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Comment by olliej | Hacker News Reader

I suspect we aren’t, but at the same time a bunch of republicans did try to use force to interrupt the peaceful transition of power that was meant to be a defining characteristic of the United States.

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The defining characteristic of the United States is that it didn't work.

The SYSTEM (the US Republic) worked. The system is resilient by design and performed as expected to deliver the appropriate output on the input it was given.

As people in finance are fond of saying, past performance is no guarantee of future results. Did it not work for any identifiable reason that makes us immune, or due to non-replicable acts of bravery on one side, incompetence on the other, and good old luck in between? It's not hard to imagine the insurrectionists turning the other way in a hallway and finding Pence, or getting into the rotunda a moment earlier. Or a few election officials in Pennsylvania or Detroit bowing to pressure, allowing the valid election results to be overturned. Republicans are working very hard to make sure that they have people on election boards who will make a different choice next time. So no, I'd say the system just barely worked because of people within it, and can not be counted on to save us again.

There is no deus ex machina. This isn't a movie. People have to work to save democracy.

This. Thank you. So many people believe that we got lucky, or something. It's like they believe good things are fated to happen. That's not how this works. Good people need to prevent the bad things or the bad people win. And these are really, really bad people. In the case of Pennsylvania, Judge Matthew Brann, an extreme right-wing Republican, dismissed the Trump case that attempted to throw out the mail-in ballots, and saved Democracy. Judge Brann loves Democracy more than he loved Trump. But is he still there? Or will someone offer to pay off his debts and his mortgage next time? We are teetering on the edge of the precipice, folks.

This back and forth will continue to escalate into an actual civil war until both sides can come to terms with their misdeeds and meet at the bargaining table before the country is torn apart. The events you are referring to were inspired by violent attacks on the US capitol (as well as every major US city) only months prior.

Which in turn, were inspired by the government murdering citizens in the street. My description or your description or the parent's description may all be oversimplifications/biased/provocatively worded, and, while focusing on whether or not these events were each "justified" and to what degree is a fine exercise, it is also counter-productive to the conversation of coming to terms and meeting at the bargaining table, as you say.

Did you see the presentation Trump's chief of staff had to hand to Congress? The events OP is referring to were nothing less than a failed coup d'état. Diminishing it is only giving an excuse to the perpetrators, distract from their ongoing preparations to stack the system in their favour, and fuel their next try

> nothing less than a failed coup d'état.

No it was not. Go watch that famous YouTube video about the keys to power.

They had nothing, no source of power at all. At the bare minimum they would have needed the military on their side. Or 20 million people. They had neither. (Yah - even with all the people voting for Trump, only a fraction of a fraction were willing to use violence. The overwhelming majority were unhappy, even very vocal, but they accepted the results.)

It was basically a riot. A bunch of idiots making a mess and destroying things. Even if they had "succeeded" they still would not have had any power.

Just because you estimate their chances of success to have been low ( personally i disagree, there are probably enough nutjobs in the military and police forces, and they had non insignificant amount of federal and state political power), doesn't make it something else than a coup d'état. Did they attempt to seize power and overrule the results of an election or didn't they? Their miserable failure at it isn't an excuse.

Trump was still president at the time. Who were they seizing power from?

Your description would make more sense if they had done it after Biden was president, but they didn't.

There's this thing called an "auto-coup". It's where the one currently in power seizes power that he does not legitimately have, in order to avoid handing over power to the one who beat him in an election. Trump either was trying to do that, or came very close to trying (depending on how you draw your lines).

They tried to seize power by overturning the pending confirmation of election results. The legitimacy of Trump was him getting elected, him refusing to let go would be seizing power.

This is what I'm talking about: things will continue to get worse until we drop the "my side is blameless while the other side is literally <your choice of Stalin or Hitler>" charade. What happened was terrible, but months earlier demonstrators tried to force entry into the White House so they could execute a sitting president.

While the fallacy you're describing is an apt description of 90% of political bitterness, it is effectively impossible to force people - even reasonable people who acknowledge the sins of both sides - to ignore the nigh-universal opinion that "one of them is worse". I honestly am not sure how to get around that, especially considering that it's almost certainly true by many metrics, regardless of "which side" it is, since it would be an amazing coincidence for both sides in any context to express goodness and evil in effectively equal amounts. The tendency to take binary sides on a gradient issue is just too strong - even people who see and acknowledge the gradient still effectively choose sides in most conversations.

Edit: It's almost as if you have to let each side feel that they are correct that "the other side" is indeed worse, but also communicate to them that it doesn't matter in the big big picture, and pursuing any manifestation of that opinion is counterproductive.

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