What’s in it for me? A tour of the American political landscape that led to the January 6, 2021 insurrection.
A farmer in California crossed his fields one sweltering summer day in 2018.
He paused when he saw the mouth of a wasp nest.
To seal it, he drove in a stake and began pounding it with a hammer.
That produced a spark, which set the fields ablaze.
Within half an hour, the fire spread across 20 acres.
The parched forests and scattered homes made the area what firefighters call wildland – so dry it’s practically tinder.
The American political landscape of the twentieth-century was a wildland, too – and the insurrection of January 6, 2021 was the match that finally set it ablaze.
These blinks follow the trajectory of the country’s political dissolution, drawing on seven years of interviews the author conducted in three very different cities.
In these blinks, you’ll learn how Greenwich became a hotbed for the ultra-rich; why West Virginians are fleeing their state; and how historic racism keeps Black Chicagoans locked in a vicious cycle.
Greenwich, Connecticut became the epicenter of a new capitalist vision.
Greenwich, Connecticut has a storied history in the world of American wealth.
It was a farming, fishing, and quarry town until 1848, when the newly built railroad made it accessible by train.
Developers began advertising it as a place for weary folks to retreat from the bustling metropolis of New York City.
Soon, Greenwich became a hotbed for wealth where Wall Street financiers built opulent, Gilded Age mansions.
In the early 1900s, however, conspicuous consumption went out of fashion in both Greenwich and America as a whole.
Displays of wealth became passé.
During this period, Greenwich adopted a coat of arms bearing a simple motto: fortitudine et frugalitate, or “courage and thrift.
” But that trend didn’t endure.
In the early 2000s, Greenwich’s wealthy residents returned to the world of Gilded Age opulence – and then far surpassed it.
Here’s the key message: Greenwich, Connecticut became the epicenter of a new capitalist vision.
Around the 1980s, financiers and economists began devising a whole host of new ways to make big gains on the US stock market – primarily through high-risk, high-reward investment pools known as hedge funds.
Those new advantages compounded, and by 2017, Wall Streeters were making 23 percent of the entire country’s corporate profits.
Many of those Wall Streeters lived, of course, in Greenwich.
The amount of individual wealth that accumulated in the area was so high that tax officials began monitoring the quarterly payments of the half-dozen richest taxpayers.
Their personal earnings affected the budget of the entire state.
The changes in Greenwich reflected broader shifts in the American economic ecosystem.
Top earners had begun to separate from the rest of the country’s population in numerous ways.
The most obvious was their wealth.
By 2007, the top .
01 percent of earners – about 16,000 households – held $1 of every $17 earned in America: the highest share since data collection began in 1913.
Then there were all the advantages that wealth afforded these families, like better health care, tax advice, and education for their children.
Less obviously, the ethical values of the wealthy also began to shift away from the culture as a whole.
Business leaders prioritized short-term profits over long-term gains; restraint went out of fashion in favor of grabbing as much money as you could, as quickly as possible.
Financial gain was the only value that seemed to matter.
Prescott Bush – father of George H.
W.
and grandfather to George W.
The Republican Party’s moderate wing began disintegrating from the mid-1960s onward.
– was the poster child for Greenwich, Connecticut’s political scene.
He was the moderator of the town council and spent eleven years as a US senator.
He was also ludicrously aristocratic – an eight-time club golf champion who required his sons to wear jackets and ties at dinner each night.
Despite that, however, Prescott was politically moderate.
He had more progressive opinions on civil rights, birth control, and welfare than many of his Republican compatriots.
And he lambasted fellow Republican Joseph McCarthy for sowing political divisions within the country.
Prescott Bush’s attitude could have been the one that led the Republican Party into the new century.
But it wasn’t.
The key message here is: The Republican Party’s moderate wing began disintegrating from the mid-1960s onward.
Despite Prescott’s exalted status in Greenwich, some of the residents had begun distinctly shifting to the right.
One example was J.
William Middendorf II, an investment banker who served on the town council with Prescott.
Middendorf had become, as he called it, a “disciple” of libertarianism; he condemned moderates and railed against the expanding scope of government.
