America’s historic moment took place two months ago – not last night

What is being undervalued is the entirely decisive rejection of Donald Trump at the ballot box by what is still a great country

Supporters of Donald Trump broke into the US Capitol on Wednesday (Getty)

Any 14-year-old with a vague interest in history knows that revolutions tend to begin with some kind of invasion of the seat of power, perhaps, but not always, willed on by some kind of strongman leader.

That such scenes should unfold on American primetime television is for this precise reason. They were scripted as such by an outgoing president, who is every inch that 14-year-old, and who has always understood politics as no more than a reality TV show put on for the 24-hour news channels.

Trumpism thrives on the fear and panic it spreads. American proto-fascism feeds on the chemically addictive tsunami of terror and outrage that accompanies its actions, expressed through the information architecture of social media that is necessarily overly simplistic and which prizes the overblown and the apocalyptic above all else.

A mob descends upon the Capitol, breaks through an underwhelming security presence, then finds itself short on ideas about what it wants to do beyond taking a few selfies, and we are invited to believe that it’s October 1917 in Washington DC.

Everything about Donald Trump invites comparisons with the 1930s. We’re reminded that all demagogues are laughed at until it’s too late. That their ridiculousness is one of the greatest weapons.

In the febrile rush to say something, anything, the most sensationalist, most shocking observation is usually the safest. Grave historical analogies are easy to deploy, they are always imperfect and they are rarely of any benefit to anyone. If you laugh at Trump, well, you can expect to be told that they laughed at Mussolini until it was too late. That dark times don’t announce their arrival, the lights just flicker out one by one. The room’s the same but at some point everything changed.

But should it really be so hard to cling to the actual reality of the days in which we live? That this is not the 1930s. That, yes, what happened in Washington DC on Wednesday night is the grim consequence of the legitimate election of a president, four years ago, whose far-right credentials were not taken seriously enough. But also that four years later, he has lost.

The awful events in the Capitol building have quite rightly prompted a backlash against the politicians and pundits who indulged Donald Trump four years ago, when all that he stood for was clear enough to see.

Piers Morgan, for example, has reestablished himself as someone of the liberal centre-left, through his daily Covid-19 related mauling of Tory cabinet ministers. But Morgan still spent a year or so writing sycophantic pieces about the reality TV star president who used to call him “the champ”, spent almost a full year with his Twitter profile picture being an adoring one of him and Trump together. When he interviewed him, he gave him an Arsenal shirt. All these things happened long after the president had called for a complete ban on Muslims entering the United States. He was already long beyond the pale from day one.

But could it be that what is happening now, today, this week, is a similar underestimation? That what is being undervalued and not taken seriously enough is the entirely decisive rejection of proto-fascism by what is still a great country?

Trump, we are told, is bunkered down in the White House raging against the dying of the light. But the light isn’t dying, it’s coming back on, and Trump’s Truman Show-style coup for the Fox News massive is not as powerful as its opponents seemed determined to fear.

This is not to say there are not extreme causes for concern. The more illuminating avenue of interrogation in the future will be whether the Republican Party, with or without Donald Trump, has decided it can no longer win elections by conventional means, and that its only route to power is at the expense of democracy.

Certainly, that is what is happening now, because Donald Trump has lost an election by miles, and therefore tyrannical routes are the only ones that are open to him.

And one of the eternal problems in representative democracies is that a losing candidate tends to leave a fresh stench in the lift as he walks out of it. The Parliamentary Labour Party is generously studded with clueless Corbynista disciples who find themselves short of a messiah. America’s legislature, too, is full of wild-eyed Trumpites, so sure of their duty to “Make America Great Again” that it transcends democratic norms.

We must consider the possibility that Trump will turn out to have been America’s faintly ridiculous General D’Annunzio. That the next guy won’t be quite such a fool.  

But now is not forever. Now scarcely makes it to the medium term. To those making bold predictions about what the world will look like in four years, there is a sharp answer. Take a look at the four just gone.

What is certainly true is that the waves of fear and panic and outrage Trump’s actions send through his opponents are a potent force that he has always used to his advantage. And these are problems that do not have easy answers. Social media, in its current form, is a mortal threat to the way in which modern democracies function. But again, last night, Twitter shut down Donald Trump’s account, albeit temporarily. Things do not always have to get worse. It is distinctly possible rock bottom has already been passed.  

“We have nothing to fear but fear itself,” somebody once said, back in the 1930s, as it happens, and standing in a spot that was yesterday occupied by a shirtless man in horns, wearing the mark of a professional online conspiracy theory outlet. Those words are as true now as they were then.

There is absolutely no reason that America and its admirers shouldn’t cling to Tuesday 3 November 2020, instead of Wednesday 6 January 2021, as a day in which history really did change.