We Are Actually Rooting For You, United States of America

By Alberto Cox Délano | Think Pieces | January 6, 2022 |

By Alberto Cox Délano | Think Pieces | January 6, 2022 |

These kinds of anniversaries, the ones for the type of days you can mark by the what and where you were doing, they are almost always treated by historians and armchair historians (A.K.A: political analysts) as a dangerous and highly volatile substance. And they have a point, most times, these kinds of days need decades of processing, declassification and distancing, silting into a nuanced picture of why That Day marks a turning point.

Not with January 6th, when a semi-organized mob assaulted the US Capitol to try and stop reality and institutional processes from running their course. Even one year on, the pathetic brutality of that day is as transparent as something that traumatic can be, the sequence of events that led to that coup and of the day itself are pretty well established, we are just filling in the details. The underlying trends are also pretty evident: The perfect confluence of media channels that were either irresponsible, callous, or outright seditious on one side, and people determined to pay good money to hear what they wanted to hear.

Seriously, can anyone say that this cock-up-coup wasn’t completely predictable? This is not hindsight bias, you didn’t even need to know that there was going to be a rally in support of the big lie that day. The fact that the whole world tuned in to follow a routine formalization procedure by the US Congress paints the entire picture. Everybody knew that day wasn’t going to be normal, just like the previous two months weren’t normal … at least based on the idea of the US that the US itself sells abroad. Everybody knew that day was going to be a shitshow, likely a tragic one, because the former guy’s administration and his whitery of upwardly mobile failures wanted it so. The former guy’s rally that morning was the North Tower plane, bringing in the Breaking News, the mob attack was the South Tower plane.

But then you realize what was actually clouding the judgment of so many in the US that day when facing the obvious … other than the former guy’s administration deliberately screwing up with the security response. The fact is, the US had no historical experience with this; they had never witnessed an anti-democratic crowd trying to undermine a legitimate institutional process through violence. They had never experienced in their own homeground the very same attacks on democracy and self-determination their own governments had been propping up since they ran out of North American lands to Manifest Destiny themselves upon. And even before that.

I must apologize, I am dead wrong. The US had never experienced this kind of attack on their democratic institutions on a federal level. Because what happened on January 6th in Washington DC was just a larger scale, less effective display of what happened at a State level during the Reconstruction, again and again. Not even counting the many Tulsas there have been in US history.

That day, I read many reactions in Twitter that could be summarized as, “The US is experiencing a fascist coup and they don’t have the language to realize what’s happening.” That was as brutally on-point as it could get: being unable to name a transparent coup by its name is what happens when you’re deprived of learning your whole history, one that at the same time is taught in gross solipsism.

Now, this is common to any country with an Imperialist heritage. Hell, every official History curriculum in any country will teach a myth in one way or another. They will teach the crimes of the past as blemishes instead of constituent parts of their national skeleton. But in the US, true to form, that historical illiteracy leads to a sprawl of dead ends and shoddy-quality edifices.

I’m not talking about the ignorance of those losers that stormed the Capitol, because they weren’t ignorant of their own history; they just chose to hold on to a poorly adapted myth because that’s just what fascists do.

No, what I’m talking about is the historical illiteracy in the Blue States, in Democrat +20 counties, in School Boards that are not plagued by Karens. Of kids who discover just how much had been hidden from them once they take a mandatory year abroad. Because no one has bought the myth of the US as a beacon of democracy and solid institutions more than the US Democrat, the US Centrists, and Moderates. Usually white, but it crosses almost every intersection. Just to clarify, the GOP and crew espouse the very same discourse, but you can always see the shape of their authoritarian and supremacist agenda underneath.

That myth led to what actually pissed me off that day. The attack itself was horrifying but so unshocking, so predictable that I couldn’t feel any anger. What really pissed me off that day were the reactions of one Democrat Congressperson after another (and the few GOP that condemned the whole thing), during the attack, after the attack and, in particular, when they finally started the confirmation of Biden as president. Over and over and over again, the talking points from the tree of clichés (watered by the blood of lesser tyrants):

This is not who we are as a country (Never have so many Black People rolled their eyes so hard at the same time).

This attack is something out of a Banana Republic (You mean the countries that got those names because of US banana companies and government headhunting dictators with abandon? Suck… all of the dicks)

The World looks up to us, we need to lead by example blahblahblah

I came this close to punching the TV.

Are there still well-meaning, informed people in the US that actually believe that? Because we don’t, not since the Bush era, at the very least. Whatever goodwill the Obama era might’ve granted you was erased by the former guy. Who would look up to a country whose political system is stuck in the 18th Century? Sweet Socialist Christ, you actually don’t know right?

We don’t look up to you, we are rooting for you. We are rooting for you to evolve, to actually become a modern country, to embrace Democracy, Representativity, Proportionality, Multi-Party Systems, Guaranteed Voting Rights. We are rooting for you to become an actual land of the free. Notice the indefinite article before; Democracy is not something you win at, it’s something you’re supposed to build every day.

Well, I’m saying “rooting” in the general sense. There were many, in the Americas, the Africas, the Asias who reacted to the coup using the video below:

I have to admit I couldn’t avoid a chuckle, but I’m actually annoyed at my fellow global leftists who see the last five years as the US walking into its own karma. That’s bullshit because we know damn well that the US is too damn powerful, in every single category, to allow it to fall into full fascism, losing whatever remnants of incipient democracy were left. That’s why we were glued to the news during the election week, that’s why we were all rooting for Biden as questionable as he could be. We are rooting for the US because it’s strategic to our own interests.

That’s why, edgy-jokes aside, we were watching the mob on January 6th with horror, we could tell what it was from thousands of miles away.

That’s the other thing an incomplete knowledge of history steals from you. The maxim says that you learn history to better understand your present, your current self, which is absolutely true, but I think it can lead to curriculums that teach only the history that directly involves the students. However, there is a lot to be learned from Histories where you don’t have a clear stake, either from way back in the past or the deep history of other countries.

US well-meaning liberals (ahem, Jake Tapper!) and progressives need to start learning from other countries. Other countries that went through similar historical processes, countries that underwent or are still undergoing a Transition to Democracy. You would learn that all countries that in the late 20th Century transitioned from fascist dictatorships to fledgling Democracies suffered coup attempts, brought about by hangers-on from the previous regime. Read about the Spanish, Chilean, or Greek transitions. Learn about the 23-F coup attempt in Spain, learn about the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions set up in Argentina, Chile, or South Africa.

We are rooting for you, to learn from us. The accomplishments we pride ourselves on. Distanced from the hopeless buzz of your country’s own history, learning parallel histories can help you see things more clearly, solutions there where you didn’t have the language to describe the problem.

Alberto Cox wants the Democrats to know that he could mobilize thousands of hardened volunteers of Gabriel Boric’s campaign, they can hit the streets and help turn around 2022, only provide us basic lodging and food vouchers. Contact him at @NotAlbertoCox