To advance his beliefs, Middendorf allied with Barry Goldwater, an Arizona senator with libertarian beliefs on civil rights and government programs.
At the Republican National Convention, where Goldwater won the presidential nomination in 1964, the party’s steady shift rightward became evident.
There, Nelson Rockefeller – a moderate Republican – denounced what he saw as a radical right-wing element in the party.
Instead of cheers, the hall rang with the sound of boos.
Even so, libertarianism remained largely at the fringes until the rise of the talk radio star Rush Limbaugh in the ’90s.
On his program, Limbaugh demonized government programs, environmentalism, and education as different means through which liberals were trying to dominate society.
The doors blew wide open after moderate Mitt Romney lost the 2012 election to Barack Obama.
The party stood at a crossroads.
Established Republican leaders wanted to move left and win over minorities.
But other prominent conservatives disagreed.
They argued that who they really needed to win over were unenthusiastic, “missing” white voters who were no longer convinced by the mainstream pro-business, low-tax agenda.
And to do it, they needed a populist disruptor who would rail against the very notion of government.
Clarksburg, West Virginia has become a shadow of its former self.
The “Athens of Allegheny” – now known as Clarksburg, West Virginia – is a city with a population some 16,000 strong, nestled in the green highland between mountain and river.
In years long gone, Clarksburg was a thriving hub of activity.
Straddling the line between North and South, the city’s famed residents included both Union and Confederate Civil War generals.
Later, in the twentieth century, Clarksburg prospered and grew thanks to its riches in coal, natural gas, and sand.
In 1960, politicians – including Lyndon Johnson and three Kennedys – paid it a visit.
Now, however, Clarksburg feels like a hollowed-out shell.
Its population is declining; it has some of the highest rates of smoking, obesity, diabetes, and prescription drug abuse in the country.
What happened?
The key message here?
Clarksburg, West Virginia has become a shadow of its former self.
The author arrived in Clarksburg in 1998 – just around the time that mountaintop removal, a new revolution in mining, was gaining speed.
It involved blasting the tops off of mountains to access the minerals; this method yielded more than twice as much coal per hour as underground digging.
Companies began buying rights to remove nearby mountaintops, irrevocably altering the landscape and ushering in the myth that coal would save the city.
Meanwhile, young people were fleeing the state for work, leaving a smaller tax pool behind to fund the city.
Fewer taxes meant fewer resources, which drove even more people to flee.
Between 2007 and 2017, West Virginia lost 18,000 people – the highest per-capita exodus rate in the country.
That coincided with still other changes, particularly in the way that West Virginians – and the country at large – were consuming news.
Previously, West Virginia had had a thriving local news scene.
But print ads began migrating to the internet instead, and between 2000 and 2012, print advertising fell across American newspapers by a massive 71 percent.
Newspapers across the country began collapsing as people got their news in bits and pieces from television, online, or through social media.
Headlines and sound bites began to prioritize emotional, provocative hooks – click bait – because that’s what drew people in.
As a result of these trends, news became less local and more national.
Between 1949 and 2007, the percentage of Americans who could name their governor declined sharply.
Without local news, Americans lost a powerful source of social cohesion and connection with their neighbors.
All of this fed a growing sense of isolation – and impending doom.
Chicago, Illinois is a stark reminder of the plight of Black Americans.
In the early twentieth century, Black Americans began leaving the former Confederate states in search of greater freedom and opportunity.
Throughout this period, known as the Great Migration, the Illinois city of Chicago became the “Promised Land.
” Chicago’s population was just 2 percent Black before the Great Migration; after, it was 33 percent.
However, Black migrants weren’t exactly welcomed with open arms by the city’s white residents.
Instead, white neighborhoods began forming agreements that prevented homeowners from renting or selling to prospective Black residents.
As a result, Black migrants were funneled into a stretch of land on the South Side of Chicago, where they were left to navigate overcrowded schools and apartments.
Other racist housing policies compounded the problem, and by 1940, Chicago was more racially segregated than Richmond, Virginia – the former capital of the Confederacy.
