Trump putsch: a job for old men?

The Capitol insurrectionists of January 6 were overwhelmingly white and predominantly male. That much is obvious from pictures and from common sense. But the ones so far identified share another characteristic that seems surprising. It would not be accurate to say they were mostly "really" old -- but they were decidedly not young.

According to the Atlantic, the source of this chart:

... the demographic profile of the suspected Capitol rioters is different from that of past right-wing extremists. The average age of the arrestees we studied is 40. Two-thirds are 35 or older ...

And that's a little bizarre. Revolutionists who storm an established regime are almost always young.  Think of the crowds of Egyptians who occupied Tahrir Square in 2011, dooming the longtime dictator Mubarak. Or of the crowds who tried to preserve democracy in Hong Kong last year. 

Or, for that matter, think of the Founding Fathers who fought the American Revolution. In 1776, those major military leaders, Marquis de Lafayette and Alexander Hamilton, were 18 and 21 respectively. The political leadership was only a little older: John Jay, 30, Thomas Jefferson, 33, John Hancock, 39, John Adams, 40. And the patriarch of them all, General Washington, was all of 44.

News accounts keep surfacing of insurrection participants who might really be called old.

• A husband and wife planned their role in the Jan. 6 Capitol attack with a group of Oath Keepers, federal prosecutors alleged in charging documents filed Thursday. Sandra Parker, 60, and her husband Bennie Parker, 70, were allegedly affiliated with the same group of Oath Keepers militia members that has already been indicted on conspiracy charges for the alleged planning they did before participating in the riot. 

• ... [one arrestee] was 70-year-old Lonnie Coffman, an Alabama man who authorities say brought a car full of weapons and explosives to Washington, D.C.

What the hell is going on with these members of my Boomer cohort? Feelings of activist desperation  often recede as we age. And these folks don't seem to have acquired the tempering judgement that often accompanies mere time on the planet.

Sure, they belong to Trump's cohort of aggrieved white people who believe they remember a time when their kind was top of the pyramid. Their memories are distorted by bigotry, but I can easily imagine them watching the Biden inauguration festivities and thinking -- this is not my culture; where do these people come from? Their kind lost pop cultural hegemony decades ago; I often think a feeling of cultural loss is a lot of what makes middle class white people such suckers for the politics of resentment.

A Huffington Post article about younger people trying, and failing, to detach their parents from the QAnon conspiracy theory, offers some further insight. If anyone you know is QAnon-believing or QAnon-curious, I cannot recommend this story too highly. Here's a sample of what unhappy relatives are learning about their loved ones:

‘I Miss My Mom’: Children Of QAnon Believers Are Desperately Trying To Deradicalize Their Own Parents

... Kara, a 46-year-old health care worker in the Midwest, said her mom’s descent into QAnon was gradual at first but accelerated once she retired. Now it’s out of control.

“My mom’s the most giving, wonderful person. Or, she was,” Kara said. “This has taken over her life.” 

... Kara’s mother went to college and worked in health care. The belief that she must be uneducated is a dangerous misunderstanding of how people fall into QAnon — which in many cases has less to do with intelligence than with circumstantial vulnerability. 

Fear and confusion are major drivers of conspiratorial thinking; a key reason why QAnon’s allure skyrocketed early in the pandemic is because droves of panicked people were desperate for answers about the coronavirus that expert authorities couldn’t immediately provide. QAnon quickly conjured up its own twisted version of events, tactically affirming people’s fears while seeding suspicion of credible information sources. (QAnon is also a common destination for white supremacists, whose racism can’t be explained away by their educational status.)

Has the pandemic combined with racism to create a group of frightened old people who ended up idolizing Trump and attacking the Capitol? So it seems. Can they be helped back to reality? Not so easy.