Trump can channel the anger of large numbers of alienated people, but the anger and paranoia exists independently of him, even though he uses this rage for his own purposes. And even when Trump is gone, these angry people will remain in our society.
The riot inside Congress last week is going to be with us for a long time, in terms of reaction and policy response. While we can lay responsibility on Donald Trump’s doorstep for inciting the violent behavior, he himself did not participate in the riot itself, nor did he pay for people to come to D.C. to be a part of it.
So who are they? Some are opportunists who flew private jets to D.C. to break windows, others are far-right racists flying Confederate flags, and a few are just normal Republican activists and officeholders choosing to indulge an anti-democratic violent fantasy. But many in what CNN’s Brian Stelter called an Extremely Online riot are middle or lower middle class people who found their way to radicalism through social media. The one who has been profiled in depth is Ashli Babbitt, a woman who died from a gunshot wound as she tried to climb into the Speaker’s lobby. In tracing her life, I think there are some lessons about what we can do to stop the polarization and radicalization of our society.
According to the New York Times, Babbitt was a 35 year-old woman from California who spent 14 years serving in the U.S. Air Force, deploying to both Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. government sent Babbitt abroad eight times, and though not every time was in a combat zone, such repeated deployments into violent areas tend to cause brain damage.
After her time at war, Babbitt had a modest propensity for violence, threatening a rival love interest by rear ending her with a car in 2016. She married, and bought a small business with her husband, a pool supply company called Fowlers Pool Service and Supply. There she ran into commercial problems common to small businesses these days. The pool business isn’t a good one, dominated as it is by monopoly pool supply distributor Pool Corp. (The FTC settled with Pool Corp in 2011 over a predatory practice called ‘exclusive dealing.’ This settlement clearly failed, as Pool Corp was bragging to investors earlier this year that one of its competitive advantages was “exclusive products.”)
Fowlers Pool Service and Supply predictably ran into trouble. So Babbitt took out what was known as a “merchant cash advance” from a company called EBF Partners, which she calculated charged her an interest rate of 169%. She quickly defaulted, and was embroiled in a lawsuit. Her lawyers argued that her lender had cheated her with too high of an interest rate. She lost, as “courts have held that such arrangements don’t amount to loans and are not bound by usury laws.” According to her brother, her politics weren’t particularly unusual, she was frustrated with homelessness in San Diego, and how hard it was to run a business. And then she got more into politics through social media, and then into QAnon.
So here’s the profile of a rioter, a working class person who went overseas eight times in military service, including two combat zones, who then tried her hand at a small business where financial predators and monopolists lurked. She then fell in with conspiratorial social media, and turned into a violent rioter who, like most of the rioters, thought she was defending America by overturning an election.
It’s easy to mock this kind of thinking, to see rioters as losers or racists. And no doubt there’s a strain of deep-seated racial animus that is with us and always will be, but I think ascribing all of it to such an explanation is too simple. Racist or no, Babbitt really was at one point a patriotic American, serving in the military for over half her adult life. More broadly, she’s far from alone in expressing rage at the status quo. There have protests against the existing social order for almost a decade, starting with the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, and then Black Lives Matter in 2014 and accelerating into protests and riots earlier this year. I’ve written about the relationship between unrest and corporate power in the context of those protests, a sense of alienation that normal political channels, that politics itself is not a realistic path for addressing social problems.
There’s no moral or practical equivalence between these pro-Trump rioters and those who protested against police brutality; anger against racism in America is grounded and legitimate, while QAnon paranoia is not. And the pro-Trump protesters are not a group of sad sack victims taking out legitimate grievances by attempting to attack the counting of electoral votes. What Babbitt did was obviously wrong, and she did not have to do it. Most in her situation do not.
But still, environments nudge us in different directions. And Babbitt was both an adult making dangerous political choices, and a product of our policy regime, having been a soldier in a violent unnecessary war and trying to make her way a society that enables predators to make money through financial chicanery and addictive products. She chose poorly, but she also had few choices to make, one of which was getting on social media and being lured into joining a violent and paranoid cult of personality.
