounds self-defeating in anticipating a Trump win. What this reader sees very little of is a concerted effort by Democrats to stymie extra-legal actions by Republicans to fraudulently claim victory.
Trump acolyte Roger Stone recently revealed some of the GOP’s plans to ensure a Democratic defeat. Sand-bagged by a couple of undercover journalists, Stone was recorded saying, “We’re working on it, we’re working on it. Lawyers, judges, technology. . . But at least this time when they do it, you have a lawyer and a judge, his home phone number standing by so you can stop it. We made no preparations last time. None. . . . There are technical, legal steps we have to take to try to have a more honest election. We’re not there yet, but there are things that can be done. Changes in state law, real time voter list monitoring. . . I mean, we’re finally now on an offensive footing.”
Are the Democrats similarly mobilizing for robust judicial, p.r. and political counteractions to the GOP’s hefty bag of dirty tricks? Will they have in place a concerted quick reaction taskforce to respond? Is the administration quietly preparing to control potential widespread violence and targeted domestic terrorism?
We’ve successfully dealt with such threats in the past.
From the late 19th century till the 1920s, the U.S. and Europe underwent numerous deadly attacks by anarchists. An anarchist assassinated President McKinley in 1901. In 1910, anarchists blew up the Los Angeles Times building, killing 21. In 1914, anarchists set off bombs in New York City. In 1916, ten persons were killed and 40 injured by a suitcase bomb in San Francisco. Nine policemen and a bystander were killed in Milwaukee in 1917 by a time bomb left at a Catholic church. In 1919, authorities uncovered an anarchist plot to mail 36 letter bombs to prominent Americans, including J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer.
In 1919, bombs went off in Paterson, NJ, Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Washington, DC. The explosion in the capital damaged the homes of Assistant Navy Secretary Franklin Roosevelt and Attorney General Palmer, who, in response, launched the infamous “Palmer Raids” during the first “Red Scare” in the aftermath of World War I. Thousands were arrested and hundreds deported.
In 1920, a horse cart loaded with 100 pounds of dynamite was set off by remote control on Wall St., killing 38 and maiming hundreds more. It was the worst terrorist bombing in the United States until the Oklahoma City attack in 1995 and the worst in New York until the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center.
More recently, in the 1970s, radical left groups carried out regular terrorist attacks. In an eighteen-month period during 1971 and 1972 the FBI recorded 2,500 bombings in the country, almost five a day. I was a college student in Washington at the time. I went to my bank on F Street one day to cash a check. Roped off in yellow ribbon, it was a crime scene. The Weather Underground had bombed it.
Three key elements differentiate current-day political violence from previously. First, guns, including military-style weapons, saturate society; militias and armed hate groups are active. Second, today’s news media environment is atomized, free from the Fairness Doctrine that previously regulated content. And third, and crucially, millions of Americans’ distrust institutions, including refusing to accept election results, encouraged by politicians in furtherance of their self-aggrandizing goals to hold onto power.
I foresee inevitable violence whatever the outcome of the election. In the event Biden wins, expect hard-right groups, egged on by Trump and other Republicans, to carry out attacks. Should Trump be victorious, anticipate popular protests to be met with force by MAGA fanatics and, after he takes office, by federal forces.
Wagner’s opera Götterdämmerung ends with tragic hero Siegfried’s funeral pyre floating down the Rhine aflame and Valhalla being burned to the ground. Meant to be earth’s salvation, his demise marks the end for the gods and all heroes.
Does this prophecy America’s fate? Democrats take note.