Strife and polarization are the legacy of the January 6th insurrection
More than two thousand of President Trump’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, to stop Congress from certifying the electoral votes of the 2020 presidential election. Seven people died in the riot, and four Capitol Police officers committed suicide in subsequent months. Repairing the Capitol building cost approximately $3 million, according to the Department of Justice. The January 6th insurrection should have unified Democrats and Republicans in shock and in opposition to political violence. Five years later, though, disagreements over the purpose and historical significance of the January 6th insurrection have instead intensified political polarization. For Trump’s supporters, it has fueled conspiracies and normalized violence against the president’s critics.
Interpretation of January 6th, and how its events should be handled, was controversial from the beginning and has become even more so in the last five years. Initially, Democrats and Republicans held diverging perspectives on the events of January 6, but the margin was relatively narrow. In a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center just nine days after the insurrection, 21% of interviewed Democrats and 5% of Republicans blamed Trump for the riots; 1% of Democrats and 17% of Republicans doubted that Trump supporters participated in the insurrection, and 1% of Democrats and 10% of Republicans blamed Democrats for the attempted coup.
Conspiracy theories thrive when interpretation is contested, however, and Trump capitalized on Americans’ debate over the day’s events. Despite urging January 6th protesters to march to the capital and “fight like hell” minutes before the attack, Trump continues to claim that the insurrection was instigated by an FBI conspiracy. Right-wing politicians and journalists also spread conspiracy theories, blaming the Black Lives Matter movement and Antifa for the violence on January 6th. These alternate explanations were rapidly embraced by right-wing supporters, thanks to confirmation bias, political expediency, and Fox News echo chambers.
These differences in opinion about January 6th’s historical significance grew in the months following the insurrection, especially when rioters were held to account. In March 2021, 50% of surveyed Republicans and 89% of surveyed Democrats said that the rioters should be prosecuted; by September, only 27% of Republicans supported the prosecution. Five years later, party stances have become even more extreme: January 6th rioters and their supporters now demand that their prosecutors be arrested and they themselves be hailed as martyrs, while the majority of Democrats see the event as treasonous. In an already polarized country, the January 6th insurrection continues to drive a wedge between Democrats and Republicans.
The other critical legacy of January 6 is Trump’s tacit approval of violence against political adversaries. As soon as he was sworn in, Trump used the history of January 6th to make this stance clear. Calling the mob a group of “great patriots,” he pardoned nearly all of the 1,500 convicted rioters on his first day in office, including the 170 convicted for using deadly weapons against law enforcement officers. He also commuted the sentences of 14 defendants, some of them known members of extremist groups such as the far-right Oath Keepers and the white-supremacist Proud Boys. Trump has since continued to excuse perpetrators of violent crime: after the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by aggressive ICE agents, for example, Trump blamed both victims for provoking agents rather than holding government officials accountable for the deaths of innocents. Criminals know they can walk free without fear of retribution, as long as they vocally support Trump, because of the example the president set after January 6th. The events of January 6th were unprecedented, unconstitutional, and unresolved. Under a different president in a different era, the January 6th insurrection would have united members of Congress and horrified Americans across the political spectrum. Instead, five years later, it serves as a dark reminder of the polarization and violence now infecting the country.
