White riot? By Matthew Yglesias.

White riot? By Matthew Yglesias. 

(Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Hey folks. End of a week that felt like it lasted forever. First, I want to flag a new job opportunity leading legislative affairs on criminal justice issues at the Niskanen Center. It’s a great opportunity for the right person to move the ball forward on this issue in a constructive way.

Now onto the thick of things.

In the wake of the failed January 6 insurrection, a lot of articles got written situating the event in the context of the history of racial violence in the United States. Of the articles in that genre, I think my favorites were by Hakeem Jefferson in 538 and Omar Wasow in The Washington Post; Isaac Chotiner’s interview with Eric Foner is also very much worth your time.

This is important history to understand, both on its own terms and as a counterweight to the naive surprise expressed in some segments of the media in the immediate aftermath of the attack.

American political culture has a tendency to be somewhat willfully blind about the less pretty aspects of US history. That can sometimes be marshaled to useful rhetorical effect when attempting to rally people to condemn bad acts in the present, but it can also provoke complacency about the durability of our institutions and values, which is unmerited. It is entirely possible that loosely coordinated action between elite figures in electoral politics and violent mobs in the streets could overpower democratic self-government in the United States. We know that because it’s happened before.

Something that troubles me, though, was the tendency of some commentary in this genre to cite not just past racial violence as contextual history but to baldly assert that we should understand 1/6 as specifically white supremacist violence. I am open to the possibility that this is true, but it’s the kind of claim that I think should be demonstrated with some kind of evidence rather than just baldly asserted.

Here’s some stuff I am not arguing

When I probed this issue on Twitter last week, I immediately got hit with a perhaps-inevitable firestorm of non-sequiturs and strawmen.

So here’s some stuff I don’t doubt:

There is a significant intermingling between racism and conservative politics in the United States and long has been (indeed I wrote a Slow Boring post about this).

Some of the insurrectionaries were sporting Confederate flags and other white nationalist paraphernalia and some of the ones who weren’t probably share the same ideological commitments.

The mob was overwhelmingly composed of white people.

But here’s the rub. Precisely because white racism and conservative politics freely intermingle, points two and three characterize basically anything that happens in large right-wing political gatherings. If you go to a big pro-life event it’s overwhelmingly white people, and statistically some of those white people are going to have very ugly racial views, but I don’t think it illuminates anything to look at a rally whose purpose is to get abortion made illegal and characterize it as a white supremacist rally.

If somebody said “wow there’s a huge white supremacist rally happening on the mall tomorrow” and turned out to be referring to an anti-abortion march, you’d think that person was speaking to you in a confusing or misleading way. And even if subsequent photos of the event showed some Confederate flag tattoos on some of the rally-goers, I don’t think that changes the calculus.

So that’s my question about the insurrection. Is there any reason to believe that it was a distinctively white nationalist, white supremacist, or otherwise racist political formation apart from just being generically right-wing?

We could have evidence about this

One thing you might look at here was the divisions among House Republicans.

Most members of the House GOP caucus voted, even in the aftermath of the riot, to support President Trump’s effort to overturn the results of the election.

In addition, most members of the House GOP caucus are white. But there are two newly elected Black members, Burgess Owens and Byron Donalds, and they both voted with Trump. So did Carlos Gimenez, Mario Diaz-Balart, and Mike Garcia. The two Jewish House Republicans, David Kustoff and Lee Zeldin, also voted with Trump.

I don’t want to say that’s definitive evidence of non-racism. But look at it through the other lens of the telescope. If there was a vote in the House that most Republican backed, but where all the Black and Jewish House Republicans and most of the Latin House Republicans broke with party leadership to side with the Democrats, that would strike me as evidence that something fishy was up race-wise.

It’s not a coincidence that both Tim Scott and Marco Rubio have been outspoken at times about racial profiling while more moderate Senate Republicans like Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins have not. Murkowski and Collins are relatively moderate, but they are both white and they both represent very white constituencies. Racial profiling as a topic very clearly is all about race and racism, and that’s reflected in the link between legislators’ personal identities and their level of interest in the subject. It does not seem to me that we have evidence of a similar linkage in this case. Neither Scott nor Rubio, for example, has shown any interest in voting to convict the president of high crimes and misdemeanors.

You could also look at the crowd. Clearly, by eyeballing it, they were mostly white, as you would expect of any conservative political gathering in the United States. But is it whiter than the GOP electorate as a whole? Certainly if it was a disproportionately white group that would give us evidence of a strong racial role in the motive. And that might be true. But I haven’t seen anyone attempt to quantify it. Among those arrested at the riot — and arrested in post-riot terror plots — I’ve seen people of color, and one of the chief organizers of the protest-turned riot is #StopTheSteal organizer Ali Alexander, who is Black.

