Vigilante Veneration: Fascistic Characteristics Of A Divided United States / Paul Street
Award-winning journalist, policy researcher, author, and historian Paul Street joins me to discuss the highly controversial and divisive Kyle Rittenhouse case and subsequent acquittal. Along with providing a substantive exploration of the broad sociopolitical context of this trial, we also touch on the case of the modern-day lynching of Ahmaud Arbery and the recent conviction of the men who murdered him in Georgia, the concerted legislative push in Republican dominated states across the U.S. to impose harsher voter restrictions and roll back reproductive rights on the national level, and what these trends mean for the upcoming elections of 2022 and 2024, and electoral politics as a whole.
Near the tail end of the uprisings of the "long summer of 2020," Kenosha, Wisconsin, erupted into riots after the police shooting of Jacob Blake, in August of that year. Days of rioting ensued. 17-year-old Rittenhouse—Trump-enamored and an aspiring cop himself—traveled to Kenosha, picked up an AR-15, and joined dozens of other well-armed white reactionaries, allegedly to provide first aid, clean up graffiti, and aid police in protecting the private property of business owners. By the end of the night of August 25, he had shot three men, two of them fatally.
In this interview, Paul Street and I don’t so much as dwell on the gruesome, and often tedious, details of the trial of Rittenhouse (such as whether the act of shooting three protestors could be justified as self-defense or not), but rather the broader context these events fit within. Specifically, how the veneration of vigilantes and so-called vigilante justice, which Rittenhouse has been applauded for within conservative, right-leaning spaces, speaks to how utterly fascist the conservative right has become.
In that long summer of 2020, we witnessed police brutality on full display in the murder of George Floyd in May and subsequent riots and protests, and in conjunction, an emboldened vigilante far-right came into fuller view with the well-armed militias that accompanied the police in their attempt to brutally contain a racial justice movement in all its wild forms. 2020 also saw the beginnings of a years-long pandemic we are still grappling with, and, only six days into 2021, a deadly, fumbling fascist coup attempt at the Capitol, instigated by Trump and his allies, weeks before the Presidential Inauguration of Joe Biden.
On the state level, Republicans have passed scores of laws to undermine the rights of the LGBTQ+ community, attack voter rights, cripple public health measures, censure public school educators, and set the stage for Roe v. Wade to be overturned by the conservative majority Supreme Court. The dismal performance of the Democrats, a party that currently barely maintains a majority in Congress, and the maneuvers and long-term strategies employed by the Republicans, will lead, potentially, to a Republican majority in Congress and a Trump presidential win in 2024. The lame duck presidency of Joe Biden and an ineffective, self-defeating Democratic Party have been, seemingly, unable and unwilling to counter this on any fundamental level. It’s not surprising, but must be noted.
What comes next is not pretty. The situation is complex, fluid and dynamic, and many things are difficult to predict. But if we expect electoral politics to counter this lurch toward a kind of 21st century neofascism, we would be sorely mistaken in that assumption. How we approach what comes next must be practical, creative, and revolutionary. Under no circumstances must we allow fascism to dictate our future. Voting may have served a utilitarian function in disrupting the Dominionist Christian Right from molding this nation in its horrific image, but voting has always been a fucking joke in this country. And with the GOP’s laser focused efforts to further undermine any legitimacy voting may have had in unseating them from political positions of power, we must recognize the dead end electoralism really is.
Bio:
Paul Street is an independent progressive policy researcher, award-winning journalist, historian, author and speaker based in Iowa City, Iowa, and Chicago, Illinois. He is the author of ten books to date, and most recently Hollow Resistance: Obama, Trump, and the Politics of Appeasement, and This Happened Here: Neoliberals, Amerikaners, and the Trumping of America. Paul writes regularly for Counterpunch.
Episode Notes:
Learn more about Paul’s work at his website
Read his Counterpunch articles
Purchase his books Hollow Resistance and This Happened Here on Bookshop
Music produced by Epik The Dawn
