The Capitol Insurrectionists Weren’t "Low Class"

Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenfuhrer, reportedly complained about the "low class" nature of the insurrectionists he recruited to come to Washington, DC, and then incited to attack and sack the U.S. Capitol. One of the myths of Trump's 2016 surprise election victory was that he had won the support of financially insecure working class voters who wanted someone to champion their concerns.  Of course, numerous studies subsequently found that racism, not financial worries and insecurity, was the prime motivator for many of the voters who flocked to Trump in 2016.  I suspect future studies will confirm a similar phenomenon for 2020 Trump's voters despite their claims to the contrary.  Increasingly it appears that many, if not a majority, of the insurrectionists who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, were not impoverished or low class. They had the financial means to travel cross country and stay at at pricey Washington, DC, hotels. That said, they certainly seem to have been intellectually stupid in that they thought the could sack the Capitol, have photos of themselves all over the Internet and on national news shows and even bragged about their actions on social media yet somehow thought there'd be no consequences for their actions. A case of dumb and dumber even if not low class financially.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at these insurrectionist who hopefully face harsh punishments a draws parallels with past racist movements that involved so-called respectable people.  Here are excerpts:

They were business owners, CEOs, state legislators, police officers, active and retired service members, real-estate brokers, stay-at-home dads, and, I assume, some Proud Boys.

The mob that breached the Capitol last week at President Donald Trump’s exhortation, hoping to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, was full of what you might call “respectable people.” They left dozens of Capitol Police officers injured, screamed “Hang Mike Pence!,” threatened to murder House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and set up a gallows outside the building. Some were extremists using the crowd as cover, but as federal authorities issue indictments, a striking number of those they name appear to be regular Americans.

Although any crowd that size is bound to include people who are struggling financially, no one should be shocked to see the middle classes so well represented among the mob.

The notion that political violence simply emerges out of economic desperation, rather than ideology, is comforting. But it’s false. Throughout American history, political violence has often been guided, initiated, and perpetrated by respectable people from educated middle- and upper-class backgrounds. The belief that only impoverished people engage in political violence—particularly right-wing political violence—is a misconception often cultivated by the very elites who benefit from that violence.

The members of the mob that attacked the Capitol and beat a police officer to death last week were not desperate. They were there because they believed they had been unjustly stripped of their inviolable right to rule. They believed that not only because of the third-generation real-estate tycoon who incited them, but also because of the wealthy Ivy Leaguers who encouraged them to think that the election had been stolen.

There’s ample precedent for this. When the Ku Klux Klan formed during Reconstruction, according to the historian Eric Foner, its leadership “included planters, merchants, lawyers, and even ministers. ‘The most respectable citizens are engaged in it,’ reported a Georgia Freedmen’s Bureau agent, ‘if there can be any respectability about such people.’”

Respectable people can be very dangerous. President Ulysses S. Grant responded to the outrages of the KKK in the Reconstruction South by sending the military to crush the Klan and the newly formed Department of Justice to prosecute it. For a time, the effort was successful.

In New Orleans, “carpenters, grocers, and tinsmiths belonged [to the White League], as did laborers and stevedores,” according to the historian Justin Nystrom, but “more common were professional men from Factor’s Row: clerks, accountants, sugar and cotton factors, weighers, and lawyers.” In South Carolina, a leader of the Red Shirts, Benjamin Tillman, was born into a wealthy slave-owning family. His men were made up of “substantial landowners already prominent in local agricultural societies, Granges, and conservative political clubs,” the historian Steven Hahn wrote. The white-supremacist militants who massacred Black people and overthrew the government of Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898 were described as “reputable white citizens” in contemporary accounts.

The elite leaders of white-supremacist organizations, however, were content to cultivate the perception that the outrages condemned by northern newspapers were the work of lower-class white men, which only increased the urgency of their political project: restoring the rule of the white elite, so that the alleged passions of the white lower classes could be restrained, and the supposed corruption of Black men and their white allies could be punished. In truth, however, it was when Black and white laborers formed alliances—such as the Readjusters in Virginia—that the white supremacists were most effectively resisted.

After Republicans retreated from Reconstruction, making clear they would neither defend the rights of Black people nor prevent Democrats from violating them, the respectable men who had overthrown the Reconstruction governments were far more open about their deeds. They became mayors, governors, congressmen, and senators. They erected monuments to the Confederate Army and its valor in defending the institution of human bondage, both to celebrate their accomplishments and to dissuade Black southerners from ever again contemplating political equality with white people.

Of course, it was their success in seizing power and disenfranchising their political rivals that allowed them to maintain their respectability. Had they failed, had the South’s brief experiment in multiracial democracy succeeded, they would have been seen as the bandits, assassins, and terrorists that they were. Impunity is what makes murder and terrorism respectable. After all, if these deeds were actually crimes, they would have been punished.

Watching the mob ransack the Capitol last week, Trump is reported to have been initially enthusiastic about the riot, but later disgusted by “what he considered the ‘low-class’ spectacle of people in ragtag costumes rummaging through the Capitol.”

Now we know the truth. They weren’t “low class.” They were respectable. They almost always are.