We all know one or more people who fully sympathize with the Capital rioters. We are all in the spotlight to lend a hand in the healing from this episode and the recovery of our body politic while at the same time protecting and defending our society from future like episodes. We have known this since 2016 but the severity of the stakes have just been made suddenly certain rather than speculative like they have been up until now.
Let's try to get into the heads of those people who felt justified in invading the Capitol and threatening the lives of the Vice-President and members of Congress. As a Democrat imagine if you will, how 2016 would have felt if any of the narrow-margin states that gave the Electoral College to Trump had voting irregularities such that the vote count had been in serious question. Granted, the Democrats actually have a precedent for this with Bush v. Gore. We also have a record of how Democrats handled it. They clearly demonstrated that the Left respects the rule of law and democratic norms over their personal desire to win. Democrats acquiesced to the somewhat specious Supreme Court decision to give the Presidency to George Bush. Note that the Court explicitly stated that the decision was not intended to set any precedent. (One could argue that they were operating outside of their authority to decide any case that couldn't be relied upon to set judicial precedent.)
In clear contrast, the more recent events make it clear that those in the Trump cult have been conditioned to believe these norms don't apply if they hinder their side from winning. (You can be sure they are much more supportive of them when they work in their favor.) With the Bush v Gore precedent notwithstanding, they have been conditioned to believe that the Left such an evil threat that violence is not only justified but possibly required.
Stay with me here. We are used to calling on protests to be disciplined when it comes to violence because of the appreciation we hold for the work of Rev. Martin Luther King and those who struggled with him. In the deep story of the Right, the success of King and Civil Rights is a lost battle (much like the Civil War itself). It makes perfect sense that Confederate icons and flags have been adopted by them. They are still fighting that war. Their God-given privilege of having someone to look down upon no matter how bad their own life gets is essential to their understanding of the social order. In the conservative mindset, social order is a zero-sum game. If someone rises, then it is a given that someone else must fall. If someone different than them gains a right, then it is axiomatic that someone like them must lose a right. It's also a given that one rises in the social hierarchy by dent of effective competition, by doing their jobs better than those who don't rise. Capitalism is an absolute meritocracy, and so forth. Under this mindset, lower classes (other than themselves) are low not because of structural discrimination but because of poor performance. When it appears that political forces are placing less-qualified and less-capable "other" people ahead of them in the cosmic hierarchy (remember, it's a zero-sum set), they experience a profound sense of grievance. And that feeling of grievance is what the Trump cult has exploited and fanned.
If we are to engage in the work of healing our body politic, we need to engage with this clear-eyed understanding of how the oppositions feels and thinks. (More exploration of this will be coming.)
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