It is certainly true, as our incoming President declared, that Wednesday was a dark day in American history. It is certainly true that the conduct of a President of the United States inciting sedition is a disgrace that none of us would ever have wanted to see. And — in particular — it’s certainly true, as everyone has noted, that the security around the Capitol should have been far more robust.
But, despite all that, I would bet — if there were any way of resolving the bet — that the history of the United States as it unfolds into the future will be better than it would have been if the security around the Capitol had been as it should have been.
With the appropriate security — the kind for which the need was easily foreseeable — it seems reasonable to assume that the mob would have been repulsed, and the Capitol would have remained inviolate. (We can’t, admittedly, know whether other outrages would have been committed.)
But what happened shocked the nation in ways that seem to be redounding on the Republican sociopathy that has darkened our times.
- It seems probable that Donald Trump will be impeached one more time, with his standing with the American people darkened and diminished still further.
- It seems probable that those Republican opportunists — Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz — have damaged their political prospects, because the outrage at the Capitol has made their Trumpian posturing over the Electoral vote certification a serious miscalculation.
- We already saw that many Republicans backed away from the path they were on— abandoning objections on the Electoral vote, resigning from their positions in the Trump gang.
Meanwhile, all this outrageous display of the dark consequences of the Trumpian sedition seems to be fortifying the standing of President-to-be Joe Biden as he prepares to assume office.
And how would things be different if the mob had simply been contained and turned back?
Questions of “alternative history” are inherently beset with uncertainty. We can never know what would have happened — how much better the Reconstruction process would have unfolded -- if Abraham Lincoln had been better protected at Ford’s Theater that night in April, 1865. We can never know whether there would have been a World War in the second decade of the 20th century if Archduke Ferdinand had chosen a different route for his carriage.
But despite the uncertainty, the question of consequences is one that necessarily faces us all the time, and that inherently means assessing the likely consequences of alternative paths. Just as we have to make those assessments every time we make a choice, so also it makes sense to consider where alternative courses might have taken us.
And to me, at this moment, it seems that we are fortunate that the security at the Capitol was so badly mismanaged, because it has exposed so dramatically the evils on the American right — from Trump to the Republicans in Congress to the fascists and white supremacists trashing “the citadel of American democracy” — at a crucial moment in our history, as power is about to be transferred to the decent from the indecent, to the honest from the liars, to the rule of law from the lawless, to the forces of democracy from the forces of dictatorship.
