As November 3rd approached, many feared the worst was coming. Biden would win and Trump would reject the results. His party would rally around him. His supporters would storm-vote counting facilities and militias would gun down anyone who resisted. Riots against Trump would destabilize cities in a way exponentially more widespread than in the spring, drawing lines for a civil war.
There were legitimate reasons for concern. Trump openly declared his desire to steal the election, his supporters organized intimidating truck caravans through liberal areas. Republican politicians, judges, and law enforcement agencies already militarized against riots all appeared ready to back him to the end. But a month later, the fuse has burned without explosion.
We cannot chalk Trump’s failure up purely to incompetence. If things were slightly different, like a 2000-style too-close-to-call finish in a single state, a shameless conservative apparatus is certainly in place to manufacture a legal steal. Even if things weren’t so tight, if Trump wasn’t so erratic, and hadn’t lost so many allies among the GOP, ruling class, and state bureaucracy, the Republican apparatchiks tasked with state-level certification might have been more obedient. And who knows what would have happened had the victorious nominee been Bernie Sanders instead of Joe Biden.
Were any of this the case, there would be a missing element in the predictions of chaos: the social forces willing to fight to the death over the election. In the triumphant flames and fury of the George Floyd uprising, and the enthusiasm on the right for those who run down or gun down the rebels, there was concern violence could spread throughout the country. Popular conspiracy theories among both Trump supporters and Democrats held that this violence is orchestrated by shadowy forces—the Soros cabal, Putin, the Boogaloo Bois, or some combination thereof. More realistic radicals recognized that even if the violence were inevitable only the state, and the big powers it represents, was truly prepared to win. There were very few, however, who hoped for this outcome—at least to an extent they were willing to make it happen.
So the fantasy of a defeated Trump’s “standby” paramilitary of Proud Boys and patriot militias mobilized to lay siege to the metropolis did not come to pass. But what if it had, and what if local police defected to the right? In this scenario, liberals would call upon a mass movement of Biden voters to defend democracy. One could imagine a day of action, like the Women’s March, or the not-quite blockade of JFK airport that followed the Muslim ban. Even if these occurred on a far larger scale, however, these protests were ideologically pacific and largely ended with announcements from organizers that the urgent problems of a federal apparatus suddenly corrupted by misogynists and Islamophobes could be corrected by elections and courts. Those solutions no longer on the table, would they move fully towards action, like the more direct blockade at international airports outside New York, the massive women’s strikes in Poland, the recent rioting against Macron’s security law, or even a general strike?
While such tactical breaks aren’t impossible, this demographic is totally unaware and inexperienced in what would it take to topple an emerging dictatorship, and those with some experience to help them—the antifascists, anti-ICE blockaders, water-defenders, rioters, immigrant labor organizers, etc., were largely denounced by liberals, scapegoated as helping Trump, and roundly repressed in a bipartisan effort. Liberals sympathize with these elements only far as to launder their demands into ill-defined policy positions like “defund the police” and “abolish ICE,” that no one could seriously believe will go anywhere in Biden, Schumer, and Pelosi’s Democratic Party of Order. Knowing this, the rebellious party would be unlikely to pour into the streets and highways as they did to avenge the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Jacob Blake, and Walter Wallace Jr. They would not erect or defend camps and autonomous zones outside the coup’s centers of power to make a special fight with the armed forces of dictatorship, after spending the last several months being crushed by the armed forces of liberal democracy.
Marx’s 18th Brumaire, a history of how the Parisian proletarian revolution of 1848 was coopted, made a similar observation. When the right-populist Louis Napolean overthrew democracy with a self-coup in 1851, parliamentarians and petit-bourgeois parties attempted to rouse the proletariat to rise up again. Why did the proletariat not rescue the bourgeoisie? Marx asked. Because those not already in jail remembered the prior betrayals: “Any genuinely revolutionary uprising of the proletariat would have put new life into the bourgeoisie, reconciled it with the army and ensured a second June [1849] defeat of the workers.”
Equally implausible that the working class would rush to defend Biden is that they have been won over to the right. For all the fantasies of Trump as blue collar Svengali, or even more absurd proclamations of the GOP being the new labor party, an Edison exit poll showed Biden improved slightly over Clinton in voters making less than $30k/year, gained 4% in voters making $30-50k/year, and gained 11% among those making $50-100k/per year—while Trump lost 7%. The same poll shows Trump performing modestly better in the <$30k category, but his most significant gain came from voters earning $100-200k/year—a 10% increase compared to a 6% loss for Biden.
But the working-class refutation of Trump, both in the streets and the elections of 2020, was also a refutation of the Democrats. While Trump’s voters dutifully voted Republican, a shocking number of Biden supporters left the rest of the ballot blank—leading to a dramatic underperformance of polls predicting Democrats to gain in the House, take a solid majority in the Senate, and flip several state legislatures.
