January 6 Was Scary. The Democrats’ Inability to Respond Has Been Scarier.
The January 6 Capitol riot may have been a laughable failure, but it highlighted the frailty of American democracy. Unfortunately, the Democrats running the ongoing hearings investigating the riot seem to have no idea what to do about it.
Donald Trump supporters stand on the east steps of the Capitol Building after storming its grounds on January 6, 2021, in Washington, DC. (Jon Cherry / Getty Images)
Analyzing January 6 can be tricky because it was several things at once.
On the one hand, it was an attempt to carry out something like the (briefly) successful right-wing coup in Bolivia. On the other hand, it was a slapdash, amateurish effort that failed, among other things, to get buy-in from most of the key officials needed to pull it off.
On the one hand, the storming of the Capitol was an obviously alarming and dangerous event and could have ended in the murder of congresspeople and possibly worse. On the other, almost all of those who actually did that storming turned out to be unarmed, cable-news-obsessed dopes who didn’t know what to actually do once they — by blind chance — caught the proverbial car.
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