The conventional claim would be that the January 6 attack on the Capitol was an attack on democracy itself, a trespass upon the sacred precincts of self-government. But how can liberals who have everywhere else demolished traditional forms of sanctity and reverence believe that Congress, of all things, will be spared from contempt? Liberals have taught Americans to disbelieve in God and to view everyone from the nation’s Founding Fathers to the greatest explorers and military commanders as mostly bad men — bad in part simply because they are men: white men, straight men, Christian men, biological men. Yet traditional femininity receives no more respect. Having obliterated veneration and awe in everything else, how can our liberal Jacobins believe that the Capitol building or hoary civic pieties about the work of Congress will be esteemed any more? You cannot complain if a country that people like you have seeded with unbelief turns out to be a country that doesn’t believe in your totems, either. If George Washington must come down, on what grounds can Washington as we know it today still stand?

No — if Americans should hate their ancestors, there’s no reason they should love the political institutions their ancestors produced. In other contexts, progressives are willing to say so: they would happily get rid of the Senate — it’s ‘undemocratic’, you see — as well as the Electoral College, and that’s just for a start. But still, if nothing else is inviolable, isn’t an election itself, the will of the people (properly managed, of course), so sacred that any attempt to interfere with it must be met with the harshest response? The January 6 rioters certainly thought so: they stormed the Capitol because they firmly believed the election had been stolen. They believed they were resisting an insurrection, not perpetrating one.