More than seventeen months after supporters of Donald Trump stormed the United States Capitol, Americans watched the first prime-time public hearing of the House committee investigating January 6 on Thursday night.
The images remain extraordinary even after repeated viewing. People forced their way through police lines and into the Capitol while Congress was formally certifying Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election. Members of Congress were evacuated. Police officers were attacked. The constitutional process continued only after the building was secured.
But the committee is trying to persuade Americans to look beyond the violence itself. Its argument is that January 6 should be understood as part of a broader attempt to overturn an election result, involving months of false claims that the election had been stolen and pressure on political institutions responsible for confirming the outcome.
Trump continues to reject that interpretation and describes the congressional investigation as politically motivated. He continues to claim that widespread fraud deprived him of victory. Those claims were repeatedly rejected by courts and contradicted by election officials, including Republicans. No evidence has established fraud remotely sufficient to reverse Biden’s victory.
That makes the central political problem less complicated than some of the surrounding legal questions.
Trump lost an election.
He refused to accept that he had lost legitimately.
Everything else becomes easier to understand once those two facts are separated.
There are important questions about exactly what Trump knew, what advisers told him, what responsibility particular individuals bear for the violence and whether any conduct crossed criminal thresholds. A congressional committee should not substitute automatically for a court, and partisan incentives should make everyone careful about treating political hearings as neutral legal proceedings.
But democracy does not need a criminal conviction before identifying a serious institutional problem.
A democratic system cannot function indefinitely if political leaders recognise elections only when they win.
This is something I have been returning to repeatedly over the last few months, particularly while following Pakistan’s removal of Imran Khan and France’s presidential election. Democratic institutions are often described primarily as mechanisms for selecting winners.
Increasingly, I think their more important function may be creating losers who are willing to remain inside the system.
Winning is easy to institutionalise.
The person who wins an election already has strong incentives to accept the result.
The real achievement occurs when the loser believes accepting defeat is better than destroying the mechanism that produced it.
That requires several expectations.
I need to believe the votes were counted fairly. I need to believe my political rights remain protected after losing. I need to believe the winner cannot permanently prevent me from competing again. I need to believe there will actually be another election. I need to believe losing office does not mean losing my freedom, property or physical safety.
When those expectations are credible, political defeat becomes survivable.
And when defeat is survivable, politicians have less reason to resist it outside constitutional rules.
This is why peaceful transfers of power are so politically important despite appearing almost ceremonial in established democracies. The outgoing leader is communicating something larger than personal concession.
The office belongs to the institution, not to me.
America had managed that ritual repeatedly for more than two centuries.
Presidents lost.
Some believed they deserved to win.
Some disputed particular electoral practices.
Some elections were extraordinarily close.
Yet the defeated president eventually left.
That repetition created an expectation that presidential power was temporary.
January 6 challenged that expectation.
This is why focusing exclusively on whether the Capitol attack constituted an insurrection, riot or protest can obscure the larger institutional issue. The precise legal terminology matters in court. Politically, the important fact is that violence occurred while Congress was carrying out the constitutional process confirming the electoral defeat of an incumbent president who had spent weeks telling supporters the result was illegitimate.
The riot did not occur in an informational vacuum.
Beliefs have causes.
Millions of Americans did not independently examine county-level election data and simultaneously conclude that the election had been stolen. Political elites communicated that message repeatedly.
This raises a difficult question about responsibility for political misinformation.
Democratic societies rightly protect political speech extremely strongly. Governments should not possess broad authority to decide which political claims citizens are allowed to hear. Giving incumbents the power to classify opposition arguments as misinformation would create obvious possibilities for abuse.
But legal freedom from censorship does not mean political leaders are free from responsibility for the consequences of what they say.
Speech changes behaviour because people use information to make decisions.
If a political leader repeatedly tells supporters that an election has been stolen, some supporters will update their beliefs accordingly.
That is especially true when the claim comes from a president.
Authority affects credibility.
A random social-media account claiming electoral fraud is one piece of information.
The president of the United States making the same claim carries a completely different signal because citizens reasonably assume the president has access to information they do not.
That creates an asymmetry of responsibility.
