On January 6th, 2021, our Capitol was breached by a group of individuals claiming “the people’s” house for their own. It is a day that will be written into our national history as one of tremendous significance, but just what we say about it remains to be seen. American flags have been unfurled around the world in the ensuing days as a symbol of solidarity with something that goes to the heart, not just of American idealism, but human idealism. If America is a “city on a hill,” if we are a beacon to the world with something enduring and unique to offer the broader human narrative, that light consists of this: a radical proclamation of shared self-governance.

Not “me the people,” but “we the people.”

Those who overran the Capitol — breaking windows, rifling through desks, stealing things and spouting violent rhetoric — demonstrated a gross misapprehension of the nature, goal and structure of the American ideal. Citizen self-rule. What does that mean? What is the scope and basic nature of the “rights” we as Americans are so fond of wielding? And what does the power — and vulnerability — of our republic derive from?

The answer to all these questions can be summed up in two words: sacred compact.

We formed a compact, at our nation’s founding, a compact that we would surrender our individual authority, our personal or tribal agendas, to institutions we the people had formed to act on our joint behalf, and for our mutual benefit — and, most importantly, that this institutional structure would be sacrosanct.

The tragic irony is that those who stormed the Capitol were desecrating the very ideal they reportedly sought to affirm. They had been sold a coup, dressed up as a revolution.

How did they get there?

Four years of relentless assault on the norms that underlie our compact, and the institutions formed to embody it, are part of the answer. Delegitimizing our fourth, unofficial branch of government, a free press, Donald Trump performed the first act of removing his constituency from the common weal. Having secured his place at the center of his micro-universe, he demolished norm after norm — simply by exhibiting a complete absence of shame over the violation of values that were hitherto part of our national DNA. The message to his base was clear: there is nothing to respect here. You too can run ram-shod over whatever appears to get in your way. Civility, decency and decorum were branded hypocrisy . Truth became strategy and honesty was rendered irrelevant. Cooperation. Mutual benefit. Shared intent. All these were fictitious remnants of some status quo styled as the bankrupt ethos of the “liberal elite.”

Having divided his base from the national discourse, he now divided then from their fellow Americans, reframing their existential threat in the simplest of terms: the Dems.

None of that is news. That’s all been said. What is less obvious about the road to the Capitol building is that it was laid well before Donald Trump even announced his candidacy. It began with an inversion of our most basic idea: that the constitution was designed to protect us from government, rather than to protect us from tyranny through the usurpation of it. Our own agent became the target in this revised narrative, and in one awful, confused stroke of irony, we — as attackers of our government — became the tyrants, threatening the destruction of that which we pledged to protect.

Do we laugh, or do we cry?

Instituted, by “the people,” not as a master but as a necessary agent, our government was designed to withstand efforts to subvert the common will. The constitution was drafted to ensure that its functioning was bounded and controlled by this common will — and this insurance had to be structural, self-regulatory. Separation of powers, checks and balances, all these elements ensured that the agent would not usurp the principal. But that was not because the government itself was the threat. The government, as the mechanism that executed the common will, was to be protected from threat. What the founders never envisioned was the failure of basic norms that were essential to the survival of the compact — the implicit understanding of what was and was not okay. These norms were taken for granted, implicit in the rhetoric itself. It was understood.

Or so we thought.

Flash forward to 2021. The idea of government as enemy, rather than that which must be protected from corruption or harm, has come to flower in the occupation of a building deemed now to be, not a temple of the sacred compact, but a symbol of usurped, personal will.

In 2000, under a cloud of hanging chads, Al Gore conceded the presidential election. In 2016, amid implications of meddling by a foreign power, Hilary Clinton conceded. They did this because they understood that the norms that underlie our processes are more important even than the processes themselves. This may seem like a jaded formulation, but it is in fact the genius, and the central norm, that has ensured a far greater justice and stability. Faith in the electoral process is essential to enfranchisement. Once faith is shattered, the heart of the union dies.

Does that mean we don’t work for justice, fairness and equality in our electoral process? Does that mean we ignore all the ways in which the common good is subverted for personal or financial gain? Of course not. We work tirelessly toward the fulfillment of that promise, because democracy is an orientation, a commitment, not a destination. But we understand that the invisible structures that bind us are the blood and bone of our union — we must remain “we the people,” even — and especially — when that norm has been shattered for our brethren.

This, I think, is the most important lesson to be drawn from that infamous day — the recognition that the act itself revealed a far more dangerous misapprehension, and that unless the norms that bind us are mended — or reinvented — we will not vindicate the ideal that (if the flags flying over foreign soil are any indication) is cherished globally. We must know what matters if we are to protect it; we must remind each other, educate each other; we must learn, remember, and grow.

We the people, not me the people. America’s best idea.

photo source: US Airforce, public domain