This is the key message: Chicago, Illinois is a stark reminder of the plight of Black Americans.
Chicago’s racist past has reverberated.
Take it from Preston Maurice Clark – who goes by Reese – a Black South Sider the author interviewed.
As a child, Reese had been able to attend a nice elementary school in a predominantly white neighborhood.
But then Reese’s parents were informed that the school bus he’d been riding was only available up to eighth grade.
His parents couldn’t afford public bus fare, so it was off to the local high school instead.
Fenger High was known for two things: football and violence.
But even football was on the decline by the time Reese enrolled.
Six of its current and former players had been killed in the previous twelve years.
The sports budget was slated for cuts – to just $750 a year.
When Reese turned 16, the US Secretary of Education declared Chicago schools the worst in the nation, with a dropout rate of 40 percent.
Without a good education to look forward to, Reese’s world shrank.
He descended into a spiral of drugs, violence, and eventually prison.
Reese’s story isn’t unique.
Almost a third of all Black men in the US end up incarcerated at some point.
Then, when they get out, their convictions cause employers to deny them work.
All too often, the only place left for them is back on the streets.
Donald Trump and the Republican Party tapped into white and working class people’s deepest fears.
The years immediately following September 11, 2001 defined a new era in American culture.
A central metaphor for the time was twilight warfare, which describes a conflict with no clearly defined geography, winner, or loser.
For most Americans, the wars in the Middle East were abstractions, far removed from their daily lives.
Three years into the Iraq War, for instance, less than a quarter of Americans with some college education could point out Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, and Iran on a map.
Despite that, Americans began operating from a point of fear; they perceived their “enemies” everywhere.
And the primary targets of their ire were immigrants.
Here is the key message: Donald Trump and the Republican Party tapped into white and working class people’s deepest fears.
In 2004, the populist, right-wing congressman Tom Tancredo warned that undocumented immigrants were “coming here to kill you and to kill me and our families.
” His sentiment hinged on a demographic fact: in the 1970s, 5 percent of people in America had been born abroad, while in 2018, that number was 14 percent.
This was one of the fastest diversifications of a population in history, and it made some white people anxious that they were becoming minorities in a country where they’d long been a majority.
Tancredo seized on and amplified those fears.
If Tancredo’s speeches were a preview, Donald Trump’s were the real deal.
When he announced his candidacy in June of 2015, his prepared speech contained just two sentences about immigration.
But then, he went off script and ad-libbed: “They’re bringing drugs.
They’re rapists.
And some, I assume, are good people.
” Trump’s facts were wrong – the crime rate among first-generation immigrants is lower than for native-born Americans.
But that didn’t matter.
Trump had tapped into and magnified his audience’s deeply held fears; their emotional reaction hinged on perception rather than fact.
Similar falsehoods rang throughout the party’s stance on guns.
Modern gun culture doesn’t date back to the days of the Wild West, as is commonly believed.
In fact, it only began in the 1970s, when the National Rifle Association realized their sales were dropping and they needed a new marketing strategy.
They began to frame gun ownership as a key form of self-defense – and popularized an entirely new aesthetic based around camouflage and tactical gear.
Trump ran with it all.
He rejected Syrian immigrants because “they could be ISIS,” playing on fears that terrorists were everywhere and that people needed guns for protection.
It didn’t matter that violence had actually fallen over the last two decades.
It was all about what people perceived.
American rage increased as the establishment failed.
Over the years, depictions of the working class have shifted dramatically.
Back in the 1930s, working-class men were seen striking heroic poses on posters and murals.
That depiction devolved; in the 1970s, the poster version was Archie Bunker – a fictional blue-collar worker with a racist bent.
By the 1990s, it had transformed into Homer Simpson: an incompetent, donut-eating alcoholic.
While American elites have slowly become aware of systemic discrimination based on race and gender, the category of class is often ignored.
Over the past several decades, the working classes have increasingly been degraded and sneered at, all while big money has kept them trapped.
The key message here is this: American rage increased as the establishment failed.
In Clarksburg, West Virginia, much of the establishment’s failure swirled around coal – specifically mountaintop mining, which was devouring the landscape.
