Capitol/ credits fixed
Counter-argument since I’m in a contrary mood. A scene like this is only possible in a democracy. In a genuinely authoritarian state, there are no protests on this scale. And certainly none where the protesters have uncovered faces and openly carry guns. And absolutely certainly none where those protesters are allowed by the police to enter the parliament building in order to avoid bloodshed, which is what happened here. In China this would have been either a revolution or, much more likely, a massacre, i.e. Tiananmen Square.
It’s cold comfort, but the way this day played out was in fact a demonstration of how resilient US democracy is. The challenge is to stop the system being tested like this again.
A similar interpretation was made of that photo in Europe these four years, now we have understood that it represents something different.
In the photo there are people who do not want more democracy (stop the count they shouted) and now we see that they are the majority, they were in 2016 and in 2020 only the shock of covid made them not be. The US population no longer wants democracy and this photo represents them.
Counterpoint: reports suggest that most of them earnestly believe that the election was stolen. They themselves think - they really think - that they were trying to save democracy. Obviously something has really failed here. But it might not be democracy.
