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ABSTRACT
In this article, we situate the riot at the United States Capitol building on January 6, 2021, within the longer history of white-led race riots in the United States, as both state and vigilante actors have twisted the memory of that history toward maintaining an antidemocratic and racist status quo. Motivating such riotous eruptions is what we call reactive memory in reference to the formation of historical mythologies that valorize a “return” to a whitewashed past in response to perceived threats against socioracial domination in the present. We contribute to rhetoric and communication scholarship on memory and far-right nation-building by examining the mobilization of reactive memory in “1776” discourses and the rhetoric of extremist paramilitary groups. In doing so, we demonstrate how reactive memory is conjured to justify the right’s saturation in white supremacy and antidemocratic intervention, including and especially riotous violence – not because its adherents have no other rhetorical recourse in the political state of affairs, but because they situate political violence to be their historically sanctioned prerogative.
Acknowledgments
The authors individually presented earlier sections of this article at the 2021 National Communication Association convention. We thank the reviewers for their thoughtful and engaging comments on this project. Richard would also like to thank Trish Roberts-Miller and Meredith Pruden for their generous feedback on prior work that became his contributions to this article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. Boebert (@laurenboebert).
2. The Select Committee, Final Report, 4–6.
3. The Select Committee, Final Report, 38, 101, 645–664.
4. U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Public Affairs, “Jury Convicts Four Leaders of the Proud Boys of Seditious Conspiracy Related to U.S. Capitol Breach;” U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Public Affairs, “Leader of Oath Keepers and Oath Keepers Member Found Guilty”
5. Ore, Lynching, 34–39.
6. See e.g., Johnson, I the People; McHendry, “White Supremacy in the Age;” Rood, After Gun Violence; Winslow, American Catastrophe; Woods and Hahner, Make America Meme Again.
7. McIntosh, Moon, and Nakayama, eds., Interrogating the Communicative Power of Whiteness, 4. See Alcoff, Future of Whiteness; Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists; Carstarphen et al., “Rhetoric, Race, and Resentment;” Kelly, Apocalypse Man; Kennedy, Middleton, and Ratcliffe, eds., Rhetorics of Whiteness; Moon and Flores, “Antiracism and the Abolition of Whiteness;” Nakayama and Krizek, “Whiteness as Strategic Rhetoric.”
8. See e.g., Aden, U.S. Public Memory; Bodnar, Remaking America; Jaskulowski and Majewski, “Populist in Form;” Phillips, “Introduction;” Reyes, “Introduction.”
9. Here we follow historian Kathleen Belew in using “white power” to refer to the umbrella of white hate groups, white nationalists, and neo-Nazi organizations in the latter decades of the twentieth century. Belew, Bring the War Home, ix. For the contemporary era, we use the term “far right” in reference to the “broad spectrum of exclusionary ideologies and groups” with dehumanizing, antigovernment, and white ethnonationalist tendencies. Miller-Idriss, Hate in the Homeland, 17. Our use of these intentionally broad categories is meant to signal how these extremist political movements use a wide range of rhetorical strategies around which various groups have mobilized around making white supremacy more “palatable” to the mainstream. Hartzell, “Alt-White,” 11.
10. Law, “Leaderless Resistance;” Kushner, “Leaderless Resistance,” 215; Smith, “Lone Wolves Connected Online.” In his active period, Beam was a prominent ally of contemporaneous white supremacist leaders like David Lane and other members of the far-right terrorist organization called “the Order.” Belew, Bring the War Home, 4–5, 106–113.
11. Sanchez, “Trump, the KKK, and the Versatility,” 45.
12. The Select Committee, Final Report, 500–501.
13. See Byman, Spreading Hate; Miller-Idriss, Hate in the Homeland.
14. Shammas, “A GOP Congressman Compared”
15. Flores, Deportable and Disposable; Ore, Lynching, 33. See also Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History; Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning.
16. Allan, Insurrection, 1.
17. Ibid., 2–4.
18. See Pason and File, “Protesting with Guns”
19. Allan, Insurrection, 174; Cecelski and Tyson, Democracy Betrayed; Flores, Deportable and Disposable, 70–72; Houdek, “Racial Sedimentation;” Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 381–385.
20. Branscomb, “Making Manifest”
21. Crothers, Rage on the Right, 44–49, 126. See also Barkun, Religion and the Racist Right; Belew, Bring the War Home; Levitas, Terrorist Next Door.
22. Kellner, Guys and Guns Amok, 100–113; Kushner, “Leaderless Resistance,” 215.
23. See DeChaine, “Bordering the Civic Imaginary;” Enck-Wanzer, “Barack Obama;” Woods and Hahner, Make America Meme Again; Miller-Idriss, Hate in the Homeland.
24. HoSang and Lowndes, Producers, Parasites, and Patriots, 52–55.
25. Jardina, White Identity Politics, 262.
26. Kelly, “White Pain,” 213–214. See HoSang and Lowndes, Producers, Parasites, and Patriots; Kelly, Apocalypse Man; Miller-Idriss, Hate in the Homeland.
27. See Giroux, Violence of Organized Forgetting.
28. Skinnell, “Using Democracy Against Itself,” 255.
29. Haskins, Popular Memories, 4.
30. Cohen, History and Popular Memory, xiii.
31. Blair, Dickinson, and Ott, “Introduction: Rhetoric/Memory/Place,” 6.
32. Browne, “Arendt, Eichmann;” Casey, “Public Memory;” Phillips, “Introduction”
33. Hannah-Jones, The 1619 Project.
34. Perez, Jr., and Gaudiano, “Trump Blasts 1619 Project”
35. President’s Advisory 1776 Commission, The 1776 Report, 1.
36. American Historical Association. “AHA Condemns Report.” Of course, The 1619 Project was also not without its critics who contended that it contained some inaccuracies which have largely been addressed as the Project has expanded into different media. See e.g., Harris, “I Helped Fact-Check.”
