I guess the answer is... calm down? A few hundred (even heavily armed) people do not stand a chance changing the results of the election, or almost anything in the US.
The event was for show. Although, unfortunately, one of them died. But it should remain that way and there is no reason to escalate further. (I guess we already have precedents of how escalation usually lead to innocent deaths).
This is not the issue here. It is not even that the outgoing president very deliberately provoked the attack, as well as a much wider opposition to the democratic process. The biggest problem is that the president was actively supported, in his provocation, by more than a few US senators, along with elected officials of several states (some of whom are plausible presidential candidates themselves.)
There is little doubt that if any of the extra-legal or simply bogus attempts to overthrow the election had succeeded, these senators, and most likely the republican party as a whole, would have been happy to go along with that act, in what would, in reality, have been a coup d'état.
Even if the supreme court put a stop to it - which is not a certainty - much damage would have been done.
You could describe the 2000 election as a successful bogus attempt to overthrow an election. Has America already had a coup d'etat?
Sure, I'm not proposing to escalate and it's wonderful that it is over with no real effects. But the security handling was atrocious, and the results would have been much worse if the mob were only slightly more organized and intent on bloodshed.
I'm not claiming that they would have succeeded to actually install Donald Trump for a second term. But I do believe that they could have forced a mock result to eb proclaimed on the senate floor, creating a much larger problem for the future and giving much more power to their narrative.
Also, note that the quote from me was supposed to reinforce the idea that there were compelling reasons for the police to take their presence as a serious threat. These weren't protesters chanting to save the whales, they were protesters asking for the election to be overturned (even if I agree with you that they had no real chance of achieving this goal).
I admit to being a little shocked at the glibness of this statement. As a non-USian, I see a profound shock among other thoughtful non-USians that it has come to this. Regardless of political affiliation, I believe most honest, ordinary non-USians have held in high regard the robustness of the American democratic system and its resilience to the wholesale corruption that plagues many other countries. The democratic ideal, and America as exemplar, has always been held in lofty regard. However, I’m more certain than ever that this ideal has now been firmly relegated to a historical oddity. A 200 year blip in the record of human governance, with a forthcoming return to mean. Watching this slow motion disaster unfold has mad me very, very sad.
Pleasantly surprised that the death toll was only four, of which only one was shot; much better than the regular death toll of single mass shooter incidents.
... no, I probably shouldn't joke about this, however dark, but if there's one thing that last year has made clear is that death tolls barely move the needle politically and that symbols stick in people's heads and effect real change. Even if the symbols aren't tied to underlying reality. The revenge of Baudrillard.
https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20201210/covid-19-deaths-sur...
The symbolism of protestors in the capitol was "shocking" upthread. I worry that next month we'll have forgotten about it because something worse will have happened. We've already moved on from the guy who blew up a telephone exchange, and the other occupations of state capitols, and those guys who tried to kidnap a state governor despite being infiltrated by the FBI.
(For the avoidance of doubt, I am with John Donne that anyone's death diminishes us, but avoidable and preventable deaths doubly so, which is why I'm in favour of responsible politics and the politicisation of preventable deaths)
Whole countries can freak out about the disappearance of one child or a car accident caused by some random intoxicated person and then everybody talks about their names, there are political leaders chiming in etc. Whole countries can come together to donate millions for the treatment of a rare disease of a single child. It's kinda random.
Humans are not calibrated to care about actual stats, just stories. A good story of one person can weigh more than a boring story of millions.
It's all theater, nothing more, whichever party wins... It's circus.
You're absolutely right that the symbolic effect is huge and will likely be long-lasting - both inside the US and outside.
Where are you from, how old are you? Watching too many Hollywood hero movies?
I think the above attitude is less common outside the US than within. It's usually Americans who view themselves as through the lens of American exceptionalism, the rightful police of the world, just bringing democracy everywhere out of altruism and a care for people everywhere etc.
In Europe, the US is definitely seen in a more ambivalent light with lots of corruption etc.
Aren't you shocked to see thousands of cars burned in France over NYE? About seeing the American riots last summer?
It's blown out of proportion. This Trumpist crowd was disorganized. They didn't have a plan, didn't have leaders, didn't have demands or any credible way to win. Life goes on.
There is no way to make Trump win this way and actually get obedience from the institutions of the country. They would just not recognize Trump, even if somehow senators, under duress, said he won.
It was 0 rods of the 7. Power is not in the buildings. It's in the network of interests of powerful people in the background across the country.
France has famously unstable politics, which is why they are on their fifth Republic. No one was surprised to see something like BLM because the US has long-running problems with racism. But this? This was new.
> the American democratic system and its resilience
because there was a half-hearted attempt at a coup, and it failed miserably, even when indirectly backed by the current president.
They (some) did have guns on them, along with knives, restraints, bombs (allegedly) and probably other weapons hidden on their person.
It was for show, but the police allowed it to go way too far. Not to mention, where was all the surveillance power of the NSA to provide advance warning?
The disturbing part of what happened yesterday was not that a bunch of assholes formed a mob to disrupt Congress. The disturbing part is that they were obviously allowed to do so.
To extend the comparison, the CIA is roughly the USA’a MI6 and the NSA is very roughly equivalent to the GCHQ but not exactly as the NSA are not meant to spy domestically while the GCHQ don’t have that explicit limitation.
The point is that the US federal government has a huge intelligence organization, with a huge amount of resources invested in dragnet data collection and surveillance on anyone and everyone.
The specific 3-letter organization that is technically supposed to be looking at and taking action based on that data isn't that relevant.
It wasn't a protest of a bill, or a protest for a particular legislative action. It was a protest against the election of the President itself - against all evidence, all facts, and all testimony from just about every official except the President, who egged this on.
I didn't want to see heads rolling, but I was shocked at how delicately they were handled - cops even let them through barricades.
Contrast this with left-wing protesters and their treatment by cops, and you see a much different picture, of people walking or sitting down getting pepper sprayed, or 70-something men getting shoved to the ground in a public square by a team of armored officers.
There are a number of reasons to be angry at this stunt, and a number of conclusions to draw from it. First thing is first, if we had any kind of collective conscience, Trump would be impeached today.
Rioters inflamed by years of Trump's gross lies storm the Capitol, demanding to overturn the results of the election, four die, and your response is, "Calm down"?
What good would come of that?
The right thing to do here is to break the feedback loop and take some energy out of the system.
Breaking the loop requires a deterrent, not only verbal "we will not stand for this".
It’s over let’s move on.
Literally shaking my head. I just can't fathom how this is so unremarkable to you.
Personally I'm exhausted at trying to "score" the actions of two teams when in fact I really don't want either team to win. It has become an absurd attempt to decide which team is less awful while each side fools itself into thinking it exclusively represents political virtue.
I'm hoping that events don't escalate further and that perhaps there is some opportunity for the emergence of some alternate political parties and more thoughtful political leadership in order to let the existing parties fade into history.
[0] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-or...