January 6 and the Loaded Dice of American Politics

It is not unbelievable that today marks the fifth anniversary of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. What is striking, five years on, is how familiar it all feels.

The months leading up to January 6, 2021, were not chaotic in the abstract; they were methodical. A sitting president waged a sustained campaign to delegitimize an election he had lost, seeding distrust through rallies, tweets, cable news appearances, court filings, and rhetorical proxies. When Congress moved to certify the electoral count, that same president publicly singled out his vice president as the final obstacle to overturning the result. The message did not instruct violence. It did not need to.

This unfolded amid a global pandemic that had fractured social trust, isolated millions of Americans, and collapsed shared reality itself. Some people mourned loved ones in solitude, while others dismissed the virus as a hoax engineered to destroy a political avatar. Anxiety, grievance, and epistemic confusion were already circulating freely. January 6 did not erupt from nowhere. It arrived on time.

The aftershocks of that moment still define American political life. Despite a bipartisan congressional committee's findings documenting extensive efforts to undermine the peaceful transfer of power, Donald Trump was reelected in 2024. The lesson absorbed by the political system was not repudiation but accommodation. Elite-driven political disorder, once shocking, is now folded into the normal rhythms of American governance.

This was not the first rehearsal.

Disorder as Strategy: From Florida 2000 to January 6

The Brooks Brothers riot during the 2000 election was not a spontaneous outburst of civic passion. It was a coordinated effort by Republican operatives to physically disrupt the recount in Miami-Dade County after Al Gore challenged the results in Florida. Protesters, many of whom were later revealed to be congressional staffers and party insiders, stormed the counting center, banged on doors, intimidated election officials, and succeeded in halting the recount.

That outcome mattered because the disruption worked, and the recount stopped. The Supreme Court soon intervened, and the lesson was clear: procedural chaos, when laundered through respectability and legal ambiguity, could shape political outcomes without consequence.

Twenty years later, the scale was different, but the method remained the same.

January 6 was the Brooks Brothers riot with a mass audience, a digital megaphone, and a president willing to let probability do what he could not lawfully command.

Stochastic Terrorism and the Logic of Probability

This is where the concept of stochastic terrorism, as articulated by Molly Amman and J. Reid Meloy, becomes analytically clarifying rather than rhetorically convenient.

Stochastic terrorism describes a process in which public demonization and threat-laden rhetoric increase the statistical likelihood of violence without issuing direct orders. The term “stochastic” is precise: outcomes are unpredictable at the individual level but increasingly probable at the population level.

Amman and Meloy emphasize that this is not command-and-control radicalization, but atmospheric conditioning. Through linguistic pragmatics and the ways meaning is shaped by repetition, framing, moral implication, and social reward, leaders construct a narrative environment in which violence becomes thinkable, then defensible, and finally inevitable for someone.

Crucially, stochastic terrorism thrives in the gap between moral responsibility and legal culpability. U.S. incitement law requires intent and imminence, while stochastic terrorism operates without either. The speaker does not need to want violence to occur; it is enough to tolerate the risk while continuing to load the dice.

January 6 fits this model with chilling precision. Even if one accepts the claim (generously) that Trump and his allies did not intend a riot, the probability of violence was not an accident. It was an unpriced externality of months of delegitimization, apocalyptic framing, and targeted grievance.

Someone, eventually, was going to act.

Jack Smith and the Limits of Law

This distinction matters when assessing the legacy of Special Counsel Jack Smith. Smith terminated his investigation after Trump’s reelection, adhering to longstanding Department of Justice norms against prosecuting a sitting president. That procedural ending has been misread by many as substantive exoneration.

It was not.

In recently released closed-door testimony to Congress, Smith stated that he believed the evidence would have supported a conviction beyond a reasonable doubt for conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election. That claim does not require proof that Trump ordered a riot. It requires demonstrating participation in a coordinated effort to subvert lawful electoral processes.

Stochastic terrorism explains why both things can be true at once: legal accountability can fail even when political culpability is overwhelming. The law asks narrow questions about intent, and history asks broader ones about consequence.