37. Baker, “Critical Memory and the Black Public Sphere,” 4. It is important to note that though Baker was referencing Black conservatives directly, his argument is applicable to the uses of nostalgia among conservatives more generally.
38. Rood, After Gun Violence, 25.
39. In a reactive foray against The 1619 Project, Hillsdale College, a non-sectarian Christian liberal arts institution, produced the Hillsdale 1776 Curriculum which was subsequently circulated as an alternative to the perceived perils posed by critical, multicultural education. For instance, operating parallel to the rhetoric of the 1776 Report, the curriculum’s coverage of the civil rights movement asserts that the expansion of rights during the twentieth century in fact departed from the lofty ideals of the founding. The curriculum instead paints the progressive “regime of formal inequality” as “identity politics,” and states that such a system “makes it less likely that racial reconciliation and healing can be attained by pursuing the dream for the U.S. of Martin Luther King Jr. and upholding the highest ideals of our Constitution and our Declaration of Independence.” Hillsdale College, The Hillsdale 1776 Curriculum, 2241–42
40. Reyes, “Introduction,” 2.
41. Elgenius and Rydgren, “Frames of Nostalgia and Belonging,” 590.
42. Nakayama and Krizek, “Whiteness,” 301.
43. Congressional Record, “The Declaration of Constitutional Principles,” 4460.
44. Ibid., 4460.
45. The nominal “alt-right” has declined since the Charlottesville rally, but the rhetorical tactics of the “alt-right”—including meme-driven “outrage” at ideas like political correctness – remain impactful in evolving conspiratorial subcultures such as QAnon. Woods and Hahner, Make America Meme Again, 3
46. Stern, Proud Boys, 34–35
47. McGee, “The ‘Ideograph,’” 7.
48. Beam and many others in the white power world identified with the Christian Identity movement, a revisionist, anti-Semitic ideology that interprets Christian eschatology through the lens of racial apocalypse and warns of a globalist takeover of America according to “Satan’s plan for the world.” Beam, Essays of a Klansman, 58. See Barkun, Religion and the Racist Right.
49. HoSang and Lowndes, Producers, Parasites, Patriots, 142–149.
50. Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, 58
51. DeChaine, “Bordering the Civic Imaginary,” 45.
52. Belew, Bring the War Home, 26, 46–51, 182–183; Smith, “Lone Wolves Connected Online.”
53. Hartzell, “Alt-White,” 14; Houdek, “Racial Sedimentation,” 280; Stern, Proud Boys, 31.
54. Beam, Essays of a Klansman, ii.
55. Ibid., 3.
56. Quoted in McVeigh and Estep, The Politics of Losing, 76 (emphasis added).
57. Stern, Proud Boys, 34–37
58. Beam, Essays of a Klansman, 89.
59. Branscomb, “Making Manifest,” 147–148.
60. Aside from immigration, Beam cited various policies facilitating the country’s apparent degradation, including the “promotion of interracial mating,” a “progressive income tax,” busing, and affirmative action. Beam, Essays of a Klansman, 57.
61. Beam, Essays of a Klansman, 50, 77.
62. Silva, “Having the Time of Our Lives,” 80.
63. Beam, Essays of a Klansman, 83, 86–87, 89.
64. Ibid., 3.
65. Jeffries, “The White Meme’s Burden,” 55.
66. See Branscomb, “Making Manifest.” “The Beginnings” originally reflected Kipling’s sentiments about the English people’s growing jingoism against the Germans during the first World War. In the modified version of the poem, references to the “English” have been replaced with the broader mythic-ethnic category “Saxon.” Beam also included Kipling’s xenophobic 1908 poem “The Stranger” at the end of Essays.
67. Miller-Idriss, Hate in the Homeland, 62–63; Stern, Proud Boys, 21.
68. Beam, Essays of a Klansman, 18–19.
69. Byman, Spreading Hate.
70. Crothers, Rage on the Right, 137.
71. “About the Oath Keepers”
72. Crothers, Rage on the Right, 133.
73. The Select Committee, Final Report, 505.
74. Quoted by Rhodes, “Open Letter to President Trump”
75. The “time is now” language was more likely lifted from Washington’s general orders dated July 2, 1776 and later attributed to the intrepid scene of pre-battle exhortation. Founders Online, “General Orders.” Rhodes had also previously cited these words with the same attribution as early as 2015 to preface the “Declaration of Orders We Will Not Obey” page of the militia’s website. Jackson, Oath Keepers, 77.
76. Rhodes, “Open Letter to President Trump, Part II”
77. Ibid.
78. Stovall, White Freedom, 13.
79. See Allan, Insurrection; Ore, Lynching.
80. Levitas, Terrorist Next Door, 4. See Belew, Bring the War Home.
81. Rhodes, “Open Letter to President Trump”
82. Rhodes, “Open Letter to President Trump, Part II”
83. Rhodes, “Open Letter to President Trump”
84. See e.g., Campbell, “Amending Insurrection”
85. Sawyer III, “Originalism,” 49.
86. The Select Committee, Final Report, 511.
87. Quoted in Ibid., 524.
88. Eatman, Ecologies of Harm, 114; Davis, “Memory as Everyday Critical Praxis.”
89. Phillips and Milner, You are Here, 4.
90. Ibid., 179.
91. Media Matters Staff, “Tucker Carlson”
92. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 148.
93. Lowry, The Case for Nationalism.
94. See e.g., Chirindo, “Micronations and Postnational Rhetorics”
95. Dickinson, “‘Fight the Barbarians’”
96. Ibid.
97. Gowen, “Supporters Raise Millions”