One interesting theory for how the pre-election polls got it so wrong, currently being studied at the University of Southern California, is the popularity of QAnon. The main thrust of the Q conspiracy is that the same demonic cabal that killed JFK took over both political parties, and Trump is part of a secret resistance group of “good people” trying to root them out. Farfetched as it may sound, Q has immense crossover appeal, both solidifying Trump’s base as he fails to meaningfully “make America great again” and bringing in an assortment of conspiracy subcultures, esoteric evangelicals, and aging Democrats for whom the assassination of Kennedy was a world-changing event (I wrote about this earlier this year in the context of Bob Dylan’s new single Murder Most Foul). Trump’s battle against the deep state, Q promises, will culminate in the apocalyptic “Storm,” a day in which all the enemies of the people, mostly politicians and celebrities, will be rounded-up and summarily executed. United around this vision of military dictatorship, Q supporters provided an unpredictable boost for Trump, the theory goes, giving him big victories in states thought to be in Biden’s reach, and nearly pushing him over the top in the swing states that were far closer than anticipated.
Although horrified by the Q phenomenon and Trump’s attempts at overturning the elections, Democrats have also floated fantasies of authoritarian take-over. Largely based on theories that Eurasianist cyberwarfare rigged the 2016 elections, and Putin’s kompromat on Trump means the White House is being run by treasonous KGB agents, there was some hope that electors would turn on Trump and install Hillary Clinton as president. In a 2017 poll, 25% of Democrats (and 30% of Republicans) said they would support military intervention in the government were its functioning to severely erode. After Nancy Pelosi announced impeachment hearings last year, over 80% of Democrats supported impeaching and removing the President. Even after those efforts failed, fantasies of invoking the 25th Amendment to remove Trump under grounds of mental incapacity spread leading up to the election, and even after it.
And why shouldn’t Democrats want to fight dirty? The Supreme Court has already explicitly broken any pretense of fair elections with its decisions in Bush v. Gore, Citizens United, and Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted a key section of the Voting Rights Act. In a decision last year, the Court ruled federal courts could not strike down district maps designed explicitly to favor one political party. These rulings were made when the anti-democratic rightwing of the court had only a one vote majority. Thanks to the ruthlessness of McConnell’s Senate, it’s now six votes to three. If Biden and the rest of the Democratic leadership isn’t aware the era of fair play, norms, and compromises is long over (if it ever really existed), their base increasingly wants them to lock up Trump, get rid of the filibuster, and almost a third want them to pack the Supreme Court.
So if the people want it—why doesn’t either party actually seize total power? With Trump’s failure, the “they would if they could” belief common to liberal resistance and antifascists seems unsatisfying. This prediction often assumed that a major faction of the bourgeois class has deemed liberal democracy to have outlived its role of protecting the social order. Proletarian unrest fueled by rising inequality and ecological and economic crises will be better managed by right-populist authoritarians who can win the approval of large segments of the population in order to harshly discipline the rest, and block the emerging left from gaining any institutional power. This analysis severely underestimates the extent to which the popularity of faux-egalitarianism and workerism of the Democrats can provide the exact same protections, as evidenced by the record-breaking turnout for Biden, the sidelining of Sanders in the primaries, the scapegoating of the leftwing of the party in the aftermath, and Biden’s promise that “nothing will fundamentally change.”
But this is not to say a victory of a socialist like Sanders or a more competent authoritarian Trumpist would necessitate a coup. The state exists precisely to manage the irreconcilable class contradictions of society, and so long as they are imagined reconcilable via a leftist new deal or America First agenda, it can continue as a vehicle of class rule with its current democratic structure. For this reason, the popular calls for authoritarian rule from the right and liberals have only appealed to a higher sense of democracy—that the elections are corrupted by the globalist elites, or that Trump represents a unique threat to the franchise. Even as confidence in our representatives remains historically low, this framing of fascism/socialism vs. democracy defers deeper desires for radical change to the next election cycle, where the impossible promises of Green New Deal/MAGA will once again be dangled just out of reach.
Another curious aspect of the Q phenomenon, with its slogan of “trust the plan,” is its rejection of interventionism, ambivalence towards deep political binaries, and reluctance to take political action. Despite their deeply reactionary worldview, and occasional individual appearances at rightwing rallies, most Q supporters see the violence between BLM/Antifa and the police/patriots as stage-managed events, much like the conflicts between the US and socialist regimes, designed by the deep state to divide and conquer. Trump’s “good people on both sides” statement, rapprochement with North Korea, and seeming disinterest in war with Venezuela and Iran fueled this subset’s belief that Trump’s only battle was with the deep state. This dynamic reflects the theory’s origins in pro-Trump propaganda, designed to channel the dispersed energies opposing liberal democracy and empire into the electoral process in order to give some life to the widely despised Republican Party.
But just as the carnivorous flower of Trumpism grew from the Tea Party’s astroturf, a new monster will evolve from the grassroots of Q and other antiestablishment subcultures. While genetic traits of nationalism, occultism, and structural antisemitism so central to its genetic structure will not be easily shed, Q also tends to share with the left a rejection of the fallacy that conditions are the results of the bad representatives legitimately elected by the people. Even if the ruling class were to adapt itself to the impulse to overthrow the entrenched actors behind the democratic facade in a last-ditch effort to win the disillusioned, they might one day find the carrots and sticks no longer compelling and threatening as they are today, and the popular fantasies of dictatorship and civil war reoriented into the formation of a new authority conscious of its real sides.