The more institutional authority someone possesses, the greater the potential consequence of abusing informational trust.
This is similar to the problem I wrote about during the pandemic. A political leader violating public-health guidance does more than create their own infection risk. Their behaviour communicates information about whether the guidance deserves to be taken seriously.
Political leadership has externalities.
January 6 demonstrates the extreme version.
Claims about electoral legitimacy can change whether citizens believe constitutional procedures deserve obedience.
This is why election denial is more dangerous than ordinary political lying.
Politicians exaggerate constantly. They misrepresent opponents, selectively present statistics and make promises they cannot fulfil. Democracies survive a considerable amount of dishonesty because citizens, journalists and political opponents can challenge it.
Election denial attacks the mechanism through which those disagreements are ultimately resolved.
If I believe your tax statistics are wrong, we can still compete in the next election.
If I believe elections themselves are fraudulent whenever you win, the mechanism for resolving our disagreement disappears.
That creates a recursive problem.
How do we democratically settle a dispute over whether democratic settlement itself is legitimate?
There is no higher electoral mechanism to appeal to.
Courts can examine evidence.
Election officials can conduct recounts.
Audits can verify ballots.
But if every institution producing an unfavourable conclusion is subsequently declared corrupt, no amount of institutional verification can resolve the claim.
The belief becomes unfalsifiable.
Trump’s post-election litigation illustrates this problem. His allies challenged results repeatedly. Courts, including judges appointed by Republican presidents, rejected or dismissed cases. State officials defended certified results. Recounts did not reverse the outcome. Yet for many supporters, those institutional failures did not weaken the fraud narrative.
They became further evidence that institutions themselves were compromised.
That is politically dangerous because distrust can become self-sealing.
Evidence against the conspiracy becomes evidence of the conspiracy.
Once political belief reaches that point, institutional facts lose persuasive power.
This may be one of the central democratic problems of the internet age. Citizens have access to more political information than any previous generation, but also possess unprecedented ability to construct information environments in which contrary evidence rarely becomes credible.
Political polarisation then becomes epistemic polarisation.
People do not simply disagree about values.
They disagree about what happened.
That is much harder for democracy to manage.
Compromise is possible when two people agree that unemployment is 6% but disagree about which policy would reduce it.
Compromise becomes almost impossible when one believes unemployment is 6% and the other believes the statistics agency fabricated the number because it is controlled by traitors.
Shared facts do not guarantee democratic agreement.
Their disappearance makes disagreement much more dangerous.
Political parties have an important role here because leaders rarely sustain narratives alone.
After the 2020 election, many Republican officials rejected Trump’s fraud allegations or defended the integrity of elections in their states. Others supported challenges or avoided directly contradicting him. On 6 January itself, 147 Republican members of Congress voted to object to at least one state’s electoral results, even after the attack on the Capitol.
This is where individual incentives can produce collective institutional damage.
Imagine a Republican member of Congress privately believes Biden won fairly but represents a district where most Republican primary voters believe the election was stolen. Publicly contradicting Trump may invite a primary challenge and end the politician’s career.
Remaining ambiguous becomes individually rational.
Now repeat the calculation across dozens of politicians.
Very few need personally believe the fraud claim.
They only need to believe that challenging it is politically expensive.
The result is a party in which a claim lacking evidence can persist because nobody individually possesses sufficient incentive to confront it.
This is a collective-action problem inside political leadership.
Everyone may benefit in the long run from restoring trust in elections.
Each politician bears the immediate cost of angering supporters.
The future institutional benefit is dispersed.
The electoral punishment is concentrated.
Institutions therefore need actors willing occasionally to accept personal political costs to preserve rules that benefit everyone over time.
That sounds idealistic, but democratic systems cannot eliminate the requirement entirely.
Rules can constrain politicians.
They cannot anticipate every moment when politicians must choose whether to exploit ambiguity.
Norms fill the gaps.
This is why January 6 cannot be analysed only through American constitutional law. Much of the political system behaved according to unwritten expectations.
Vice President Mike Pence’s role is an obvious example. Trump pressured Pence to reject or delay electoral votes during the congressional certification. Pence concluded he lacked constitutional authority to do so and proceeded with certification.
