Riot on the Hill

Wild scenes in Washington DC tonight, as pro-Trump mobs, egged on by the man himself, invaded the very heart of US democracy, storming the Capitol Building to disrupt the formal confirmation of the presidential election results.

This is clearly a massive embarrassment for the US political class, indeed for the whole nation; such behaviour is not what one expects to see in a country that likes to lecture the rest of the world on how democracy should work. The big question is whether these events will shock those Republicans who were prepared to play to the Trump-loving gallery into reflecting on the wisdom of such a course of action. My guess is that it will, and that today’s disruption will prompt a moratorium on Trump-style demagoguery, at least for the immediate future. The reactionary forces that the President and his enablers have nurtured in the last four years are not going to disperse overnight though, and there are still two weeks of potential chaos to navigate before the new administration takes over, so there may be further outrages to come.

The news from DC overshadowed what would normally have been the big story of the day; the twin Democratic triumphs in Georgia which have cleared the way for Joe Biden to pursue his modest centrist programme. I’ve no doubt that we’ll find plenty of reasons to criticise him in the years to come, but right now a period of relative calm in Washington seems exactly what the world needs.