Below is a comment of mine to a friend, Geoffrey Jacques, who has been warning that we shouldn’t underestimate the movement that stormed the capital building this week. To think that we won this momentous clash and the other side lost and, as a result, will move to the margins of U.S. politics and crawl into the woodwork, never to be heard from again, (if I understand him right) is mistaken, dangerous and ahistorical. In fact, the insurrectionists, Geoffrey says, returned home feeling not defeated, not a spent force, but victorious and emboldened. They will now claim their own martyrs and a “day” when they dared to “storm heaven.” In other words, what happened in our nation’s capital (again if I understand Geoffrey right) wasn’t a day that will go down in infamy in the imagery and thinking of the insurrectionists, but a moment of glory inspiring for years to come and a day that heralds their certain victory in the future.

Here’s my comment: I agree with you that we shouldn’t assume that we won and the losers are exiting stage right, never to be heard from again. I take your point seriously not to understand the events of this week one sidely and incompletely, as a unalloyed victory for our side and an abject, total, and humiliating defeat for their side. You make an invaluable point that the storming of the capital for them is a beginning, not an end, not a defeat, but a victory that they could only imagine earlier. If social media is to be believed, we will see them en masse on Inauguration Day. As for the formation of antifa squads as a few suggest, let’s hope people have more sense than to go down that road.

One the most jarring images of the storming of Congress was that of the Confederate flag making its way through these hallowed halls in the hands of modern day Southern Redeemers. Perhaps more than anything else, this image captured better than anything else the aims, politics, and ideology of this movement.

To say that the events of this past week isn’t “who we are” as a people and country is as much wrong as it is right. To think otherwise is possible only if we sanitize our past, only if our country’s dark and ugly side is scrubbed out. Simplifying our past is historically mistaken and political disarming at a moment when we must look at our past and present squarely and many sidely. Illusions and feel good stories of our country’s past and present aren’t our allies as we try to construct a more just society in the present.

The events of this past week – its shining moment in Georgia when an African American and Jewish American were elected to Congress and the storming of the Congress a day later – argue, among other things, for energized and organized movements at every level of governance to defend, deepen, and extend democracy. Perhaps there is no better example of their role and necessity than the movement/coalition to challenge voter suppression and expand voter participation led by Stacey Abrams in Georgia.

To understand the terror attack last week, it isn’t necessary to turn Hitler’s Germany or Mussolini’s Italy to find a predecessor or understand what happened. Just as easily one can go back into our own history. Following the Civil War, Southern Redeemers — bloody counter revolutionists — employed “White Terror” to violently overthrow the democratically constructed and multi-racial Reconstruction governments in the South and proceeded to install a new, whites only political regime throughout the South. It rested on terror, coercion, and the super exploitation of Black people who were stripped of any rights and forced to live in constant fear. It was the U.S. variant of fascism, long before fascism as a word and regime was part of the world’s lexicon and experience.