Without a name for it, figuring out why it happened is that much harder.
By Joshua Zeitz
Reporter
Politico
More than 18 months after the events of Jan. 6, 2021, Americans are still struggling to understand what happened that day.
Even after this summer’s revelations by the House Jan. 6 committee, the riot at the Capitol Building seems to defy easy categorization. It was at once violent and farcical, premeditated and shambolic, clearly associated with a coordinated effort by the outgoing administration to nullify a free and fair election it had just lost yet lacking the muscle of military or police authorities.
So… was it an insurrection? A coup, albeit a failed one? A political protest gone awry? A pathetic show of white power cosplay or the portent of something darker and more dangerous in our nation’s not-distant future?
Our inability to confront these questions reflects a long-held and deep-seated belief that our country operates outside the normal rules of history. Since the early 19th century, many Americans have embraced a providential understanding of the nation’s mission and destiny. This faith in the United States as the “last best hope of Earth,” as Abraham Lincoln put it, can create both a sense of purpose — a drive to correct the country’s imperfections, an aspiration to serve a beacon of light for all nations — and a set of blinders.
The oft-repeated assertion that “this is not who we are” — that Jan. 6 was an aberration — ignores a deep tradition of antidemocratic violence that courses through the veins of American history — from the mob that killed the abolitionist newspaperman Elijah Lovejoy in 1837 to Bleeding Kansas in the 1850s, from the Civil War itself to Reconstruction and Redemption,Jim Crow and the destruction of Native American nations in the service of building homesteads for free white people in the American West. This may not be who we are, but it’s most definitely who we’ve been.
Put another way: What would we call Jan. 6 had it occurred in Argentina in the 1940s, Chile in the 1970s or Hungary in 2022? We’d not likely have a problem arriving at a definition. In this sense, the myth of national innocence can be a powerful drug.