Read an Excerpt
The Road to Sedition
On January 10, 49 B.C.E., Gaius Julius Caesar, then governor of Cisalpine Gaul but on the cusp of being stripped of all power, ordered one of his legions to cross the Rubicon River, explicitly in defiance of the Roman Senate, which had ordered him to disband his army, which by law was not permitted within the borders of the Roman Republic. His action set off four years of civil war in Italy, culminating with the demise of the republic as Caesar assumed complete dictatorial control of the empire.
On January 6, 2021, Donald Trump—on the verge of being officially unseated from the presidency—heeded the urgings of his most rabid supporters and crossed his own Rubicon. Speaking that day to a crowd of tens of thousands of supporters who had turned out to “Stop the Steal” of the 2020 presidential election, he falsely claimed that he had been cheated out of the presidency and urged them to march to the Capitol to protest the outcome.
Now, it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. And after this, we’re going to walk down, and I’ll be there with you, we’re going to walk down, we’re going to walk down . . .
Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong. We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated, lawfully slated.
I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.
As he said these words, people in the crowd could be heard shouting: “Storm the Capitol!” “Invade the Capitol building!” “Let’s take the Capitol!” “Let’s take it!” “Take the Capitol!”
As Trump wrapped things up, he concluded:
And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.
So we’re going to, we’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue. I love Pennsylvania Avenue.
And we’re going to the Capitol, and we’re going to try and give.
The Democrats are hopeless—they never vote for anything. Not even one vote. But we’re going to try and give our Republicans, the weak ones because the strong ones don’t need any of our help. We’re going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.
So let’s walk down Pennsylvania Avenue.
Many of his supporters, in fact, were already at the Capitol at that moment, tussling with Capitol Police at the barricades. Thousands more surged in that direction. Trump, despite saying he would, did not join the march.
He tried. As he entered the presidential limousine, he told his Secret Service detail to take him to the Capitol. (He later told The Washington Post he tried to go there: “Secret Service said I couldn’t go. I would have gone there in a minute.”) The agents refused, saying the security risk was too great. According to several witnesses, he attempted to take control of the steering wheel. In the end, he conceded to his security detail, retreating to the White House and watching the drama unfold from there.
Like Caesar or any other commanding general, he knew they would follow his orders, even if that part about being “peaceful” slipped their minds. As it did.
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The mob that Donald Trump unleashed that day was not, as its Republican apologists would later claim, simply an aggregation of angry conservatives who “got out of hand” while protesting his defeat in the 2020 election. The siege of the Capitol had been carefully planned, orchestrated by paramilitary claques who spearheaded the attack, and supported by an army of true believers of various stripes: conspiracy theorists, Christian nationalists, and far-right street brawlers. Trump’s MAGA army.
The January 6 insurrection was an attack on the hallmark of American democracy: the peaceful transfer of power. No American president in the nation’s history had refused to acknowledge and participate in this tradition, which is often credited with being the foundation of the stability of its core democratic institution—namely, elections, the final reckoning of the public will. Well before the 2020 election, Trump had made his contempt for this institution plain, and after he lost, he made it manifest by claiming without any evidence he had been cheated, cultivating an army of people ready to use violence to prevent his dethronement and then marshalling them into an attack on Congress, eagerly crossing the Rubicon on his behalf.
Preventing the certification of the Electoral College votes, however, was only the temporal objective of Trump’s army. In a larger sense, the insurrection’s intent was to overthrow democracy itself and replace it with an authoritarian autocracy. The intended outcome was to install Trump as the nation’s permanent president for life: a dictator in the mold of Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, or Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
In this respect, the tide of authoritarianism that swept over Washington, D.C., on January 6 was in fact only a manifestation of a much larger phenomenon: the global ascent of right-wing authoritarian rule.[iii] In addition to major players where authoritarianism has been in place for a generation or longer like China and Russia, nations around the world—from the Philippines to Italy to Brazil and numerous places in between—autocratic regimes not only have secured political power, but have worked to enact its spread around the world.
This spread has been enabled by a media, internet, and social media environment in which misinformation and disinformation that readily disrupts democratic discourse have become the ordinary state of things. It’s manifested in the rise of far-right political groups, many of them engaging in intimidation and street violence while others work assiduously to insinuate themselves within the democratic electorate even as they undermine democracy itself.
Around the globe, democracies have faced sustained campaigns—fomented both by interior forces and those from outside—in which far-right operatives and leaders undermine the rule of law, pervert elections, attack media freedom, and inflame discrimination against minorities and mistreatment of migrants. Nowhere have these attacks had as significant effect on pluralistic institutions than in the United States, long considered the world’s leading exponent of democracy.
There have been several powerful indicators of American decline: a surge in political domination, embodied in the saturation of intimidation and violence in its discourse; the worsening of long-standing discrimination against racial and ethnic minority groups as well as recent policies on asylum and immigration, eroding their equal treatment under the law; and most particularly the sudden and sharp decline in confidence in its elections, toxified by Trump and his fellow Republicans both before and after his defeat in 2020.
But the United States is only one of the many democracies under siege. In Hungary and Turkey, democratic institutions have already been replaced by autocratic rule. In other nations like India, a theocratic and intolerant majority has despoiled the principles of pluralism and equal citizenship. In European nations like Germany, Sweden, and Italy, far-right political parties are ascendant and acquiring power and influence.
In the latter case, the far right’s rise to power was led by a longtime neofascist named Giorgia Meloni, who won the prime minister’s seat in Italy’s September 2022 elections. For many observers, it was the final manifestation of the long process by which right-wing extremism has been mainstreamed in the West—and, for that matter, the world.
