A Fatal Convergence: What Led to the Storming of the U.S. Capitol

“They persuaded 138 Republican members of Congress to vote against the certification of Pennsylvania’s electoral votes, the most significant demonstration of no confidence in American democracy since the secession of the Confederate states.”

Voltaire warned readers of his 1765 work Questions on Miracles: “Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit atrocities.” On January 6th, as an angry mob stormed the United States Capitol to prevent the results of the presidential election from being certified, the iconoclastic French philosopher was looking remarkably prescient. The assault on Congress was shocking, but it was not a bolt of lightning from a clear blue sky. In this article, I will argue that it was the result of the convergence of two long-running trends: declining confidence in the integrity of political systems and a deepening skepticism of authoritative sources of information. We can see these developing across the West; however, for reasons I will go into, both trends are further along in the United States.

Declining Confidence in American Democracy

For American elections to be contentious is nothing new. To begin with, the stakes in American presidential elections are sky-high. The President of the United States is the most powerful and influential person in the world and is extremely difficult to remove once in office. In the parliamentary system used in most of Europe, the Commonwealth, and Japan, a government can be removed or forced to submit to another election by a no-confidence vote, and close elections often lead to coalitions or power-sharing arrangements. In contrast, an American president who wins by a single vote is just as secure as one who wins in a landslide (France also has a presidential system, but the President must share power with a cabinet that answers to the National Assembly. Furthermore, the President is elected by national popular vote, and none of the Fifth Republic’s presidential elections have been particularly close). If a Dane finds himself saddled with a Prime Minister he despises, he can take comfort knowing that the Prime Minister is not his head of state (that would be Queen Margrethe II). A Prime Minister there might fall from power at any time and would not be able to trash the world in the meantime. Not so for the President of the United States.

The United States is also unique among Western democracies in having a patchwork of state and local elected officials conduct its elections rather than a national, non-partisan electoral commission. The American electoral system is an orchestra without a conductor, and it reflects the American preference for decentralization over centralization and election over appointment. The United States is also unique in its partly-elected judiciary, which strikes non-Americans as bizarre. This fact has almost certainly fed into the culture of litigating election results, which is also unusual by world standards. In the United Kingdom, for example, the major parties have long had a gentleman’s agreement against taking each other to court over election results.