What January 6 Changed

The Republican Party’s institutions and media ecosystem have worked diligently to memory-hole January 6 or reframe it as partisan persecution. That effort has not entirely succeeded, and the public remembers. What has changed is the political cost of remembering.

Centrist forces lost the 2024 election not because voters forgot January 6, but because they were offered a politics that treated it as an aberration rather than a warning. Messaging is obsessed with norms while ignoring the conditions that made norm-breaking effective in the first place.

January 6 was not the day democracy died. It was the day probabilistic political violence became normalized at the elite level of American life as deniable, repeatable, and survivable for those who flirt with it.

The danger is not that everyone will riot. The danger is that someone will always, and those at the top will continue to pretend this is random, unforeseeable, and not their responsibility.

The dice are already loaded. History will not pretend otherwise.

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References

• Amman, Molly, and J. Reid Meloy. “Stochastic Terrorism: A Linguistic and Psychological Analysis.” Perspectives on Terrorism 15, no. 5 (2021): 2–13. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27073433.

As a Black American, this is a uniquely frightening moment. Not abstractly scary and not just intellectually alarming, but frightening in the way history lives in the body. Black bodies have been at the center of American political violence from the beginning, rationalized in the name of order. When a society begins to normalize open political violence again, even probabilistically, the instability does not announce itself politely. It settles into muscle memory, and you feel it in your bones.

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Gordon Wood’s Empire of Liberty captures something essential about the early republic: democracy wasn’t a settled fact, but an argument in motion. Every institution, from federalism to the courts, and even the Constitution itself, was a contested stage on which the young nation argued about what self-government meant. Nowhere was that contest sharper than over the judiciary. Today, courts rely heavily on common law traditions, such as the doctrine of stare decisis, which treats precedent as binding. However, in the 1790s and early 1800s, Americans were uncertain whether English common law was a treasured inheritance or a monarchist relic that had been smuggled into republican soil.

The Judiciary Act of 1789 established the framework for a three-tiered federal court system, comprising district courts, circuit courts, and the Supreme Court perched on top. Federalists saw it as a ballast for a steady anchor for the republic’s shaky hull. Republicans, however, saw something more sinister: a hidden fortress of unelected lawyers in black robes, ready to shield privilege and property against the people’s will. The tension flared almost immediately.

In Chisholm v. Georgia (1793), the Supreme Court ruled that citizens could sue states in federal court. To Federalists, this was common sense: if states could violate contracts or debts with impunity, the union was a sham. However, in states like North Carolina, it was perceived as judicial tyranny. Allowing private suits against sovereign states felt like shackles on state independence, a violation of that revolutionary promise of self-rule. The backlash was so fierce that Congress rushed through the 11th Amendment, which stripped the Court of that jurisdiction. Ratified at lightning speed, the amendment was the first direct slap on the judiciary’s wrist. It was also a reminder that even at its birth, the Court’s authority rested on shaky democratic ground.

Fast forward a few years, and the judiciary remained a battlefield. The Federalists, battered by their own mistakes, such as the Alien and Sedition Acts and the handling of the Quasi-War with France, were losing public support. Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans thundered against them as monarchists in disguise. Then came the fateful election of 1800, the so-called Republican Revolution. Jefferson’s victory was not just about policy; it was about capturing the mantle of democracy itself. And for Jefferson, that meant “republicanizing” the court, or purging them of Federalist entrenchment and making it accountable to the people.

But the Federalists were not about to hand over the keys. In his final weeks, John Adams launched a parting barrage: the “midnight judges.” With Congress’s help, Adams filled judicial vacancies with loyal Federalists, hoping to salt the earth before Jefferson could plant his own crops. At the center of this last-minute maneuvering was John Marshall, elevated to Chief Justice, a man whose staying power would haunt Jeffersonian dreams for decades. It was high drama: Adams furiously signing commissions in the dead of night, Jefferson storming into office declaring a democratic mandate, and the judiciary suddenly cast as the last Federalist redoubt.

