A Simple Answer

Purporting to explain "Why More Republicans Aren’t Outraged By Jan. 6" is a lot like purporting to explain why more colonial Americans weren't outraged by the Boston Tea Party back in 1774.

Interestingly enough, there's another FiveThirtyEight article that does a pretty good job of explaining why. In Maggie Koerth's "We’re Misunderstanding What Caused Jan. 6," she makes a really straightforward point, courtesy of University of Michigan political science professor Christian Davenport: “They’re interested in political reform and not in the fact that people are pissed.”

The protesters at the capitol a year ago today were angry. It can be decreed that their grievances, income inequality, racial resentment and declining trust in institutions, as Professor Davenport puts them, are illegitimate, but that doesn't make them any less real. Simply telling someone they have no right to be angry about the things that they're angry about has never worked, why would anyone expect it to now? So when Professor Julia Azari calls out a lack of feeling threatened and the growth of zero-sum politics as reasons why more Republicans aren't taking what happened on January 6th of 2021 "seriously," she shows the very interest in political reform that Professor Daveport mentions.

Americans are becoming, more and more, disconnected from what people who disagree with them think, as Ms. Koerth points out in her article, and thus they are becoming angry and afraid of the monstrous caricature of the other side that's being presented to them and that they mistake for their fellow countrymen. The habit of assuming good intentions has been lost (if it ever really existed) in American politics. When you understand yourself to be up against a group of people who are brainwashed, hateful and racist (and both Democrats and Republicans tend to believe this about the other) being ready to defend oneself seems rational. And if, as the adage goes, "the best defense is a good offense," going on the attack early is also a rational strategy. Why would someone be outraged about this, even if they saw it as an overreaction to present circumstances?

Sure, it's profitable, as a politician, to present the other side as monstrous to the point of inhumanity. But it's also difficult to do that without something to build on. Americans may not have an accurate picture of opposing partisans, but they're not as far off the mark, I suspect, when they presume that partisan policies tend to focus on the welfare of the people who voted the current partisan lawmakers into office. It's been long understood that the reason why so much legislation in the United States favors the elderly over the young is that older people are more likely to vote. And when people are insecure about their own position in life, they're not particularly receptive to benefits going to other people, especially those that they perceive as being advantaged in relation to themselves. If Democratic lawmakers are thought to vote for benefits solely for Democratic voters, why wouldn't Republicans, who feel they also need help, resent that?

People support governments, or any institution, for that matter, when they understand that the institution is supporting them. People may be forced into avoiding open criticism of a government, or even parroting its praises, by threats of sanction, but enthusiasm for government requires people understanding that it looks after their interests.

The protestors in Washington D.C. last year didn't feel that the Federal government was looking out for their interests. To the contrary, they believed (correctly or not doesn't really matter) that people in the government were actively working against them, for the benefit of brainwashed, hateful and racist others. (And child sex traffickers, because that's also a current stand-in for Evil.) And the reason other Republican voters aren't more outraged is that many of them believe the same, to some degree or another. And if you're a Republican lawmaker or candidate for office, you can either ride that wave or be swamped by it. Whether one believes it or not doesn't really matter because there's no effective gatekeeping that prevents people who are willing to go along from being elected. And so it goes.

I'd say that there's no point in pretending, but that would presume that people like Professor Azari actually understand what time it is, and are willfully maintaining a fiction, when they aren't. But they're not looking at the people they profess to be explaining. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand that people are angry, or why they're angry. But it does require taking them, and their perception of themselves and their circumstances seriously, rather than simply chalking it up to delusion or a sense of entitlement. But this is one of the side effects of when people stop assuming good intent; the presumption of bad faith becomes contagious.