'The significance of the January 6 riot should be neither dismissed nor exaggerated. For sheer destructive force, it pales in comparison with the street anarchy that began in May 2020 and that has continued relentlessly in the form of shootings, savage beatings and robberies, carjackings, and looting. Physical damage at the Capitol was minimal, especially compared with the infernos that burned businesses to the ground and destroyed thousands of livelihoods. Members of Congress were in no real danger; Mike Pence was not going to be lynched, regardless of the Democrats’ dumb literalism and willful inability to recognize political hyperbole.
But while quantitatively less destructive, the January 6 riot is qualitatively different from much of the race riots and from sometimes racially motivated street crime. Attacking the processes and symbols of democratic government has the potential to crater all of American society. If the juvenile vandalism of January 6 was far from realizing that potential, it nevertheless represents a dangerous impulse. It is not inconceivable that that impulse will play out again, especially given the persistent belief of many Republican voters that the 2020 election was stolen. It is also not inconceivable that Democrats will be next to use force in the hope of reversing an election. They have already threatened elected officials in their homes and used mob tactics to protest unwanted Supreme Court confirmations.
The epistemological problem complicating any analysis of January 6 is that the participants sincerely believed that the election was stolen. That belief changes one’s judgment of who is defending democracy and who is threatening it. Republican leaders who know better should rebut the rigged election claims. Their silence in the face of Trump’s continuing demagoguery on the topic only contributes to the country’s fissures.
But the crime and riots that the Democrats alternately tolerate and justify also have the potential to unravel democracy. If law enforcement is delegitimated and hindered from doing its job, if property is not secure, if civilians fear being held up at gunpoint, pistol-whipped, or shot when they enter the public square or even in their homes, then there is no more security and no conditions for prosperity. The George Floyd riots also took aim at the symbols of government—courthouses, prosecutors’ offices, police stations, City Halls, and squad cars. The cop hatred that they amplified has proved far more lethal than the January 6 convulsion. Far more people have participated in the George Floyd riots and in the ongoing assault on law and order than breached the Capitol. The events of January 6, 2021, do not meet any legal definition of “insurrection.” But if Democrats and the mainstream media insist on the term, then the violence of the last two years has also been an insurrectionary force.
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