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America didn’t just spring from liberty and ideals. Instead, it was born in ledgers, IOUs, and crop cycles. From the start, the United States carried the awkward inheritance of empire: debts to British merchants, speculative land schemes, and a plantation economy that mortgaged people as collateral.

Liberty was the sales pitch.

Debt was the operating system.

What Gordon Wood shows in Empire of Liberty is that before slavery became the all-consuming wedge, debt was already carving deep sectional scars. Southerners feared federal courts because they threatened to enforce debts planters hoped to bury. Northerners bristled at a system that made them carry burdens unequally. The nation’s very capital was traded for a financial fix. In short, the Republic was cobbled together less as a shining city on a hill and more as a debt-restructuring deal.

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Growing Up with Disney, and the Trouble That Comes With It

Growing up with Disney VHS tapes, like many American kids in the ’90s, I have what Henry Giroux calls the nostalgia gene. In The Mouse That Roars, Giroux argues that the Disney Renaissance of the late 1980s and ’90s was less a burst of innovation and more a calculated reboot of Disney’s 1950s–60s cultural influence, polished for the post–Cold War consumer child.

The parallels are striking. The Wonderful World of Disney returned to Sunday nights, reviving Cold War television rituals in a post-Soviet key. Theme park expansions, EPCOT, MGM Studios (now Hollywood Studios), Animal Kingdom, and California Adventure, mirrored the growing animatronic dreamscape of mid-century Tomorrowland, now supercharged by Reaganomics and Imagineering. And of course, the animated films weren’t just cultural events. They became IP farms: sequels, spin-offs, merchandise, and an army of costumed characters marching down Main Street USA.

Disney in the 1990s was a soft reboot of mid-century Americana, with better optics, more diversity, and just enough cynicism to pass as updated. But Giroux offers another view, one I don’t always agree with, but that feels disturbingly accurate the more you look.

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A line in Henry Giroux’s The Mouse That Roared has stayed with me:

"Pixie-dust magic may appeal to the world of fantasy, but it offers no language for defining vital social institutions as a public good…"1

It’s the kind of sentence that sits heavy once you realize he’s not just talking about Disney. He’s talking about the national imagination. And in 2025, we’re witnessing a crack-up not just of political norms but of the very myths we’ve used to understand ourselves as a people.

Disney has long been the most effective exporter of the American fantasy, bright, sanitized, and aggressively innocent. Giroux, to his credit, doesn’t scold fans for indulging in it. He understands its pull. He admits that even critics can feel the guilty pleasure of Main Street, USA, or the comfort of a well-worn princess arc. But he insists we go deeper. Because Disney, he argues, doesn’t just reflect culture—it manufactures and overpowers it.2

It teaches.

It disciplines.

And it tells generations of children, and now adults, what is worthy of love, safety, and nostalgia.

Giroux's central warning is about imagination itself: how it’s shaped, sold, and ultimately subdued. Disney’s power isn’t merely in its content, but in its ability to colonize the idea of dreaming. It rebrands escape as freedom, consumption as empowerment, and spectacle as civic meaning. It turns the boredom, brutality, and ambiguity of modern life into something livable3 by insisting that innocence is not only possible, but correct.4 But in doing so, it replaces hard questions with curated enchantment. Democracy becomes something to experience, not something to participate in.5

I’ve been thinking about all this while watching a very different cultural reckoning unfold in real time.

Let’s call it the centrist pundit panic.

As the post-2024 election cycle rages on, I’ve noticed a deepening divide among our centrist political commentators, not between left and right, but between those who have accepted the postmodern fracture in the American psyche and those who still believe in the myth of voter innocence.

Some are finally joining what I’d call the “JVL camp, a realism so raw it feels post-Disney. Jonathan V. Last (JVL) is a writer and editor at The Bulwark who has been unafraid to examine American history and culture without the gauze of exceptionalism. Instead, he sees the U.S. as one hegemon among many in the sweep of global history—subject to the same cycles of decadence, self-indulgence, and, in our current era, a kind of reality-TV-branded seriousness. What JVL is grappling with isn’t a crisis of presentation; it’s a collapse of conscience. The problem isn’t that Americans are distracted. It’s that more of them than we’d like to admit are deciding, with full knowledge, to look away.

