Jan. 6 anniversary falls as experts sound alarm over risks to American democracy

The third anniversary of the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol comes as experts are sounding the alarm over the state of American democracy as the country enters an election year divided over the significance of the day.  

The violent rampage led to multiple deaths, the ransacking of the Capitol, the prosecution of former President Trump and a wave of shock as the public watched the images emerging from the building.

But the collective reckoning was short-lived. 

Trump has sought to shrug off responsibility for the attack, casting the event as little more than the actions of those expressing their concerns about the election, continuing to promote baseless claims of election fraud while repeatedly nodding to conspiracy theories surrounding the attack.

And Republicans who condemned Trump shortly after the attack realigned themselves with the former president just weeks later.

On the first anniversary of Jan. 6, just one GOP lawmaker — Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) — joined Democrats to commemorate the day.

“I think among the signs of concern regarding our democracy, the biggest concern is that we have one of our two main political parties is being taken over by a faction that is probably only about a third of its voters, but is very willing to eschew democratic rules like the person with the most votes wins, is willing to support political violence, and so on,” Rachel Kleinfeld, a democracy expert and senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for World Peace, said of the Republican Party.

“We now seem to think that if we don’t have another major riot that disrupts the transfer of presidential power, things aren’t so bad. … And we just need to take a big step back and say is this where we want our society to go?”

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The anniversary follows a trail of troubling signs about the strength of America’s democracy.

A USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll released Thursday found that slightly more than half of Trump supporters had no confidence the results of the 2024 election would be accurately counted, a belief closely aligned with the former president’s claims the last presidential election was “rigged.” By contrast, 81 percent of supporters of President Biden were very confident in the accuracy of the coming election results.

A Monday Washington Post-UMD poll found a quarter of Americans believe the conspiracy theory that the FBI organized and encouraged the Capitol attack.

And a smattering of polls have found Americans to be more open to the use of violence to achieve political ends. A Public Religion Research Institute-Brookings Institution poll in October found a growing share of Americans, 23 percent, agreed that “American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country” — a jump from 15 percent in 2021.

The studies come as America’s Freedom House ranking has steadily fallen over the last decade, something its president, Michael Abramowitz, said is due to multiple factors, including “rising political polarization and extremism and partisan pressure on the electoral process.” 

That dynamic has been exacerbated by social media, which has both been weaponized by foreign governments and gives rise to voices that might otherwise be little featured in mainstream press coverage. 

“The rise of social media has really made it harder for the country to unite around a shared narrative or shared set of facts,” he said.

“There’s not a shared agreement on the facts. There’s not a shared agreement on what actually happened,” Abramowitz said of Jan. 6. 

Matt Hall, a professor at Notre Dame University who helps run the January 6th, 2025, Project, which eyes the certification of the next election, said that’s been a factor in many Trump supporters holding contradictory viewpoints of the day.

“Somehow January 6th was no big deal, just a minor protest overhyped by the media, and it did happen but it was a false-flag operation perpetrated by Democrats, and it was actually a deep-state conspiracy to keep Trump out of power, and it was a completely justified effort to defend our democracy. The fact that these stories are contradictory doesn’t matter,” he said.

Despite deep divisions on news sources and viewpoints, Kleinfeld said the polarization defining U.S. politics right now is more nuanced than many might realize. Polling shows broad swaths of Americans largely agree on a variety of topics, even as they distrust one another.

“Regular Americans hold pretty mixed views and are not nearly as polarized even on things like abortion, gun control, immigration. There is difference, but it’s a lot less than the difference between our political leaders. Where we’re really failing is on emotional polarization. We just hate each other in part because we believe the other side has much different views, and because we believe the other side looks very different, are made up of very different types of people. Both the beliefs are untrue,” she said.

But Kleinfeld said efforts to curb political divides crash against a system where politicians are increasingly playing to their base — and being rewarded for it.

“You’ve got one side trying to bring it down, but you have an incentive system that means politicians win when they bring out their polarized bases. And what we need to do is change that incentive system,” she said, something that could include things like adopting ranked choice voting. 

Hall said Trump is exploiting those divisions and that distrust to bring a “revival of fascist politics.” 

“MAGA politicians like Donald Trump are using divisive rhetoric to divide us into an ‘us’ versus ‘them’ — left versus right, white versus black, rich versus poor, urban versus rural, religious versus secular — the divisions go on and on. Fascist leaders are then able to exploit these social divisions to break down basic social norms and shared understandings about our politics,” he said.

“As a result, huge swaths of society start to accept dangerous ideas that would usually be easily rejected — expanded executive power, intense animosity toward political opponents, political candidates who deny election losses, and a wavering support for free speech.”

Kleinfeld said it’s up to sitting political leaders to call out actions that erode democracy but noted the current environment makes that difficult.

“A lot of times the media reports on our democratic breakdown as left versus right or right versus left. But in fact, what’s happening is that a small faction of the Republican Party is trying to take over, and fellow Republicans who want to uphold the rule of law and liberal ideals — those are the ones being ejected from the party, threatened with violence, called all sorts of names and [had] their children threatened,” she said.

Statistics released Friday by the Justice Department noted that of the more than 1,265 people charged in the wake of Jan. 6, 718 have pleaded guilty while another 139 have been convicted at trial.

Trump has pledged to pardon them.

“The January 6 attack tested the strength of American democracy and American democracy did hold,” Abramowitz said.

“But we can’t take that for granted in the future. And so I think we really do have our work cut out for us when it comes to reinforcing American institutions and democratic safeguards.”