On Wednesday, Trumpist demonstrators crossed the line into insurrection. Line is not just a metaphor: one of the great democratic features of Washington is that it offers a vast physical space for people to voice protest, but also clear boundaries of where pressure on representatives must stop. The “March on Washington” is nowhere mentioned in the constitution, and yet it’s a great American political institution. But it is about citizens converging on their capital to contest what their representatives are doing, not to put themselves in their place and usurp power.
This is what Trump incited his far-right movement to do – though, in true Trump-style, he was too lazy to join his own “March to Save America” and instead enjoyed it as a TV spectacle. His marchers similarly seemed often more interested in selfies than delivering a political message; one, when exiting the Capitol, with a police officer politely holding the door, announced it was time for a beer. Those engaged in what some observers have called a beer-belly putsch didn’t just desecrate one of the world’s great temples of democracy; they also dishonored the tradition of political marches.
It would be fundamentally wrong, if the result of Wednesday’s full-frontal attack on one of the three branches of government were simply calls for more security and shielding politicians more effectively from citizens. It’s perfectly fine for people to come close and put pressure on elected representatives. The world’s greatest living political philosopher, Jürgen Habermas, even uses the term “siege” in his seminal democratic theory: civil society, he says, should lay siege to parliament and ensure that ideas and demands from the public get heard inside the political system. What’s more, according to Habermas, it’s fine if society is characterized by a “wild cacophony”; those afraid of shouts and other supposed forms of incivility probably are afraid of mass democracy as such.
It took many struggles for citizens to get anywhere physically close to what Thomas Jefferson described as a “natural aristocracy”, which refers to the selection of the best and the brightest through elections. There were already social justice marches on DC in the late 19th century; when marchers eventually got to the capital, they were promptly arrested. The whole area around the Hill was verboten for a long time, which is one reason MLK ended the 1963 March for Jobs and Freedom in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Only after a court decision in the early 1970s were citizens allowed close to Congress; members of the latter had argued to the last that their work was similar to what goes on in a library and that noisy, unruly citizens would disturb contemplation of the public good.
There is something undemocratic about parliaments that do not let the people come anywhere close. Norman Foster’s remodeling of the Reichstag in Berlin has been celebrated for its glass dome, through which citizens can watch what their representatives are doing further below (they can’t hear what they’re saying). It’s a nice symbol: the sovereign is placed above the deputies. But the reality is that large areas around the German parliament cannot be used for demonstrations. This tendency to keep the people at bay was only reinforced when, last August, dozens of demonstrators discontented with Merkel’s Covid-19 policies stormed the steps of the Reichstag (three policemen wielding nothing but sticks stopped them from getting inside).
Demonstrations can signal what US civil rights leaders called the sheer “significance of our numbers”. One of the noticeable facts about the Trumpist insurrection was the un-impressive numbers (of course, here things came full circle with the rather under-attended inauguration in 2017). What’s more, there was no clear main message, other than the perverse celebration of the fact that everyone’s a victim (a rhetoric contrasting markedly with conduct inside the Capitol: entitled white males patronizing the police and claiming “this is our House”).
It is ideal to have what the British scholar John Parkinson has described as large, non-landscaped space in front of a representative assembly (larger and more prominent than, for instance, the Orwellian-sounding “authorised assembly area” close to parliament in Canberra). Self-selected protesters can contest the claim of representatives to act for the people; but representatives in turn may argue that protesters themselves are not representative. This democratic dynamic – with nobody ever having a final say, with every decision subject to revision after new elections – is even, according to another scholar, perfectly symbolized in a less prominent feature of the DC landscape: the ever-changing “reflecting pool” in which we always see different faces.
Still, there’s a difference between those outside and inside the Capitol: only the latter have been chosen in democratic procedures. Hence, while a siege is legitimate and even desirable in a democracy, it must never succeed. This is what the hobby soldiers and Maga groupies (not to speak of the neo-Nazis) failed to see; they have every right to resent Biden, but no right to replace him.
It’s fundamentally wrong, then, to call them mere “electoral protesters”, as Fox News did. But neither were they primarily rioters or looters; footage from inside the building recorded apparent ringleaders admonishing people “don’t touch anything” (a warning that wasn’t always heeded – though, as we learned, when white people start looting, there starts no shooting). It also wasn’t a matter of un-American activities (according to Ben Sasse, “Americans aren’t French revolutionaries taking to the barricades”; apparently the senator, who holds a PhD in American history from Yale, missed some bits in the 18th century). Rather, it was a far-right, deeply anti-democratic crowd (with touristic and carnivalesque side interests) who took marching orders from the victim-in-chief, a man who also feels entitled to the House he’s in, though, fortunately, not for much longer.
Jan-Werner Müller is a professor at Princeton and currently also a fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study in Berlin. Democracy Rules is forthcoming from Farrar Straus & Giroux and Penguin