I don’t know that a different set of life experiences would have led Babbitt to a different place, but it’s not hard to see why someone like this would start to imagine a giant secret conspiracy was controlling her life. It’s more likely that people will distrust political institutions if those political institutions have repeatedly failed them. After all, Babbitt didn’t send herself to war, George W. Bush, as much as he might condemn her actions at the Capitol, did that.
Again, I’m not justifying, but I am trying to understand, because anti-democratic rage, which we tend to center around specific political leaders, is deep-rooted. Three out of five Americans are lonely, which has created a suicide epidemic, a trend likely to increase dramatically with Covid. The opioid crisis is no secret either. Social media and QAnon should be understood as part of this broad-based social crisis. The way we do social media is addictive, and overuse can result in depression, memory loss, alcoholism, and reduced empathy and social development. The reality is that there are a large number of people like Babbitt in America and around the world, people who are lost souls, bereft of community ties, prone to be led towards extreme rootless religious-political movements.
There are two paths in a representative democracy if we have a large group who lives in a cult-like artificial world of misinformation, and many more who rightly or wrongly don’t trust any political institution. We can try to strip these people of representation and political power; that is the guiding idea behind removing Trump, as well as a whole host of conservatives, off of Silicon Valley platforms that have become essential to modern society. Removing these people is a choice to not have a society, to pretend that we can put these people into a closet somewhere and ignore them.
The alternative is less dramatic. We can take on the legal framework behind social media so these products aren’t addictive and radicalizing. As I’ve written, there are legal immunities and policy choices that allow Facebook to profit in especially toxic ways through compiling detailed user profiles and targeting them with ads. If we change how social media companies make money, we can change how these services operate to make them socially beneficial instead of engines of radicalization.
More broadly, we can try to rebuild our institutions so everyone has a stake in society again, and end the systemic cheating in our commerce that strips people of community. Just saying ‘trust our institutions’ won’t work, at least not until we make those institutions trustworthy.
Matt Stoller is Research Director for the American Economic Liberties Project. His first book Goliath, published by Simon and Schuster, was released in October 2020.
Comments
9 responses to “Ashli Babbitt, a lost soul who died backing Donald Trump (BIG Jan 11, 2020)”
There are also at least 7 billion of other people who don’t sign up to kill brown people for money just because they are destitute.
No sympathies to despicable American troops and vets, they are part of the imperial problem that are forced down our throats.
You’re implying that she had brain damage because returned troops from repeated deployments tended to have brain damage? Mate, careful with applying group statistics to an individual. Especially a dead one.
The author is profoundly mistaken about Ashli Babbitt, who was one of the more enthusiastic supporters of “Red America” – as Alastair Crooke has called it – attending a rally of between 300,000 and one million similar “lost souls”. She was suffering only from the mistaken belief that the Capitol and congress belongs to the people, and was at the front of the group who came to the barricaded doors of the speakers lobby. In the melee – which was not violent with no armed security present, no-one saw an agent hiding at the side with a gun pointing at the broken window which Ashli went to climb through. Shot in the neck she was dead within a minute, executed by the marksman who immediately withdrew. Had it not been for the only weapons in the hands of the protestors – video cameras and phones – we wouldn’t know this vital detail – nor how it was subsequently used to create an emergency and the abandonment of the imminent senate debate on the legitimacy of the election.
Failure to realise that Ashli Babbitt was not some “violent extremist” but rather an “all-American martyr” who had woken up to the “alternative reality” of corporate power and conspiracy now condemns us to a radically divided America and a brave new world of fear and surveillance and manipulation.
I don’t agree. While the circumstances of Babbit’s death may be somewhat murky as you described, I think the picture of Babbit described by the author is typical of the many right wing supporters (and probably typical of any sort of extreme mvements). The real problem is with the system in this case the current extreme right wing liberalism enthusiastically pushed by neo liberal governments around the world. It creates alienation by treating people as customers or clients in stead of patients and citizens.
