The January 6 Insurrection: Historical and Global Contexts

Abstract

The 6 January 2021, Trumpist insurrection is in continuity with centuries of white mob violence in the United States, going back to the thwarted 1861 attempt to attack the Capitol in order to overturn Lincoln’s election. At the same, time Trumpism as a modern phenomenon also exhibits links and affinities to contemporary global neofascist and rightwing populist movements. Although small towns and rural areas were heavily represented among the participants on 6 January, analysts need—in the spirit of Marx—to avoid the Lassallean trap of writing off rural populations as uniformly conservative. In this sense, we need to grasp the pervasive racism at the root of Trumpism and its analogues without falling into a view of rural areas as monolithic.