This one is already getting a little cold, but a few words.
The Trump era - and its incendiary culmination - has proved to be a fascinating political phenomenon. As the symbolic center of gravity twists and turns under the strain of multiple converging crises, one is better able to grasp the contours and distinctions of the boundary lines between the constructed image - abstracted for the purpose of governing - and the material real.
Part of the reason for this is the nature of the symbol in question. The governance of an immense, complex society - especially one built on violence and domination - requires an abstracted and universalized code of conduct (among other things) which is highly visible, not only for the purpose of being seen, but for the purpose of reassurance, sweeping away informal networks of status and privilege in favor of a universalized and generalized legal and economic code, which in this case is materially embodied in the capitol infrastructure, its institutional and social forms, and the textual codification of its operations.
To restore some semblance of trust in favor of a cooperating citizenry, everyone has to be convinced they can live their lives without being completely screwed over. Now, what that living actually looks like is a very complicated question, but I'm going to leave that aside for now.
The symbolic edification has to be done on the equivalence of the mountaintop, in plain view, as typified by the highly formalized and visible national capitol and institution, whereas in the equivalence of the forest there are plenty of obstructions of vision in which various localities can go on about their idiosyncratic business, and general, universal messages are distorted and dispersed the further out they travel.
The benefit of the forest model of symbolic circulation is that in times of stability, various powers and interests can co-exist, albeit with the healthy helping of regular plausible deniability and gaslighting, while pointing to the carefully maintained universal and visible image and claiming that all is well.
The problem with that is that over the past couple of decades the rule of law - or at least its perception - has been steadily eaten away by corruption, racism, misogyny, queerphobia, classism and conflicting class interest, and all the rest, and the underlying causes of these chronic stresses go unaddressed, in favor of the regular buttressing of the stabilizing image itself. Of course, anyone who knew their way around the forest could speak of these things, especially those with a gift of relating the forest and the mountain together, but that didn't matter so much to the operation of the empire, as it sat sizzling in the sun.
Of course hidden things don't stay hidden forever, and visibility moves in accordance with available energy. And what visibility does is confer upon its shared participants a mutual commitment to whatever necessitated course of action that visibility reveals.
As more sectors of society were affected by the unaddressed crises mounting up, and greater amounts of explosive energy built up in all of the various repressed, contradictory, and compartmentalized hideaways, it got more and more difficult to tamp down on all of the various challenges, until - in the political sphere at least - one made its way all the way up to the doors of the capitol.
Besides all of that, to the average citizen it is a fearful thing to hear of a state capitol stormed, or a city consumed with riots, but there is always the expectation that some superseding power will intervene and restore the wayward energy flows to harmony with some sort of national idea, no matter how tortured that harmony may be.
The storming of the national capitol however, is something entirely different. It places the possibility of radical change closer to the center of gravity, closer to the seat of power, and thus threatens in the perception a real possibility of universal change which can affect oneself no matter one's spatial or energetic position.
It doesn't necessarily have to be the case that this is the singularly revelatory Event. No, the moment the gates were breached, the stewards of empire got to fevered work sweeping the embarrassments under the rug and repairing the image.
Besides, the storm and its aftermath revealed the willingness of an entire faction of the oligarchy and its followers to unilaterally smash the existing social contract - however insulting and fatuous that contract actually is - and the concomitant lack of resistance to such an impulse in the establishment, a lack that necessarily emanates from the other opposing factions of oligarchy, which ultimately results in acquiescence.
What I mean is that if a black or brown fist is raised, or there is a call for real economic justice that doesn't involve the manipulation and appropriation of billionaires and con artists, then suddenly there is an astonishing unity of focus and intent, and we can produce coordinated paramilitary responses to crush the threats and hunt down and snuff out their sources. But then right wing populists can waltz into the capitol building while mall cops fumble, all the while barely making efforts to conceal their identities or protect themselves, as they have become accustomed to regular social deference in making their grievances heard. Though of course, getting grievances heard and actually having something done about those grievances, and what the nature of those grievances were and who actually holds them and who benefits from them being addressed, well those are complications that ultimately brought these people to the doors.
Moving on, curiously it was the highly visible policing and paramilitary apparatus - the heart - that failed the initial runup to the storming, and then the late cerebral reaction of the security agencies like the FBI - which historically operate in the dark - that put into motion the belated and half-assed repression in a last ditch effort to reconstitute the universal image.
In a nation where someone can be thrown into a cage or killed for the escalating consequences of smoking an intoxicating plant, or jaywalking, or driving a busted vehicle, or hawking cigarettes, or even copping a bad attitude, it seems some harshness could be mustered up for something like massive financial crime or the intention to commit insurrection. And what response does the Democratic party in particular have prepared? Bailouts and harshly worded letters perhaps?
It is in the end, acquiescence, and permission. You may as well throw the doors open. Just try not to be too obvious with a welcoming gesture, it will make you look bad.
This itself is a political decision baked a priori into the structure of the empire itself. It is the direction that the structure will crumble; there is plenty more to come. At least now more can see this: the various factions have fragmented in the aftermath as the endpoints of their various platforms have been reached, and those existing memberships and alliances have been rethought and the various factions have begun to become reform and redrawn and reorganized. The lines have become more visible. Intentions must now better conform to them.
But vision can be a tricky thing. We are still left with the strange willingness to go about living the same way we always have, moving in the same direction, and maintaining the integrity of the symbolic world - as embodied in the Biden administration - while devastation progresses in every direction.
