Recalling the day of Jan. 6 at the Capitol
NEW YORK — Beneath a pale winter light and the glare of television cameras, it seemed hard not to see the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol riot for what it was. The violent storming of the Capitol by Donald Trump supporters bent on upending the election of Joe Biden was as clear as day: democracy under siege, live-streamed in real time.
Yet a year later, there is far from national consensus.
A Quinnipiac poll found that 93% of Democrats considered it an attack on the government, but only 29% of Republicans did. In a recent CBS-YouGov poll, 85% of Democrats called the riot an “insurrection” while only 21% of GOP voters did. A poll by The Associated Press and NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that about 4 in 10 Republicans recall the attack as violent, while 9 in 10 Democrats do.
Such a disparity in memory may be inevitable in our hyper-polarized politics, but it’s striking given the stark clarity of Jan. 6 at the time and in its immediate aftermath.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., said then that “the president bears responsibility” for the attacks.
Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., then the majority leader, said: “They tried to disrupt our democracy. They failed.”
“We keep using terms like post-factual, but it almost feels like there’s this national psychosis or amnesia about what happened a year ago,” said Charles Sykes, the former conservative Wisconsin radio host and founder of the website The Bulwark.
“It’s not just that we’re two nations. It’s as if we live on two different reality planets when it comes to the memory of Jan. 6,” Sykes said.
Nations remember the way people do: imperfectly. Neuroscientist Lisa Genova, author of “Remember: The Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting,” describes how even the most searing memories are edited each time they’re revisited. An original memory is replaced with a 2.0 version, a 3.0 version and beyond.
“Outside influences can sneak in every time we revisit and recall a memory for what happened. So for these collective memories, we have a lot of chances to revisit them,” said Genova. “Depending on your political point of view, the news channels you watch, what this meant to you, this memory is going to have a different slant based on the story that you tell yourself.”
Alexander Keyssar, a professor of history and social policy at Harvard and author of “Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College?”, believes a full-fledged investigative commission, like the one that followed the Sept. 11 attacks, might have fostered more national consensus on Jan. 6. In May, Senate Republicans used their filibuster power to block the creation of such a commission. (A House committee is to soon make public some of the findings from its six-month investigation.)
To tell the story of Jan. 6, the Capitol Historical Society is creating an oral history. Some of the stories are particularly haunting for the society’s president, Jane L. Campbell.
“When people say ‘Oh, it’s never been this bad,’ well, we did have a civil war. That was bad. That was truly bad,” Campbell said. “But during the Civil War, Lincoln made a decision to finish the dome of the Capitol. We tell that story a hundred times over.”
Meanwhile, the Capitol remains closed to the public. Only those with an appointment may enter.
