The fourth anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection is a strange one. Had a Democrat won the White House in November, there would be widespread concerns about another siege of the U.S. Capitol on Monday. That anxiety has ebbed only because the chief culprit of that riot is returning to office. In other words, this anniversary reveals less about what the country may have learned about the fragility of democracy than what it hasn’t.
How has the U.S. metabolized what happened on Jan. 6? Was the event an aberration or could we see a similar direct assault on the peaceful transfer of power again? Only time will tell, but there’s good reason to think a repeat in the medium term remains a distinct possibility. It’s not just that President-elect Donald Trump is returning to office and could once again contest a future Democratic victory. It’s that Republicans in general have no consensus position on what happened on Jan. 6, how to prevent it, or whether it was even a bad thing. The right’s narratives on Jan. 6 are a sloppy mix of conspiracy theory, denialism and defense of what happened. The lack of consensus suggests that the party effectively does not think that Jan. 6 is all that big of a deal — or that a repeat of it would be either.
The Jan. 6 insurrection caused only the most fleeting moment of consensus.
It can be instructive to contrast the reaction to Jan. 6 with the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, both violent crises that punctured universal assumptions about the safety of the republic. After Sept. 11, there was widespread agreement on the facts of the event, with conspiracy theories remaining consigned to the fringe. And swiftly both parties agreed — even if mostly to catastrophic effect — on the necessity of a new policy regime for national security.
The Jan. 6 insurrection caused only the most fleeting moment of consensus. After an outpouring of condemnations from leaders of both parties, there was an immediate split when it came to taking action. Most House Republicans declined to vote to impeach Trump, and Senate Republicans blocked Trump from being convicted on his impeachment charges. Shortly thereafter, GOP leaders were already cozying up to Trump again. And as 2024 approached and it became clear that Trump remained popular in the party, top Republicans and GOP White House hopefuls waffled on the event as well.
What’s striking in the case of Jan. 6 is that questions over basic facts changed over time in order to justify and normalize Trump’s status as the leader of the party. Today, the right’s positions are a tangled mix of obfuscation, slippery shifts in position and conspiracy-mongering. While Trump initially condemned the rioters as violent “intruders” who “defiled the seat of American democracy,” he has since revised his account of Jan. 6 as a “day of love,” denied that the attackers had firearms and deemed them “patriots.” Some Republican politicians have gone beyond denialism into fabrication of an alternative reality, pushing the evidence-free claim that Jan. 6 was an “inside job.”
That narrative has gotten serious traction on the right: A Washington Post-University of Maryland poll conducted in December 2023 showed that a third of Republicans believe the false claim that the FBI organized and encouraged the insurrection. (FBI informants were present at the riot, but there were no full-time undercover agents present, according to a report from the Justice Department’s inspector general.) Sometimes, Republicans will attribute Jan. 6 to nefarious outside agitators in one instance and then in another instance describe it as a small issue that’s been blown out of proportion. For example, right-wing pundit Tucker Carlson did an entire documentary series for Fox Nation on how Jan. 6 was instigated by outside actors or the FBI, but he has also said Jan. 6 “barely rates as a footnote” in American history. And amid all these differing accounts, the overwhelming majority of Republicans say they believe it’s time to “move on” from Jan. 6.
That there is no universal Republican story of what happened on Jan. 6 is the most important thing to know about how the party has chosen to process the event. Whether turned upside down through disinformation networks or downplayed by politicians out of expediency, the memory of Jan. 6 has been mangled into an unintelligible mess on the right. The upshot is that we are no more immune today to the degradation of democracy than we were the day of the attack.
