LUKE MOGELSON HAS logged quite a few years as war correspondent for the New Yorker but happened to be back in the USA for our own local wars in 2020: the no-vaccines-no-masks protests, the George Floyd protests and counter-protests, and the Trump-was-robbed protests, culminating in the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
The centerpiece of the book is Chapter 17, a fifty-page, first-hand account of what went down at the Capitol, a version of which ran in the New Yorker. (Mogelson, I believe, took that amazing video of buffalo-horned Q shaman Jason Chansley ensconced in Mike Pence's chair in the Senate chamber.) Mogelson's account has the benefit not only of his actually having been there, but also of his having spent months beforehand reporting on the very people swarming up the steps, zip-ties at the ready. It could well become the definitive written account.
Made me wonder--what would Tom Wolfe have done with this material?
Mogelson does so good a job reporting the martial fervency of the pro-Trumpers that I was somewhat relieved that he doesn't think we have a real civil war on our hands. He has reported on several real civil wars, and he emphasizes that they involve real grievances, real injuries--the death of one's family members, the destruction of one's hometown. Those storming the Capitol were motivated more by what they thought they might be losing than by anything they had actually lost. As Mogelson puts it, "Were large-scale violence to erupt in the US, it would be something different: a war fueled not by injury but by delusion." (316)
Then again, back in 1861, the South seceded more for what they thought they might lose than for anything they had actually lost. So who knows.
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