Some thoughts: The great paradox of 1/6 is that so much of the planning happened out in the open (both in the immediate run-up and over the past 4+ years), which actually made it less effective. There were too many disparate and undisciplined groups, effectively tourists.

This part of Trumpism will continue. To the extent the Trump family is able to operate in the open, they will become the Grateful Dead of right-wing politics, which Trump rallies already embody, and followers will go on tour, chanting "Lock Her Up" for the coming decades.
The key question is whether the Far Right will break from this. Some indications show that Trump's efforts at self-preservation by weak denunciation will fuel a break and also further a pervasive "stabbed-in-the-back" narrative that the Far Right uses everywhere.
What made 1/6 more effective was the obvious underpreparation by the Capitol police, in coordination with DOJ and DOD. Some indiv officers assented but some did their job a little too effectively--incl. by shooting the woman in the bldg as much as not shooting entrants at first.
It's clear that some people entered the Capitol with the intent to kidnap/lynch specific members of Congress (you can figure out who), and some of those people basically fantasized about doing that for the likes while live-streaming (insert analogy to Zetas/ISIS/whatevs).
Ultimately, many of the known key leaders of the Far Right were in the Capitol. There is no parallel on the Left, in part because of aversion to hierarchy means we don't have celebrity leaders in the same way (though one celeb was clearly a target on 1/6).
But these leaders also weren't quite in control of what was happening in part because they were always hedging their bets. Every action is a fundraising opportunity until the next one, and the dog catching the car problem is real for ppl w/ no political strategy.
Given all the "non-movement" arguments happening in my little corner of the too-online Left lately, it's clear that the disciplined revolutionary cadre of the Right (@kathleen_belew's subject matter) have been a victim of their own success/popularity.
They're torn b/c their politics thrive in the online environment w/ the full transformation of politics into meme-ification & trolling, but they also can't easily translate that success into anything more than endless stochastic white violence, which is where they started anyway.
The Far Right hasn't reached the status of non-movement yet, to the degree the positive valence of that term applies to the 1000s of otherwise un- or loosely organized people who filled the streets over last summer and engaged in radical and courageous tactics.
But it also doesn't need to because its minimum goal is also the baseline operation of US institutions and governance (ie, the rule of capital through racialized structural disadvantage).

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I just finished Eric Adler's The Battle of the Classics, and wanted to say something about Joel Christiansen's review linked below. I am not sure what motivates the review (I speculate a bit below), but it gives a very misleading impression of the book. 1/x


The meat of the criticism is that the history Adler gives is insufficiently critical. Adler describes a few figures who had a great influence on how the modern US university was formed. It's certainly critical: it focuses on the social Darwinism of these figures. 2/x

Other insinuations and suggestions in the review seem wildly off the mark, distorted, or inappropriate-- for example, that the book is clickbaity (it is scholarly) or conservative (hardly) or connected to the events at the Capitol (give me a break). 3/x

The core question: in what sense is classics inherently racist? Classics is old. On Adler's account, it begins in ancient Rome and is revived in the Renaissance. Slavery (Christiansen's primary concern) is also very old. Let's say classics is an education for slaveowners. 4/x

It's worth remembering that literacy itself is elite throughout most of this history. Literacy is, then, also the education of slaveowners. We can honor oral and musical traditions without denying that literacy is, generally, good. 5/x