The Trump dream that’s proven more contagious than the mutant B.1.1.7. has finally fully crossed over, IRL, into the material plane. It’s the delusion he rode in on in 2016 and the hallucination in which he himself walks, no longer a con man but now a believer. Last summer when he averted his eyes from an interviewer as he murmured of “dark shadows,” it was clear the shadows of his hateful self-obsession had come home to haunt.
But what’s happened in Washington—and at violent protests in at least a dozen state capitals around the country—is no haunting. For the last four years (and then some), Trump has herded a too-compliant press into pens at his rallies and used them like props for his rage, turning his mob at one to scream at them. Yesterday, in one tiny sideshow, the screamers knocked down the metal barricades and attacked the cameras. This is not symbolism. This is the language of fascism.
Fascism has been a visual language ever since its formal inception in Futurism, the Italian movement of art and design. So too, today, a visual grotesque that’s left too many of us grasping for words even as we tweet and text scenes from the insurrection. If we’re not careful, we’ll simply spread the contagion—“echo! echo! echo!”—like the battle cry of the right-wing social media network Parler, in which an echo is similar to a retweet. A grinning man in a Trump hat with a pom-pom, waving as he makes off with the House speaker’s podium; another toting a Confederate flag between portraits of Vice President John C. Calhoun, slavery’s most “eloquent” defender, and Charles Sumner, the abolitionist senator nearly beaten to death on the Senate floor by a pro-slavery congressman; security, guns drawn and aimed at the shattered window of the House Chamber’s door, a rioter’s face peering in like Jack Nicholson in The Shining. Trending as I write is a yet blunter collapse of history by meme: a rioter in the Capitol wearing a hoodie with the words “Camp Auschwitz” wrapped around a skull.
This is fascism’s visual trap, from the black, white, and red of the swastika to the death’s head Punisher skull that’s become a de facto symbol of Trumpism, worn by Sean Hannity on his lapel. A language of brute spectacle, hard to ignore. Look, and you’re cursed by that which is ugly in the deepest sense; look away, and you neglect the threat at our door. Or rather, yesterday, inside the House.
The task then, is translation—to render that which is shocking banal, to root fascist proclamations of revolution in the history that names them as merely small-minded manifestations of defeated ideas. Less than “ideas”; vanity, dull-eyed.
Consider the half-naked man in a headdress of fur and horns, his face painted red, white, and blue, who carried a flag attached to a spear into the Senate chamber. There he posed for a picture on the dais, flexing a muscle. It’s absurd; it’s awful. It’s a joke; it’s an armed man seizing power. Well, not really, right? He left the Capitol, Trump will probably still leave the White House, and all they’ll have are memories, selfies, and keepsakes in the form of Nancy Pelosi’s office supplies.
But fascists know, explicitly or implicitly, that such images can do the work for them. The horned man cosplays for the same reason Trump dances at his rallies—because it works: It draws the eye, it seems to express earnestness and humor at the same time, the layers of meaning that can produce a symbol. But the horned man is not a symbol; he’s a fact, and not a funny one. His name is Jake Angeli, he’s 32, and he’s from Arizona. On Parler right now, photographs of him are being edited to suggest that he’s actually a leftist, even as on Fox News, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and Tucker Carlson shift blame for the violence from themselves to alleged antifa infiltrators, a kind of media reichstagging that could supply Trump with a sham rationale for martial law. But Angeli is long on record as a Trump supporter, and he considers himself a kind of “shaman” for QAnon, itself mostly a collage of bogeymen. We’ve seen this picture before. It is a symbol of nothing, because like “ironic racism” or the Camp Auschwitz hoodie, it not only lacks but actually denies depth. It is complex but two-dimensional, a conspiracy theorist’s map of “connections.” It is flat by design, the better to replicate itself, copy after copy.
The events most people watched on CNN today were viral, replicated outside statehouses in Topeka and Spokane and Salem and Harrisburg. In Lansing, Michigan, outside the state house protesters erected a giant cross. They did not need to set it aflame to make its Christian nationalism plain. Meanwhile, on the National Mall, insurrectionists—there’s no other word for this act—erected gallows. A cross and a gallows.