The important institutional point is not whether Pence deserves personal celebration for performing a constitutional duty.
It is that a system should not depend excessively on whether one individual decides to interpret ambiguous power responsibly.
If changing one person’s decision could create a constitutional crisis, the institution contains a vulnerability.
Democratic systems should learn from near failures.
That means clarifying procedures before another election tests them.
This is the constructive purpose an investigation can serve.
Congressional hearings become less useful if their principal objective is producing dramatic television or confirming what each party already believes. They become valuable if they identify institutional weaknesses and produce reforms making repetition harder.
How should electoral votes be certified?
What discretion does the vice president possess?
How should states handle competing claims about electors?
What protections should election officials receive from political pressure?
What happens when candidates refuse to concede?
Those questions are much less emotionally satisfying than determining who deserves blame.
They may matter more for 2024 and every election afterwards.
Accountability and institutional reform should not be treated as alternatives.
Accountability changes incentives by imposing costs for misconduct.
Reform reduces the opportunity for misconduct.
A resilient democracy needs both.
There is also a danger in Democrats treating January 6 as evidence that their own political coalition therefore represents democracy itself.
It does not.
One party can defend democratic institutions in a particular confrontation without acquiring permanent democratic legitimacy for every policy it supports.
Republican voters remain citizens with legitimate political preferences.
Conservative positions on taxation, abortion, immigration, guns or regulation do not become anti-democratic because Trump challenged the 2020 election.
The distinction matters because democracy cannot be defended by turning ordinary partisan competition into a struggle between legitimate citizens and illegitimate ones.
The objective should be restoring a shared rule:
Republicans can win elections. Democrats can win elections. Both have to accept verified defeats.
That principle is politically neutral even when applying it in a particular case produces an uncomfortable partisan conclusion.
Joe Biden won the 2020 election.
Recognising that fact does not require supporting Biden.
A voter can believe his presidency is disastrous and still accept that he legitimately holds office.
That distinction between legitimacy and approval may be one of democracy’s most important.
I do not need to like your government to recognise its right to govern.
If legitimacy requires approval, every political opponent becomes illegitimate by definition.
The same principle applies internationally. I can recognise that a government was elected legitimately while criticising its policies severely. Institutional legitimacy describes the process producing authority, not the quality of every decision made afterwards.
This is why Trump’s refusal to concede mattered independently of whether one agrees with his policies.
The issue was not conservatism.
It was succession.
The United States has spent much of its history presenting peaceful electoral transfer as evidence of democratic stability. January 6 showed that even very old norms can weaken if political incentives change enough.
That should make Americans cautious about the assumption that institutions survive automatically because they survived previously.
Institutions possess no independent physical existence.
Congress is a building and a set of rules.
The presidency is an office and a set of rules.
Elections are procedures and a set of expectations.
People make them real by behaving as though the rules bind them.
That does not mean institutions are merely imaginary. Once established, they shape incentives powerfully.
But they still require repeated compliance.
A constitutional system survives because millions of people perform thousands of ordinary acts of restraint: election officials count votes they may dislike, judges reject arguments from politicians they support, military officers remain outside electoral disputes, legislators certify opponents’ victories and defeated presidents leave office.
Most of those actions are boring.
That is exactly what we want.
The political system becomes visible when somebody stops behaving normally.
Perhaps this is why the January 6 hearings matter even though Americans already watched the riot live seventeen months ago.
The images show what happened when political conflict reached the Capitol.
The more important investigation concerns everything that happened before people reached the doors.
How did an electoral defeat become a belief that constitutional procedures were illegitimate?
Who reinforced that belief?
Which institutions resisted pressure?
Which nearly failed?
And what changes would make the system less dependent on individual restraint next time?
Those are harder questions than whether smashing windows at the Capitol was wrong.
Almost everyone can answer that.
The real democratic test comes earlier.
Can politicians tell supporters something they do not want to hear?
Can a candidate say: we lost?
That sentence can end a political career.
Sometimes it protects the political system that makes another career possible.
Democracy is often described as government by winners.
I increasingly think its durability depends on something less celebrated.
It needs losers who believe losing once is preferable to making it impossible for anyone to lose peacefully again.
