Author: Luke Mogelson
ISBN No: 9781 529418712
Review date: 09/05/2024
No of pages: 360
Publisher: Quercus
Publisher URL:
https://www.quercusbooks.co.uk/titles/luke-mogelson/the-storm-is-here/9781529418712/
Year of publication: 25/01/2029
Brief:
price
£25, hardback
In the finest episodes of The Simpsons, the story begins one way and veers to quite another. In the one that starts with the family driving in the forest, they end up in a Native American casino and Bart is shown a vision of his future, where sister Lisa has become president of the United States. The country is bankrupt, she points out, ‘after President Trump’. Once, the idea of Donald Trump becoming US President was so outlandish that it was a (throw-away) joke. No-one’s laughing any more.
The journalist Luke Mogelson has turned a series of articles he wrote for The New Yorker Magazine into a book, The Storm is here. Mogelson ends his book early in 2022 interviewing a former Ku Klux Klan imperial wizard who’s running for office in the state of Georgia, part of ‘a broader trend. Across the country, right-wing extremists who’d assailed the democratic process over the past two years were suddenly participating in it’. The climax of the book is the January 6 storming by Trump supporters of the Capitol in Washington DC, but arguably more troubling is that the constituency that has backed Trump – and that Mogelson has traced back decades – has responded not with further fury, but ‘acceptance. Their country was dead [to them]. Now what?’ In other words, the putting down of the ‘insurrection’ by mob that took over the Capitol building, with loss of life, was not a resolution, but a part of continuing evolution of American politics. Something like January 6 could happen again and turn out even more direly for democracy. Scenarios include ‘rebellion and reprisal’; an undefined ‘when this shit pops off’.
As Mogelson shows (the paperback edition comes out in September, priced £12.99), taking video and being on the spot, Trump supporters speak of patriotism and Christianity and chant ‘USA!’. Why then the violence towards those in authority – because it’s one thing to hate ‘antifa’ (anti-fascists, pronounced ‘an-tee-fah’) and Democrats, quite another to assault police and the seat of Congress. That is one of the questions that Mogelson set out to answer about his own country, having reported on wartorn countries abroad (Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq). As he sets out early (page 5), ‘I witnessed frustration with covid-19 policies grow up into a fanatical anti-government movement, which became a militarised opposition to demands for racial justice, which became an organised crusade against democracy’.
Mogelson drives (for nine hours) to Minneapolis (page 48) to witness the rioting there after a police officer smothers George Floyd to death (on page 305, the officer’s conviction is reported). Mogelson, then, is chronicling racial hatred, police brutality and the campaigning against it (including mob anarchy) and how one thing can lead to another (do white nationalists opportunistically seize on such riots after the Floyd and other deaths, ‘to delegitimise the demonstrations and instigate a race war’?).
It may be reassuring or chilling that Mogelson pushes the story back: ‘Christian paramilitarism’ until 1991 had the Soviet Union as its enemy; then ‘the federals’ became the new enemy (page 174). Private security readers may want to open the book at page 233 when on January 6, 2021 after a speech by Trump, Mogelson is among the thousands in downtown Washington DC and experiences ‘an eerie sense of inexorability mixed with apprehensive hesitation’:
The mood was quiet and subdued. It reminded me of certain combat situations: the slightly stunned, almost bashful moment when bravado, expectation and fantasy crash against reality.
Mogelson describes inside the Senate chamber, the plain odd occupying of the (minutes earlier evacuated) centre of power by variously-dressed protesters; posing for pictures, pinching souvenirs, screaming and swearing, having conversations with Capitol police officers, with bizarre good cheer as if the intruders hadn’t bayed for blood and indeed been the cause of injuries and fatalities. Mogelson wrote of how some of the police explained talking to the mob was a ‘de-escalation strategy’:
The problem with this explanation is that there was no strategy, to de-escalate or otherwise. According to a Senate review, the Capitol Police ‘received little to no communication from senior officers during the attack’. As ranking members of the force became consumed with repelling the violent offensive outside, no one stepped in to coordinate the overall defence after the building was breached …. A lieutenant asked repeatedly throughout the day, ‘Does anybody have a plan?'”
The February print edition of Professional Security digested the building security side of the January 6 story as told by the ‘Final Report of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol’.
Since publication, Democrat Senator Gary Peters as chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee has released a report on ‘the high volume of tips and online traffic about the potential for violence – some of which the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Office of Intelligence and Analysis were aware of as early as December 2020 – these agencies failed to sound the alarm and share critical intelligence information that could have helped law enforcement better prepare for the events of January 6’. Peters spoke of ‘a shocking failure of imagination from these intelligence agencies to take these threats seriously, and there is no question that their failures to effectively analyse and share the threat information contributed to the failures to prevent and respond to the horrific attack that unfolded at the Capitol. I’ll continue pressing for our national security apparatus and intelligence agencies to learn from their missteps so that an attack of this nature never happens again’.
Mogelson notes that the Captiol Police have an annual budget ‘of roughly half a billion dollars’. In UK terms, very roughly the same as a sizeable police force like Nottinghamshire. Without guidance, the police had to work out for themselves ‘how to engage with the mob’. One posed for pictures with rioters; a lieutenant puts a MAGA hat on; when some officers leave, they’re hugged (naturally, while Gil Scott Heron memorably sang that ‘the revolution will not be televised’, January 6 like everything else in America was thoroughly captured on camera-phones).
Mogelson suggests a tacit, or sometimes explicit ‘contract’ between police and Trump supporters that day, and depending on whether the police accepted that the rioters had the upper hand,’the dynamic ranged from homicidal belligerence to something like camaraderie …. a schizophrenic vacillation that compounded the dark unreality of the day’. Mogelson suggests the police weren’t being ‘tactically shrewd’ when they were sometimes passive towards law-breakers, but that they had a ‘complex’ attitude towards their adversary – police nationally were all for Trump, and veterans and police were among the rioters.
The story Mogelson tells, then, not only might inform others protecting parliamentary or other government property about what they might face. Mogelson wonders if ‘January 6’ (to use a shorthand term) is a watershed for conservatism. Before, most conservatives celebrated law enforcement, as protectors; now, police are seen as part of a corrupt, even satanic (according to conspiracy theory) system.
Mogelson points out the impunity that Trump supporters felt (none he observed seemed to feel fear) with the ‘indiscriminate’ violence against (peaceful) black protest marchers. January 6 ended for Mogelson by witnessing insurrectionists’ violence and threats towards television media correspondents. When someone stops Mogelson not to confront him but to show a body camera taken off a cop, Mogelson knows he ought to ask questions, to do his job as a journalist, but it’s as if he has had enough. Otherwise, Mogelson is indefatigable; seeking to witness, to understand, even if he cannot explain.
