Four years after Donald Trump’s sparsely attended inauguration, Joe Biden is likely to be sworn in before a crowd of, well, almost no one. Some past presidents will attend—though not Trump—and a few other dignitaries and celebrity performers, but that’s basically it. In response to the January 6 MAGA riot at the Capitol, and amid fears of more right-wing violence, the city has been subjected to a militarized lockdown to a degree not seen since at least 1968. Twenty-five thousand National Guard now roam the streets, along with thousands of police officers and representatives of other law enforcement agencies. Unscalable fences and checkpoints barnacle the center of the city. The part of D.C. where tourists usually gawp at the heart of imperial power—the National Mall and the White House—has now been rendered a no-go “red zone.”
Pundits have reached for comparisons to the American-instituted “green” zones of Kabul and Baghdad (even the Secret Service has used the term). But that elides some important facts, namely that while D.C. recently experienced a white supremacist uprising, it’s far from an active theater of conflict. It’s precisely because D.C. is not a war zone that its military occupation seems so shocking. Just a couple weeks ago, the capital was much like any other major American city, which is to say highly surveilled and policed but not occupied. It didn’t feel like a militarized ghost town, like a Call of Duty map.
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