William Makepeace Thackeray’s masterpiece, Vanity Fair, was published with a subtitle: “A Novel without a Hero.” Whatever genre the January 6 hearings belong to — documentary? comedy? circus? — they are telling a story without a hero, a characteristic story of our unheroic time.
As I have argued at some length, the invasion of the Capitol and the vandalism and violence associated with it were a sideshow, and should be understood as such. The main event was Donald Trump’s attempt to find some legal or procedural fig leaf for invalidating the 2020 presidential election, and by that means to remain in power — a coup d’état under color of law. Tyrants always fortify their regimes with borrowed prestige: borrowed from the law, from religion, from science, and, above all, from “the People.” But tyranny is tyranny.
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