Division is being fostered by social media ("rage = engagement") and the news media through articles such as this. People lean center and are tired of the fringes.
If both parties got rid of the extreme elements, everything would be boring again.
They did indeed! However, the results were mostly just pathetic. The unfortunate thing is that the President himself tried to play along with it, and best chance for significant escalation would be if the President manages to be re-elected in three years' time — which is not the most likely outcome but is still actually distressingly credible — and does more to lay the groundwork during his term in office.
It was closer to working than you'd think. It looks pathetic until it works.
> The unfortunate thing is that the President himself tried to play along with it
That's generous wording.
But disrupting the continuity of government would take a good deal more than that. A real, non-sad coup attempt would have sent the military in there to support the crazies, or at the very least, a quasi-organized group of armed men who could set up some defensible position. Instead we saw mostly maniacs looting the speaker's podium.
> That's generous wording.
If you're assessing his intentions, yes, but while his act of "oh look I'm doing plausible deniability, I'm not organzing any coup" was weak, so was any organization he actually did. The risk is that next time people might learn from these mistakes.
(The other risk is a counter-coup crackdown like Turkey, which cracks down on the opposition and purges them from both the public and private sphere, as enemies of the state. Our due-process is still a little too strong for that to work right now, fortunately, and any attempts to that end that may exist are pretty marginal.)
That's not the only way to succeed. Occupying the Capitol alone would indeed not have done anything.
If they had managed to prevent the certification of the vote, however, and thrown the question to the House, that's success. (unlike usual votes, the one for this is one-vote-per-state in the House, yes US democracy is organized fucking cray-cray).
The coup was pathetic, but what would have happened if the riot had delayed the presidential election being certified?
John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry helped cause the American civil war two years later. He and most of his raiders were quickly caught and executed. But the trial turned Brown into a martyr in the north and motivated the South to form the Confederacy.
I think Brown's raid was a moral action, and the Jan 6th coup was an attack on American democracy. I'm not very confident that the justice system will hold the planners accountable, or that it just did short term damage to our democracy.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/andrewsolender/2021/09/15/poll-...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/24/republicans-...
https://www.axios.com/axios-ipsos-poll-republicans-lose-trus...
Social media and "the news media" may be part of our issues, but they're not the whole of them.
"United we stand, divided we fall", and the goal of most media rhetoric is to divide. Don't trust the "it was a coup" rhetoric. Dig in, take a look at the footage of what happened at the capitol. Don't take the media's word for it.
They wanted to throw it back to the states, have them do more "review" or give different electors.
If nobody can convincingly be said to have the required number of electoral votes, the US House decides, with each state getting one vote.
> They left quickly and peacefully when asked
Oh? Then what is anyone being charged with and convicted for exactly?
They finally left vaguely once Trump asked, because he was forced into it, it hadn't worked, and public pressure had risen.
Importantly, there are very few being charged with anything. Not everyone, but a very few people.
Also note the presence of undercover FBI on premises as members of alt-right groups [0].
[0] https://republicandaily.com/2021/07/confirmed-undercover-age... <-- The editorial is left to the end of the summary of news events. I really, really wish we could go back to a world of just reporting and not editorializing.
I don't get what the rest of your comment is about, you'll have to spell it out for me. The feds _should_ be targetting these far-right extremists. They've shown themselves to be violent threats to society and democracy.
You are at _best_ completely misinformed.
They had a zero percent chance of taking over the government. Do you seriously think that a bunch Q-cultists that didn't even fire a single shot could take over the US government?
What they did was not OK, but it's clearly not what you are making it out to be.
Those people ARE facing repercussions. Many of them are facing prosecution. We should avoid this type of partisan rhetoric. I know it's a nice talking point to call it a coup and all and helps get clicks, but let's look at things as they actually happened.
The system IS working (these folks are going to court) and hyperbole only leads to more division.
The "system" is doing a poor job so far of punishing anyone but the useful idiots.
"Once that idea takes hold, it has a force of its own. The demagogues warn that the other side is mobilizing. They are coming for us. Not only do we have to defend ourselves, but we have to deny them the advantage of making the first move. The logic of the preemptive strike sets in: Do it to them before they do it to you." [1] (in the context of the N Ireland troubles.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/01/america...
I don’t agree neither disagree with the article, but that’s a big “if”.
It would be great if we could just avoid the war part and just split. As a progressive I feel like I have no need to ever go to a conservative state and I’m sure conservatives feel the same way. Let them define the laws they want.
This is the key isn't it? Do we observe anything happening on this end recently? What we observed in the last decades, is the opposite.