Unless we arrest these movements and return to much more social policies, the problems will simply increase and eventually lead to a much more serious attack on democratic institutions.
While I don’t wish to draw out a discussion on which it is unlikely either side will make concessions, I would like to emphasise that this event, in which the premeditated and unexpected execution of an unarmed protestor effectively changed the course of history, is the pretext for the imposition of extraordinary powers by the State against the people. It has already been classified as a new 9/11 – or “1/6” by respected investigative journalist and commentator Pepe Escobar, and whether you believe these events to be false flags or “domestic terrorism”, be assured this is the belief held by many millions of Americans, now more than ever. The “serious attack on domestic institutions” has already happened, including the censorship of alternative opinion by Twitter.
Both David and Hans make good points here — Hans on neoliberalism and David on civil liberties. Just the suppression of the Hunter Biden story was enough to steal a remarkably close election from the incumbent Trump. Let’s not typecast the woman who was shot. She should be treated with respect but I hope the killer can be identified. When Hilary Clinton coined the word “Deplorables” I was disgusted, of course, but also surprised at the willful abandonment of the Democrats’ Roosevelt coalition. Half the electorate is looking for a voice and the only people who spoke to them were Trump and Bernie Sanders.
“extreme right wing liberalism enthusiastically pushed by neo liberal governments around the world. ”
The globalist neo-liberal govts also push extreme left-wing cultural leftism in the forms of population replacement through mass immigration, Gender Ideology, including extreme forms of LGBTQism, hatred/destruction of the nuclear family, hatred of the white race, GDP worship and promotion of secular hedonist consumerism.
“…eventually lead to a much more serious attack on democratic institutions.”
Trump was probably the last chance for anything resembling democratic institutions. Biden had the backing of 99% of the Wall Street and Big Tech/Silicon Valley plutocratic oligarchy. “The last chance” would have been Trump winning a second term and then taking the war to the Deep State, which he did a little bit of during his first term. Do you know that some people are so clueless that they don’t know that Obama started four new wars (Libya, Syria, Ukraine, Yemen) while Trump started no new wars despite the constant bluster over Iran.
This provides an excellent summary of the conditions producing rampant alienation in the countries which have embraced neoliberal ideology as the dominant way in which government functions. As has often been pointed out on P&I it is the collapse of community and the extreme forms of liberalism–the socio-cultural model of neoliberalism–that has played so much in undermining any sense of social security people might have had in a more cohesive society where government ruled for the whole population, not just for itself and the large corporations.
But that is the easy part to describe. The more difficult part is to turn it around. We can easily oppose neoliberal individualism with a form of democratic socialism, incorporating both private and state enterprise, but will the mainstream voter comprehend what is being offered by the alternative Weltanschauung and its policy applications. The problem is that social media tends to reduce everything to emotive slogans, onto which people cling, preventing them from critically examining the big picture. Emotive responses are short term, impulsive and usually lead nowhere.
However, the next three or four governments in the US, here and in the UK must (am I being over-optimistic) take the deep concerns–however inarticulately presented–of the alienated middle and working classes seriously and doing something positive to reduce the alienation.
Thoughtful comments, thanks David and Greg. The demonisation of Trump is cheap and nasty, dirty and lazy. It does nothing to address the political problems in America, Australia or anywhere else. The heavy threats from the FBI are concerning. If I had been in Washington I would have joined the march and walked around the halls of the Capitol like I did as a child. When I saw on the news footage a young man sitting at Nancy Pelosi’s desk I thought you beauty! He is an improvement on the horse’s arse that normally occupies the chair. I was reminded of a young man who sat in the Magistrate’s chair when a Vietnam Moratorium march spilled into the Beaufort Street Court House in Perth. Will the Americans allow themselves to be censored, watched and shamed just like the Chinese or will they have some courage?