The process released debris and elements like lead and arsenic that wound up in the air and water supply and wreaked havoc on people’s health.
Yet the health care that West Virginians depended on to ease these issues was at risk, too.
Wall Street had invested in coal companies on the bet that China’s economic growth would ignite a new desire for coal.
Their bet, however, was wrong – and investors suddenly found themselves needing to cut costs.
One measure they implemented was denying health insurance to former employees.
One company, Patriot Coal, asked the bankruptcy court to abandon a union contract that provided health insurance for 23,000 retired miners and dependents.
And the court agreed.
Suddenly, thousands of people who needed health care found themselves without it.
Of course, the business and political establishment wasn’t just failing those in Appalachia.
It was also failing the nation’s Black population.
In fall 2014, a Black teenager named Laquan McDonald was shot by the police.
The official police account claimed that McDonald lunged at an officer with a knife.
So why was Mayor Rahm Emanuel, a Democrat, fighting to prevent the release of a dashcam video of the scene?
Critics claimed he was trying to protect his election prospects.
And when the video was finally released – after Emanuel had secured his reelection – it showed that McDonald had been walking away from the police when an officer shot him 16 times.
Protests erupted in the wake of the video’s release.
There was a distinct sense that the system Rahm Emanuel, and others like him, inhabited was broken.
Throughout his presidency, Trump implemented an agenda of destruction.
Trump’s victory in the 2016 election was the product of factors that converged around Greenwich, Clarksburg, and Chicago.
In Greenwich, Trump lost the county overall; the final tally was 57 to 39 percent – but that wasn’t the resounding rejection that many were expecting.
In West Virginia, Trump won by a whopping 42 points in a state that had once been a Democratic stronghold.
And in Chicago, just one precinct went for Trump.
But across the country, Black voter turnout was down in a presidential election for the first time in 20 years.
Less than a week after his inauguration, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved the Doomsday Clock, a measure of how close civilization is to collapse, to a frightening 2 minutes and 30 seconds before midnight.
It was the closest the Clock had come to Doomsday since 1952, when the US tested its first hydrogen bomb.
Here’s the key message: Throughout his presidency, Trump implemented an agenda of destruction.
Immediately, Trump set about reducing government function at the federal level to an all-time low.
He deliberately left hundreds of jobs unfilled, and many other employees left of their own accord.
More than 79,000 full-time workers quit or retired in just the first nine months of his term – 42 percent more than had left during the same period of Obama’s presidency.
Another key target of Trump’s ire was the media.
After just a month in office, Trump dubbed news outlets the “enemy of the people.
” The next year, he told a crowd, “Just remember: what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.
” He repeatedly dismantled the very notion of truth.
Meanwhile, the federal government was empowering corporate and investor interests.
In 2017, Trump signed a $1.
5 trillion tax cut, which he framed as a gift to the working and middle classes.
That was patently false.
An average household in the bottom 20 percent of income received a cut of $120, while a household in the top 1 percent received $48,000.
Along with these changes came cultural rifts.
In Greenwich, a local government employee reported that a few weeks after Trump’s election, a member of the town council had touched her groin and said, “I love this new world.
I no longer have to be politically correct.
” Trump had bragged about assaulting women and gotten away with it – so why couldn’t others do the same?
Social cohesion dropped astonishingly.
In 2018, a report by two political scientists found that 15 percent of Republicans and 20 percent of Democrats believed the US would be better off if large numbers of the opposing party “just died.
” The nation was alarmingly divided.
“This is their new hoax,” Trump said at a rally on February 28, 2020.
The COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests laid bare a dysfunctional system.
He was criticizing Democrats for their concern over his response to COVID-19.
“So far we have lost nobody to coronavirus,” he added.
A month after the speech, over a thousand Americans were dying each day.
Trump had weakened the civil service, and now that weakness was contributing to unnecessary illness and death.
America was the world’s richest and most powerful country, yet it couldn’t manage to find masks to protect its citizens or tests to diagnose them.
The economy, too, was in freefall – the country was experiencing its lowest levels of employment since 1975.
