Usually when trying to understand politics, we all grasp for historical precedents or analogies to situations that the founders envisioned. Most political commentary consists of those kinds of warring analogies, like “during the pandemic of 1918 city governments in San Francisco did X, while St Louis did Y” or “the writers of the Constitution wrote the Second Amendment to reserve militia powers to the states, which they believed were…” And a lot of the disagreement between different camps comes from various ways of interpreting the will of the people from the revolutionary era who envisioned how the government ought to do things.

Probably the largest gap in our understanding of how the government ought to work is due to the fact that the Constitution makes no references at all to political parties. This seems to have been the most significant oversight of the founders, who imagined that the three branches of government would be competing with one another, rather than cooperating across them based on factional affiliation to parties. That tension has been increasingly obscured over time despite the founders’ interest in preventing “factionalism.”

That obscurity has caused some number of people to miss an important bit of context in interpretations of last Wednesday’s events: that this scenario was exactly kind of thing that the framers of the constitution spent a lot of time thinking about. In fact, it was pretty much the most obvious political crime.

The president incited a mob to attack the congress during a transition of power. Strip away the particularities of our current age, the party affiliations of the various actors, the more recent historical examples of right-wing authoritarianism which this act was an outgrowth of, and the specific vectors which carried the false narratives that precipitated it. (Violent authoritarianism is almost always based on fraudulent beliefs.)

“What if the president doesn’t like something that congress is doing, and he sends the military to arrest all of them? Or he ignores the laws they pass over his veto? Or he whips up a mob to invade the capitol?” These are the kinds of questions we all game out when learning about the U.S. Constitution in middle-school history. It’s something that lots of people have thought about! Including, importantly, the very people who came up with the idea that there should be such a thing as a president and a legislature, and who enumerated the powers they ought to be granted to deal with one another. Unlike most of the political questions people debate, we don’t need to imagine what the founders would have thought about this—they spent ample time explaining their thinking about lawless rulers and the ability of government to constrain in situations exactly like this!

This is going to be the thing that schoolchildren learn about Donald Trump in 2076. That he lost re-election and then attempted to remain in power using every possible bullshit recourse. Because it is such a clear object lesson on how the various parts of the federal government and political representation as delegated to the states are all designed to interact as to make a perfect writing prompt for kids writing papers in class. They will be given essay assignments on how these events were a violation of the separation of powers, and be able to easily cite the steadily escalating constitutional abuses in the years running up to Wednesday’s debacle. Depending on the way the next 11 or so days play out, the extremely straightforward way in which he tried and failed to do this ought to clarify and distill all of his other actions over the past five years. We’ve been the frog in the pot as it heats up, getting acclimated to each transgression as it passes without consequence, waiting for the bubbles to start frothing over. (Or at least those of us without the wherewithal to look over the edge of the pot at any point and notice the burner.)

The specific lies which have facilitated this attempted power grab are so comically bogus and premeditated as to be unworthy of taking seriously, and have been roundly discredited by anyone even remotely tethered to reality at this point. Some people, by wandering into that mire and looking around, have gotten a bit hung up on the specifics of that alternate reality universe, missing the important consideration that any fascist uprising would, of necessity, be marinated in a sauce of dishonesty. It is always thus with demagogues, and it is indeed important not to ignore the chain of custody tying it to traits of right-wing thinking that led inevitably to this. The right is always a force for authoritarianism and enemies of a free and just society.

Yet that should not completely overshadow the fact that Trump sicced his bloodthirsty deplorables on Republicans as well as Democrats. People in the crowd were most eager to hang the Vice-President (working in his capacity as president of the Senate) and the Republican legislators whom they saw as obstacles to the executive seizing power. They ran roughshod over the seat of government, roaming around the corridors with zip ties to kidnap lawmakers and vandalizing their chambers. It’s a textbook definition of the kind of mob chaos that Madison et al imagined a president would attempt if the other branches were not given the ability to retaliate. Any senator or representative who doesn’t currently understand that they were attacked in their capacity as a legislator rather than as a member of a party “faction” right now needs a wake up call stronger than their own attempted murder, apparently. (The Republicans who voted to sustain objections to the electoral college votes after the incident belong in this category).

Such congresspeople may also apparently need to be reminded that failing to punish not only the president, but also the members of their own ranks who abetted this attack on representative democracy, will invite future attempts, and weaken the United States as a concept.

While I was watching the crisis unfold on Wednesday and seeing the flood of images that emerged afterwards (many gleefully filmed by the perpetrators themselves, who chose this particular moment to not wear masks in a turn of self-incriminating thinking that would be hilarious if it weren’t packaged with an adjacent cruelty towards others that is a hallmark of the year of Covid), I found myself becoming genuinely angry in a way I didn’t expect. I’m usually pretty above it, when it comes to sanctimonious outrage at offensive acts towards patriotic symbols, but as an American, it was infuriating to watch it all come to this in a way that I had cynically believed myself unable to feel at this point. Of all the disgraceful behavior of the right in our recent time period: suppressing votes, stealing a Supreme Court seat, extorting our foreign allies for domestic political advantage, stalling assistance to the country as it suffers through a health crisis, corrupting the justice system, and cheering on basically every variety of brutality towards Black people or immigrants—this was so obviously seditious that anyone who wasn’t shocked by it can safely be written off as unshockable. Anyone with a modicum of affection for this country (or at least good neo-classical architecture) was revolted.

Though this travesty was in some ways the least consequential of the events of the past year for the actual lives of people living in the United States, it was the most forthrightly symbolic of the right’s utter disregard for our shared civic spirit. If this isn’t enough for the people who preen and pose as if they honor our national values to realize that the forces they’ve been stoking are vile and un-American, what else possibly could be? It isn’t like the founders didn’t try to warn them about this guy.