Wrecking democracy is really bad

To be clear: Storming the Capitol building, killing a police officer, and attempting to overturn the results of a legitimate election is a really bad thing to do whether or not you had racial motives.

In fact it’s the clear and obvious badness of the event that makes me wonder why there’s so much eagerness to gild the lily and be “well, it’s super-racist.”

If a cab driver doesn’t stop to pick someone up because he’s engaged in racial discrimination, that’s bad. But if the cabby just doesn’t see you there, then that’s not bad. If you don’t get hired because the boss is a bigot, that’s bad. If you don’t get hired because you’re not qualified, then that’s not bad. Which is just to say that there are lots of situations in life when “is it racist?” is a very central question to the moral evaluation of something that happened.

But the events of January 6 aren’t like that. Both the pre-riot nonsense from the GOP, the riot itself, and (especially in my view) the post-riot continued efforts to overturn the election were all very bad and clearly worthy of moral condemnation.

So why does it have to be a white supremacist riot on top of everything else?

Calling the RA

I don’t want to be Racism Court lawyer for these psychos. There is nothing about them or their actions that I believe deserves a defense.

But I do think to label all right-wing politics as white supremacist is indicative of two problematic trends in progressive thought.

One is a tendency to think of racism as an argument-stopping trump card. I imagine this as having arisen from dorm room culture. If you’re hanging around the common room and another student insists on adhering to a political position that you find to be infuriating, stupid, and harmful to human welfare, then the RA is going to tell you that’s life and you need to deal with it. But if another student insists on saying something that’s racist, then the RA is going to tell him he needs to shut the fuck up. Which is to say that in the campus environment, if you can convince the higher authorities that your adversaries are racist, they lose the argument.

Electoral politics isn’t like that. There’s no RA. There’s just the voters. And most of them are white. If you convince everyone that deep down Candidate X is maybe gonna favor white folks’ interest, it’s not obvious that’s even bad for Candidate X at all. That doesn’t mean you should never call out racism — sometimes telling the truth is its own reward, and stigmatizing the most egregious forms of misconduct (such as being done with Confederate iconography) can improve the climate over time.

However, in ambiguous situations there’s no particular reason to think that calling in the RA to rule your opponents Officially Racist will have any power.

The demographic spider hole

The other problem is belief in demographic determinism. If you point out that there are Black and Hispanic and Asian Trump supporters, people on the left will give you sophisticated explanations of how non-white people can nonetheless participate in politics inflected by white supremacy. And that’s fine. I get that. But I think it’s clear that the habit of casually discussing right-wing politics in racialized terms leads, in practice, to neglecting the existence of swing voters in all ethnic groups in the United States.

Biden was able to win the 2020 election despite the largest Electoral College bias on record. If the 2016-2020 trends continue for four more years, in 2024 the EC bias will be about the same; but if Biden can get back to Obama/Clinton shares of the Black and Hispanic vote that makes the map much more friendly, and also helps put Texas in play as a stretch Senate target. It certainly seems like an attainable goal but it’s hard to focus on if you’re dug-in characterizing as white supremacist a Trump Movement that over the past four years gained ground with Black, Hispanic, and Asian voters while losing white votes.

In conclusion:

None of this is to justify the actions of the political elites who pushed “stop the steal,” of the rioters or riot-inciters, or of those who post hoc justified the riot by voting to overturn the election.

It’s also not to deny the obvious reality that any time you look at a huge gathering of right-wing people in the United States it will be mostly white people, including plenty of racist white people.

Nor is it to deny the important fact that violent resistance to multiracial democracy is an important part of the story of American history, one that cuts against some widespread pat narratives.

The question is why, looking at a mixed-race group of right-wing insurrectionaries backed by a mixed-race group of right-wing politicians, one would leap, without any particular evidence or analysis, to the view that you’re looking in the present at a specifically racial mobilization? What is clarified intellectually or politically by insisting on this frame? Who does it help?

I think it’s become obfuscatory of the real issues. I acknowledge that present-day “read the room” norms suggest that one should refrain from objecting to these characterizations anyway, but I want to insist on the larger point that this right-wing movement is extremely dangerous. That means it needs to be countered effectively and that means it needs to be analyzed thoroughly and precisely. That, in turn, means asking for claims to be backed up with real evidence and consideration of alternatives. For liberals to continue with the current trajectory of losing non-white support while telling themselves they’re fighting a desperate battle against white supremacy would be a serious error and it’s worth reading the world instead of the room to try to forestall it.