Pelosi’s new Jan. 6 select committee is about to collide with ‘white rage’

Pelosi’s new Jan. 6 select committee is about to collide with ‘white rage’

Washington Post

Opinion by 

Greg Sargent

Columnist

June 30, 2021 at 12:00 a.m. GMT+9

(Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP)

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For nearly a week, the far right has raged at Gen. Mark A. Milley for declaring a desire to “understand white rage.” But Milley didn’t allude to “white rage” in a vacuum. Milley said he wants to understand its role in inciting the Jan. 6 insurrection, asking how it might have caused “thousands of people” to try to “overturn the Constitution of the United States.”

The effort to cancel the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for this comment, then, is partly an effort to erase from the national agenda the question of what role “white rage” — or, more accurately, white supremacy or racial nationalism — played in inciting one of the worst outbreaks of political violence in modern U.S. history.

The new select committee on Jan. 6, which House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has just announced, will inevitably entertain this question in one way or another. And that will ignite the right’s anger again but, hopefully, will also force a national debate over that question, a debate we need.

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That the committee will engage in a version of the “white rage” debate becomes clear if you read the particulars of the new bill creating it. The committee will have 12 members and one chair with subpoena power, all appointed by the speaker, five members in consultation with the House minority leader.

But what’s also telling is the committee’s mission. The bill charges it with investigating the “facts, circumstances, and causes” relating to the “domestic terrorist attack” on the Capitol.

But, going broader, the committee will also investigate the “influencing factors” that incited such an attack on “American representative democracy.” It will recommend ways to prevent future “acts targeted at American democratic institutions” and ways to strengthen those institutions against future political violence.

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Tellingly, after defining Jan. 6 as “domestic terrorism” and “domestic violent extremism,” the bill also quotes the FBI director testifying that the biggest driver of such extremism is “racially-motivated,” with “white supremacist ideology” representing a subset of that.

In other words, the commission is charged with treating the insurrection as an outgrowth of a longer-running series of threats to democracy posed by various movements and ideologies. And it identifies racially motivated and white supremacist violence as a key component of that threat.

The ‘white rage’ debate

This should open the door for a robust debate over “white rage” and democracy. To be clear, this will ideally be broader than merely debating the fact that many white nationalists and neo-confederates were among the rioters.

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Instead, it should also be about the role that white supremacy and racial nationalism played not just in inspiring Jan. 6 but, more broadly, their role in driving the radicalization against democracy that has been let loose on the right.

In Tucker Carlson’s infamous monologue about Milley, he scoffed that “white rage” has no meaning. He derided it as objectionable precisely because it’s “race specific.”

I’m agnostic on whether “white rage” is a useful term in this context. But Carol Anderson, who has championed the idea, has defined it as a form of white supremacy driven by fears of multiracial democracy and the “sense that only whites are legitimate Americans.”

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This is what Milley was obviously getting at. He described the attack on the Capitol as partly an outgrowth of “white rage.” In essence, this means white supremacy, or racial nationalism, or fear of multiracial democracy played some role in it.

And so, deriding the very idea that the insurrection might have had race-specific causes is just a way to delegitimize the role of those ideologies in Jan. 6 as a topic of worthy national debate.

Fear and loathing of multiracial democracy

In an essay pegged to his new book, Adam Serwer pulls together these threads. As he notes, a broad range of anti-democratic conduct among Republicans — from voter suppression targeting non-Whites to support for Donald Trump’s election subversion to the hysteria around native voters getting “replaced” by immigrants from the “Third World” — are all united by a similar political logic.

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That logic, Serwer notes, sees the opposition and its democratic victories as dubious at best or illegitimate at worst. And that set of pathologies is heavily tangled up with the opposition’s reliance on non-White voters, who are in some sense understood as “usurpers.”

Once this is established, anti-majoritarian, anti-democratic tactics are not just justified, but the righting of a profound wrong. All this is central to racial nationalism.

One might add to this the constant invocations of imminent civil collapse supposedly about to end the rule of law in this country, always due to protests against police brutality. Or the valorization of an affluent resident of a gated community for pointing a gun at protesters, which he openly describes as a moment of divine inspiration.

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Or one might add the constant portrayal of the rioters as nonthreatening and even victims of law enforcement. The subtext is that the rioters were inspired by what John Ganz calls a “kernel” of “virtuous” rebellion over perceived lack of agency, by a buried ember of truth somewhere that some vague set of injustices, among them political disempowerment, has been inflicted on them.

Untangling all these pathologies will occupy generations of future historians. But if the select committee can compel a genuine national debate on them, rather than one that takes refuge in empty posturing around the term “white rage,” it will have served a purpose.