What we saw on Wednesday in Washington was a physical assault against the institutions of the American republic, full stop, and one that comes after years of increasingly normalized political violence. Historical parallels, both within our own country and abroad, all seem inapt; what we are witnessing is in fact sui generis.
How we got to this point will take weeks for law enforcement to unravel and years for historians to analyze. But both Wednesday’s insurrection and the larger climate of political violence, intimidation and destruction that has in recent years become accepted and even encouraged, including by swaths of elite opinion, stem in large part from a diminishment in the role of ideas, words and values in our public discourse.
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