Jan. 6 was the start of a new era
Chester, N.Y.: In August 1991, Soviet hardliners attempted to depose President Mikhail Gorbachev and halt the perceived liberalization of the Soviet Union. The coup failed, but Moscow’s influence never recovered: Ukraine declared independence two days later, and the Soviet Union collapsed before the end of the year. In November 1923, Nazis tried and failed to topple the Weimar Republic. The coup leaders were arrested and jailed but received lenient sentences. Ten years later, they controlled the country. And in ancient Rome, it took more than a century of destabilizing inequality and two decades following Caesar’s Rubicon crossing before the Republic eventually fell.
That the U.S. thwarted a symbolic coup attempt is not a story of successfully avoiding catastrophe. Instead, the very existence of such an attempt is a dire warning of the country’s fragility — its defining feature in the decade ahead. It will take years to resolve.
The underlying conditions that made Jan. 6 possible — a deep distrust of institutions and the creation of a politicized reality in which a critical mass of one party is incapable of recognizing the other’s legitimacy — did not disappear when the mob dispersed. The QAnon conspiracy alleging that Satan-worshipping elites who run a child sex ring are trying to control our politics has now poisoned the groundwater of American discourse: A majority of Americans now either believe these allegations are true (17%) or are unsure (37%).
Neutralizing the immediate threats to our democracy, bringing to justice those responsible and addressing the underlying causes of those threats is a process that will take years to complete. And each step is essential in preventing our slide toward the still-very-much-avoidable fates of the Soviet Union, Weimar Germany or the Roman Republic.
Aaron Bartnick