You can read JVL’s latest piece on whether voters deserve to be infantilized or if that’s a defense mechanism for the commentariat here:

The Bulwark

American Cthulhu

Ten years ago I would have spent time this week writing about Pete Rose, the Hall of Fame, and the decline of American culture…

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a year ago · 870 likes · 1199 comments · Jonathan V. Last

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Jeffersonian America

Jeffersonian America was rife with competition, commercial appetites, class resentment, and violence. The democratic ethos associated with Jefferson, often tapped in an idealized register, was not shared by all. But the words—democracy, rights, liberty—meant something, especially to people who had just fought a war over autonomy. The convergence of political resentment against a Federalist elite and the expansionist hunger to settle lands already occupied by Indigenous peoples created a volatile mix, one that echoes in the glorification of crassness we still see in America today.

Gordon S. Wood traces these developments in his sweeping examination of the early American republic and its Jeffersonian transformation.

Last time, the newsletter explored Jeffersonian America’s growing pretension for commerce, and the other side of that coin: greed.

Check it out and other Empire of Liberty reflections:

The Inland Fracture of the Federalists

Charles William Janson, an English immigrant to the U.S., eventually returned to England after a string of land speculation and business failures. Bitter, he insulted American society as ignorant and crude, where the uneducated believed themselves equal to the educated.1 In that insult lay the energy many Federalists were channeling as Jefferson’s presidency progressed. Concentrated increasingly in the Northeast, Federalists viewed the rest of the country as savage, selfish, unkempt, and dangerously egalitarian.

Though a strong Jeffersonian Republican (or Democratic-Republican) presence existed in the North, especially in inland and western regions, Federalist influence in those areas was fading quickly by the first decade of the 19th century.

Yet one notable Federalist, William Cooper of Otsego County, New York, managed to establish himself inland. He founded the town of Cooperstown, now known for the Baseball Hall of Fame, in hopes of becoming a gentleman in the old European sense: a landowning patriarch. But that vision was no longer aligned with the American way.

Soon after its founding, Cooperstown was plagued by lawsuits, bankruptcies, vandalism, arson, and violence. The town’s disdain for aristocratic pretense culminated in Cooper himself being publicly caned in the street in 1807.2 His children were ravaged by illness, greed, alcoholism, and recklessness. Only one, James, who later became a novelist (one of whose literary works is depicted by the artist above), survived with any legacy. Even then, the family lost its wealth, and Cooperstown was bought by what Wood calls “a new breed of upstart”: William Holt Averall, the son of a shoemaker and a hard-nosed capitalist who rejected any investment in gentility.3

Violence, too, became political. Proto-parties (not yet formalized) regularly saw opponents physically beaten, sometimes fatally. The cane and the pistol, not just the pamphlet, were often the tools of ideological conflict.4

In that chaos, the Federalist worldview—that some were born to govern and others to be governed—was breaking down. Amid the fever of change, elites began to sell the idea of democracy, even if they had no intention of living by it.

You can read more about that here:

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Southern Culture and Savage Irony

Violence was no stranger to the South either, but there it became more than common—it became defining. The emerging Southern honor culture was mirrored in bloodsport: dueling, gambling, cockfighting, and reckless moneymaking. Southern elites sneered at these pursuits even as they partook in them.

Andrew Jackson, the son of Scots-Irish immigrants from Northern Ireland, personified this violent honor culture. Jackson was known for his love of racing and cockfighting, and for killing a man over a horse race wager. That same man would become one of America’s most consequential presidents.

Wood shows how New England Federalists metaphorically and geographically looked down on Southern Whites, describing them as barely better than their "savage neighbors"5—a reference to Indigenous Americans.

