Who stormed the United States Congress?

We watched the assault on the United States Capitol with amazement. Far-right mobs, who define themselves as “patriots” and encouraged by President Donald Trump himself, desecrated one of the paradigmatic temples of U.S. democracy. “It will be a wild demonstration,” Trump had warned, and indeed it was.

Faced with such images, the first question that comes to mind is what would have happened if Trump had won thereby heightening the importance of these people to the U.S. political landscape. The second is whether Trump’s defeat eliminates this danger in the future.

In the last election Trump obtained about 75 million votes. After Joe Biden, he received the most votes of any presidential candidate in history. Various factors influenced this result, so it would be an exaggeration to say that such a figure coincides with the most violent current that was expressed in the storming of the Capitol. However, it is not a minor fact that a poll by the English firm YouGov, carried out right after the happenings, indicated that 42 percent of Republicans supported “completely or in some way” the assault.

It is quite clear that the conditions that generated the Trump phenomenon are still present in U.S. society. So, with or without his personal leadership, they will continue to have a decisive influence on the American political landscape. It is the result of a discredited political body that governs the country, of the lack of confidence in the electoral system and of the enormous inequalities created by a declining economy incapable of satisfying the historical expectations, more commonly referred to as the “American dream”, the basis of a social consensus that has been sustained by the aspirations of the white middle class.

Those who stormed the Capitol consider themselves victims of the system and in a way they are, even if they have a mistaken cause, method and leadership. They are the newly displaced by the conditions imposed by capitalism’s neoliberal globalization, even in the United States, and by the consequences of the relative deterioration of American hegemony in the world.

It is why one of Joe Biden’s first measures was to create an advisory council on internal affairs, paradoxically under the direction of  Susan Rice, a foreign policy expert, charged with ensuring that foreign policy effectively pays tribute to the economic improvement of the American middle class. In other words, it constitutes a doctrine that is not very different from the protectionist emphasis raised by Trump during his mandate, which augurs the difficulties that Biden will have in projecting a multirateralist policy, as he has announced, and improving the relationship with allies, who now receive him with a marching band.

Whatever its manifestation in the future, what happened last week reflects an important division among Republicans, and a limitation to compete with the Democrats on the electoral plane. Although this does not mean an attenuation of the existing polarization, and that conservatives have lost their ability to recover from the Trumpian disaster. Ultimately, the American extreme right agenda remains intact with social support that has tended to grow so that, surely, there will be no shortage of power groups and politicians who will continue to assume it as their platform.

The most violent hosts of the extreme right have already tasted the blood, so new attacks on U.S. institutions are to be expected. Armed to the teeth, the FBI has long viewed them as the nation’s worst domestic threat. Biden has just called it “internal terrorism,” which can have far-reaching legal consequences, but it remains to be seen if the system shows a real political will to suppress them, something that has always been limited by racism and the political control of the rest of society.

Having gained control of both houses of Congress, Democrats are in a good position to take advantage after this election. For now, they will not have procedural obstacles to organize the administration and implement its main policies. However, this does not mean that they do not have to face their own internal contradictions, in fact deeper and more encompassing than those of the Republicans.

The main driving force behind the Democrats in this election was Donald Trump. It is to be expected then that the divisions resulting not only from generational, racial or gender issues, but also from ideological and class issues will soon emerge. Just as Trump was the catalyst for an anti-establishment movement from the right, Bernie Sanders and other progressive Democratic Party politicians have been the catalyst from the left, with a tremendous impact on consensus building within that party.

Although distorted and exaggerated by the right, it is not inappropriate to recognize that a socialist current, understood as a kind of social democracy quite alien to the U.S. political tradition, was present in the elections and encompasses important Democratic sectors, especially among the youth. Satisfying the claims of this trend, decisive in Democratic electoral aspirations, constitutes a major problem for the traditional Democratic establishment and a challenge for the Biden administration.

The assault on the Capitol was [possibly] the last of Trump’s attacks on the traditions that sustain the American political imagination, but the perpetrators, as bizarre as they look, were not Martians, but representative of sectors present throughout American history. On this occasion, the dissatisfaction and anger of white supremacists exploded. But if they have had a different skin color and other complaints, surely there would have been more than five dead.