But because Democrats — and the committee’s few cooperating Republican members — seem determined to conduct a sensible inquiry, the hearings ultimately promise an anticlimax. They will serve as a great font of running commentary on Twitter for a few days, among the relatively few users who regularly tweet about politics. They seem unlikely to penetrate Facebook’s impenetrable algorithm. Like everyone over the age of 30, I live in psychic terror of whatever kind of inscrutable TikToks it will produce. The cable stations will sort along ideological lines; the big national newspapers will strive for balance, although plenty of them will write about grave threats to democracy.

What Democratic leaders fail to appreciate is that our society seems to be reverting to the factional, regional and violent version of America that existed before television — during a long 19th century from which we awoke only briefly and imperfectly. The calls to execute the vice president of the United States, which the president allegedly heard and seemed to acknowledge, have proved insufficient to arouse the conservative movement and the Republican Party’s remaining scruples. A terrifying historical counterfactual is that the only thing that might have gotten enough of the G.O.P. on board to matter would have been if the rioters had actually gone through with it, and even then, it’s hard to be sure.