Description
On January 6, a crowd of Donald Trump supporters stormed the Capitol Building in an attempt to subvert the certification of the 2020 election results. Those who participated claimed to be participating in a ‘second American Revolution,’ defending the democratic process and the American Constitution from a corrupt state apparatus attempting to counter the will of the American people – that Trump returns to office as President. Throughout the process of the Senate Select Committee Investigation, the responsibility shifted to Trump personally as having created ‘the Big Lie’ to manipulate his supporters for his own benefit, as a fundamentally anti-Democratic and thus anti-American political force.
This paper draws on literature from settler colonial studies, critical theories of race, and Native Studies to contextualise January 6 in the broader story of American white supremacy and settler colonialism. Through a critical reading of the documentary texts related to the insurrection, we can ascertain how the rioters position themselves within this story as the true inheritors of the American Revolution, once again taking up arms to defend their natural rights. Further, by conceptualising the American state as the settler empire-state, we can see how the state’s claims to post-racial politics within a liberal tradition work to obscure how white supremacy and settler coloniality structure how the state reconfigures itself against challenges to the political order it represents. Through this critical reading, this opens the space to critically analyse both the claims of rioters and the American state’s reassertion of its own authority over the legacy of 1776 and assess these narratives as embodying white settler counter-revolution.