Violence in the Southern backcountry was often grotesque. Gouging out eyes and biting off noses were not uncommon. These brutal customs, as Wood and others argue, were inherited from the Celtic borderlands of the British Isles. As he writes:

“Indeed historians have persuasively argued that most of the characteristics of the Southern ‘rednecks’—including their indolence, the making of ‘moonshine,’ fiddling and banjo-playing, chewing tobacco, hunting, and hog-raising—can be tracked back to their Celtic ancestors. This is especially true, they say, of the hot-headedness and propensity to personal violence of backcountry Southern ‘crackers,’ with someone like Andrew Jackson being a prime representative.”6

To foreign observers, Americans pushing westward and down the Ohio River weren’t spreading civilization—they were regressing into savagery.7

And this doesn’t even account for the day-to-day brutality experienced by enslaved African Americans. That cruelty was not incidental; it was structural, and it was foundational.

You can read more about that here:

The Hypocrisy of Republicanism

As hierarchies unraveled, so too did the carefully maintained illusions of racial order. In one telling anecdote, a foreign visitor mistook a White woman for a servant. She insisted she was merely “help,” noting, “I am no sarvant; none but negers are sarvants.”

White domestic laborers demanded to be seated at the table with their “bosses”—a word increasingly adopted from Dutch usage. They claimed such proximity was not only natural but righteous in a free country. This growing refusal to be deferential contributed to a market society in the North, where masters and journeymen began to regard each other as employers and employees. The rise of impersonal cash wages signaled the rise of wage labor and added energy to the Northern Jeffersonian Republican base.8

As Wood notes, Thomas Jefferson, enslaver and President, believed the Republic belonged to people who lived by manual labor, not by their wits. That’s a rich irony, given the source of Jefferson’s own wealth. But more cynically, Jefferson knew how to politicize that belief, because that sentiment animated the voters in his Northern strongholds.

Federalists, who saw themselves as a kind of American aristocracy, viewed this labor populism as a threat to their vision of order and refinement.9

The deeper hypocrisy came from the so-called Southern cavaliers, who cast themselves as working men while living in luxury—men who, in the words of contemporary critics, had only been taught to “dress, to drink, to smoke, to swear, to game” and indulge in “the very rational, elegant and humane pleasures of the turf and cock-pit.” These critiques came from lawyers in Virginia aiming to wrest control of county courts from the planter class.10

Thus, the mythology of the working-class hero was born—often more fantasy than fact, but politically potent all the same.

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The next section shifts from history into reflection, connecting the fractures of Jeffersonian America to the disillusionment of our present moment. It’s where the threads come together, where the echoes get louder, and where the questions get harder.

If you’ve made it this far and want to keep exploring how the past haunts the present, I hope you’ll consider becoming a paid subscriber. That support unlocks the full piece and helps sustain work that doesn’t just analyze history, but wrestles with what it all means.

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Reader Note: This blog has become one of the fastest-growing history blogs on Substack, recently ranking 21st out of 100 on Substack’s new “Rising” list. I can’t thank you enough for the support—it truly means the world to me. After years of feeling like I was hitting a brick wall and wondering if I should give up writing, your encouragement has made al…

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The Romanticized Frontier and the Realities of Extraction

The mythological American frontier is one of rugged individualism, but this narrative often overlooks how government intervention deeply shaped western development. Frontier …

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Commerce, Power, and the Jeffersonian Fantasy

Over the past two weeks, we’ve stepped away from presidential politics to examine the world of early Black Americans—figures like Phillis Wheatley, who challenged the era’s contradictions, …

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Mr. Jefferson’…

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Consequently, the Jeffersonian “Revolution of 1800” has blended nearly imperceptibly into the main democratic currents of American h…

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Growing up, I attended the same elementary/middle school as my older sister. It was a Catholic school that was highly family-oriented. I ha…

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I photographed the Inner Harbor as the sun lowered into the distant horizon. Standing before the Maryland Science Center, I thought about times I would visit the building as a child and adult. It has been a staple of my life, but that can’t be said for every generation. The Maryland Science Center began a…

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