January 6 Is Five Years Behind Us. The Threat It Exposed Is Not.
On the fifth anniversary of the attack on the Capitol, I’m participating in a hearing meant to remember what happened. I’m grateful for that—but I worry that as the shock fades, so does our vigilance,
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Five years ago today, I walked into the Capitol with a knot in my stomach that I still struggle to describe. I had served in that building for years. I knew its rhythms, its quiet corners, the way the marble echoes when the halls are empty. January 6, 2021 shattered all of that. It didn’t just break windows or doors. It broke an illusion many of us carried—that the foundations of American democracy were so solid they could never really be shaken.
I remember standing there afterward, surrounded by debris and disbelief, thinking: This is not who we are. And yet, it was. Or at least, it was a part of us we had long refused to confront.
Today marks the fifth anniversary of January 6, and later today I’ll be participating in a hearing organized by Democrats to remember what happened and why it matters. I’m glad to do it. I believe remembering is essential. Democracies don’t survive by accident, and they certainly don’t survive by amnesia. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel a deep unease heading into it.
My worry isn’t about the hearing itself. It’s about whether January 6 has already started to fade into the background noise of our politics—filed away as “old news,” something grim but familiar, something people feel they already understand. History shows us that the most dangerous moment isn’t always when the threat is new and shocking. It’s when the threat becomes boring.
Fear drove people to the Capitol that day. Not just raw rage, but a cultivated fear—fear of losing power, fear of change, fear fed and directed by leaders who knew better and chose themselves anyway. January 6 was not spontaneous. It was the inevitable outcome of lies repeated so often they began to feel like truth.
What stays with me most isn’t only the violence. It’s what followed. The silences. The rationalizations. The slow normalization of the unacceptable. I watched people who knew exactly what had happened decide it was easier to move on than to confront it honestly. I learned then that democracy doesn’t just die from assaults. It erodes when cowardice becomes strategy.
That’s part of why today feels so complicated. The president hasn’t moved on. The impulse that fueled January 6 hasn’t disappeared. If anything, it has been refined, made more strategic, more embedded in institutions and rhetoric. The moves to weaken democratic guardrails are no longer chaotic—they’re methodical. And yet, because they happen incrementally, they risk being ignored.
We hold hearings. We mark anniversaries. We replay footage we’ve all seen before. And I worry that while we’re looking backward, our defenses are quietly lowering. That vigilance is being replaced by fatigue. That outrage has been dulled by repetition.
Leaving Congress forced me to reckon with a hard truth: institutions don’t defend themselves. They rely on people—flawed, scared, ambitious people—to stand up when standing up comes at a cost. January 6 clarified that price. For some, it was too high. For others, it became a line they will never cross again.
I’ve been asked whether January 6 made me cynical. It stripped away any remaining naïveté, but cynicism implies detachment. I feel anything but detached. If anything, that day bound me more tightly to the idea of this country—not as a myth or a slogan, but as a responsibility.
I think often about the people whose names most Americans will never know. The police officers who held the line. The staffers who barricaded doors and texted loved ones, unsure if they’d make it home. The election workers across the country who kept counting votes despite threats and harassment. They didn’t give speeches. They didn’t seek attention. They simply did their jobs because they believed in something bigger than themselves. That, too, is America.
Five years later, accountability has been uneven. Justice has been slow. And the temptation to declare the chapter closed is strong. Forgetting is easier than reckoning. But forgetting doesn’t heal a democracy—it leaves it vulnerable.
What gives me hope isn’t the absence of danger. It’s the persistence of people who refuse to accept that this is as good as it gets. I see it in young Americans who reject the idea that politics must be cruel and transactional. I see it in people who understand that democracy isn’t about winning at all costs—it’s about agreeing on the rules even when you lose. I see it in veterans who know the difference between loyalty to a country and loyalty to a man.
January 6 was a trauma, but trauma doesn’t have to define the future. It can clarify values. It can sharpen resolve. It can remind us that the American experiment has always been fragile—and that it has always survived because ordinary people chose courage over convenience.
So yes, I’ll sit in a hearing room today and remember. I’ll speak because memory matters. But remembrance alone isn’t enough. Democracy demands more than anniversaries. It asks us to stay alert when the headlines fade, to care when it’s no longer shocking, to defend institutions not just when they’re attacked violently, but when they’re hollowed out quietly.
On this fifth anniversary, I don’t feel despair. I feel resolve. The same resolve I felt walking out of the Capitol that night, determined that lies and violence would not have the final say. They haven’t yet. And as long as we resist the urge to grow numb—to treat democracy as background noise rather than a living obligation—they never will.
The danger of January 6 isn’t that we remember it too vividly. It’s that we stop paying attention altogether. And I still believe this country is better than that.
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