This makes for a bracing read:
For want of a better term, I’m calling all of them seditionists—not just the people who took part in the riot, but the far larger number of Americans who are united by their belief that Donald Trump won the election, that Joe Biden lost, and that a long list of people and institutions are lying about it: Congress, the media, Mike Pence, the election officials in all 50 states, and the judges in dozens of courts.
In December, 34 percent of Americans said they did not trust the outcome of the 2020 election. More recently, 21 percent said that they either strongly support or somewhat support the storming of the Capitol building. As of this week, 32 percent were still telling pollsters that Biden was not the legitimate winner.
Even if we assume that only half of those polled are impassioned by politics, and even if we put the number of truly seditious Americans at 10 or 15 percent, that’s a very large number of people. For although Trump will eventually exit political life, the seditionists will not. They will remain, nursing their grievances, feverishly posting on social media, angrily listening to Tucker Carlson—the Fox News host has just told them that the federal troops in Washington, D.C., are “not there for your safety” but because Democrats want to send a “message about power”—and energetically running for office....
Perhaps in 2022, more seditionists will enter Congress, joining Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, the QAnon-aligned conspiracist who has already said she will launch impeachment proceedings against Biden. Perhaps in 2024, seditionists, rather than reality-based Republicans, will be running the elections in Georgia and Arizona. Americans could see worse postelection scenarios than the one we’ve just lived through.
We could also see more violence. Since the election, the Bridging Divides Initiative, a group that tracks and counters political violence in the U.S., has observed a singularly ominous metric: a sharp uptick in the number of protests outside the homes of politicians and public figures, including city- and county-level officials, many featuring “armed and unlawful paramilitary actors.” In Idaho, aggressive protesters shut down a public-health meeting; in Northern California, numerous public-health officials have resigned in the face of threats from anti-maskers. Death threats are already shaping U.S. politics at a higher level too. We may never know how many more Republicans in Congress might have voted for Trump’s impeachment last week had it not been for the ominous messages they were receiving online.
The author concludes with some ideas about how to reintegrate the "seditionists" back into the community, drawing on lessons from countries that suffered sectarian and factional violence.
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