This is the key message: The COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests laid bare a dysfunctional system.
The virus was particularly damaging to low-income neighborhoods, where rising rents and stagnant wages had driven many Americans into smaller, more crowded apartments where social distancing was difficult.
Even worse, in the three years before the pandemic, more than two million Americans had lost their health insurance.
When asked about the mass deaths, Trump shrugged and remarked, “It is what it is.
” The Black community was experiencing some of the harshest effects of COVID-19.
In late spring 2020, Black Chicago residents were dying from the virus at rates four times that of white residents.
This was largely due to economic and social disparities that meant they’d entered the pandemic with a greater rate of preexisting conditions.
But the pandemic wasn’t the only event that rocked the Black community that summer – so, too, did the murder of George Floyd.
A white police officer knelt on Floyd’s neck for over nine minutes as Floyd pleaded with him to stop.
In response to the killing, protests broke out across the nation and the world.
People were forced to reckon with a racist system in which Blacks were 50 percent more likely than their white counterparts to die at the hands of police.
Unfortunately, the protests also emboldened Trump to further demonize the left.
Analyses showed that looting and violence occurred at only around 7 percent of Black Lives Matter protests.
But images of burnt buildings and looted stores were circulated widely, and Trump used them to conjure an image of a nation under siege.
In June 2020, Americans bought more guns than in any previous month in history.
As the 2020 election approached, gun sales continued to break records.
Twenty years of mounting inequality, frustration, and cynicism culminated in the January 6 insurrection.
On social media, right-wing militants began issuing calls to arms.
And in an interview with Fox News host Laura Ingraham, Trump claimed that “People that you’ve never heard of” were controlling his opponent, Joe Biden, “in the dark shadows.
” When the election came in November 2020, it wasn’t particularly close.
Biden won by more than seven million votes – 306 to 232 in the Electoral College.
But immediately, Trump launched a fevered effort to contest the results.
He tweeted incessantly about winning by a landslide and advanced wild and fantastical theories about voter fraud.
But none of his attempts at subversion worked.
Trump’s last chance to intervene would come on January 6, when Vice President Pence was set to oversee the final certification of the vote by Congress.
The key message here?
Twenty years of mounting inequality, frustration, and cynicism culminated in the January 6 insurrection.
At 10:00 a.
m.
that day, crowds began to gather south of the White House.
Few wore masks, and several worked together to erect a wooden gallows complete with noose.
When Trump gave his speech, he told them to march to the Capitol “peacefully and patriotically” – but also used the word “fight” more than 20 times.
At 1:10 p.
m.
, protesters began tussling with police; things escalated quickly.
The crowd stormed toward the Capitol, grabbing metal barricades and using them as ladders to scale the building.
Flagpoles and fire extinguishers became tools for breaking through windows.
In all, seven Americans died as a result of the events and their aftermath.
It was the result of more than 20 years of pain, anger, neglect, cynicism, and lies that all served as fuel for a flame that threatened to burn democracy to the ground.
In the hours immediately following the riot, Twitter and Facebook banned Trump from their platforms.
Lindsey Graham, a staunch Trump supporter, said “Count me out,” and told the Senate, “Enough is enough.
” But it didn’t last.
Within days, he had rejoined the Republican establishment to declare that if Republicans wanted to win, they couldn’t do it without Trump.
A few weeks later, in Biden's inaugural speech, the new president called for unity.
But underneath it was an entreaty for caution.
Democracy, he stated, is precious – and fragile.
If January 6 taught Americans anything, that was it.
Final summary
The key message in these blinks is that: Over the first two decades of the twenty-first century, America became a wildland; its political landscape was primed to burn.
The widening gap between the haves and the have-nots, failing institutions, and structural racism combined to set the conditions under which Donald Trump won victory in the 2016 presidential election.
Once he was in the White House, Trump set about further destroying federal institutions and people’s trust in information – a mistake whose cost only became clear during the COVID-19 pandemic and BLM protests.
Cynicism, dissatisfaction, and anger grew until January 6, 2021, when a violent insurrection rocked the Capitol and forced the nation to reckon with itself.