Americans believe very different things about what happened in Washington a year ago, on January 6, when a group of Donald Trump supporters breached the U.S. Capitol and disrupted Congress’s certification of President Joe Biden’s election victory.
At a “March to Save America” that day, Trump called on his vice president, Mike Pence, who oversaw the certification, to overturn the election results—and called on attendees to walk to the Capitol in protest. Early that afternoon, some 1,200 people broke into the Capitol building, preventing Congress from completing the certification until after midnight—when a majority of Republican members of the House of Representatives then voted against it.
A year later, the American public’s understanding of the event is cloudy: Almost 40 percent of those surveyed in mid-December don’t even know which candidate the rioters supported. About 14 percent identified them as being Trump opponents, and 24 percent admitted they didn’t know whose side they were on at all. Even within the Republican Party, there’s no consensus about what took place. Around 45 percent of Republicans said that the rioters were a threat to democracy, while 52 percent said those involved were protecting democracy, according to a poll taken at the end of December. What was the attack on the U.S. Capitol actually about?
Seth Masket is a professor of political science and the director of the Center on American Politics at the University of Denver. As Masket explains, the vast majority of Republicans and Democrats—from party leaders to voters—initially condemned the violence of January 6, but the Republican Party has increasingly moved since then to excuse or even condone the rioters. Masket says there’s one reason why: Trump’s ongoing power in the party—and his ongoing claim, which there’s never been evidence for, that he won in 2020. Yet accepting this claim is now the litmus test for all prospective Republican candidates.
Which, to Masket, shows that the question isn’t merely historical: If any party refuses to accept an election when it loses, that’s a danger for the next election—and for the democracy as such. And however resilient American democracy ends up being, it’s crucial to understand now that a failure among political elites to agree on whether elections are legitimate has often foreshadowed the breakdown of democracy in other countries.
Michael Bluhm: How do you understand what happened on January 6?
Seth Masket: It’s an important question to keep alive, because there’s still a lot of disagreement about it. To be clear about a central fact of the matter: This wasn’t just a president saying, I don’t want to leave—which would be odd and unprecedented enough. This was a president enabling a violent mob to disrupt the processes within the Congress that would lead to his orderly, democratic removal from office. Several members of Congress went along with this. And it was all connected to efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election in various states and Congress.
