Name: Crowds attract the strangest folk, be it here or in the US
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Crowds attract the strangest folk, be it here or in the US

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Imagine for a moment that after the last UK election the Conservatives had clearly won but the Labour Party had refused to concede.Imagine, furthermore, that the last time Labour won an election, senior Conservatives refused to accept that fact, claiming instead that foreign powers had installed the Labour government.Play that scenario out and you get close to making sense of what the hell happened on Capitol Hill this week.It has been plain for a number of cycles now that American democracy is close to broken, if not smashed apart. After the 2016 election, many US Democrats refused to accept that won legitimately. They spent four years trying – – to prove it. Since November 2020, Trump himself has taken that tactic a step further . America was already a powder-keg. But it was Trump who proved willing to run around handing out matches.Those who stormed the Capitol on Wednesday . Trump has repeatedly insisted that the November election was stolen and that he won it.As the weeks went on, he made the same claims, and every time they were looked into they fell apart. This was a point that Lindsay Graham, the South Carolina Republican senator, made from the floor on Wednesday.The Supreme Court rejected Trump’s appeals to discount or overturn votes. As did authorities at state level. Polls suggested around nine out of 10 Trump voters believed he won the election. Trump not only refused to leave office, but bolted all the doors that would have allowed him a graceful or dignified exit from it.On Wednesday the US Congress had been due to confirm Joe Biden’s victory.And it was to avert this that Trump called on supporters to congregate in Washington. His rhetoric before the march on the Capitol will go down in history as a wildly reckless political speech. He told his supporters: “We will never give up. We will never concede. It doesn’t happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft.”He continued: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women. And we’ll probably not be cheering for some of them. Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength.”Imagine if someone had spoken like this in our own country. If at the height of Parliament’s Brexit stalemate before the last election, when Parliament appeared to be acting against the will of the people, a political figure in Britain had called on the public to march on Westminster and “show strength”, what might have happened? I am not certain the British scenario would have played out so very differently.Because this is what happens when you raise a crowd. All sorts of people emerge: .It happened last summer when many peaceful Americans horrified by the actions of one Minnesotan policeman came out on to the streets of America under the banner . As they marched, they started to learn that not everybody had the same interests. Significant numbers were out to have fun. Others wanted to riot, loot, steal and burn. They sullied themselves and the movement they professed to care for. So it was on Wednesday.Many non-Americans will marvel at the array of attention-seekers, eccentrics and ordinary-looking people who made up the crowd that pushed its way into the Capitol. Much attention will be paid to those people waving Confederate flags – the flag of the old South. And while some will try to insist that this shows that the protesters were all racists, the flag is seen by others as a symbol of state-rights over laws dictated by Washington.Likewise there are those who claim that if BLM or had attempted to push their way into the Capitol, the number of people shot by authorities would be far higher. In reality, BLM-Antifa protesters have been allowed to assail state and federal buildings with impunity over the last year. So that divisive claim does not hold. Most likely, law-enforcement were stunned by flag-waving Americans pushing their way forwards in such numbers and rightly reluctant to open fire on a crowd.In recent years, Britain has seen the fall-off of trust in our institutions but it is nothing compared to the distrust and hatred of Washington emanating from every corner of the US in recent years. People believe that Washington wants to take away everything they have: their money, their rights, their guns, their religion. Pushed to such a place, and encouraged to congregate, what did Trump imagine would happen?This has been festering for years. Joe Biden’s job – indeed the job of Americans from both sides of the aisle – is not just to work out what has gone wrong, but to work together to try to make things right.Douglas Murray is a British author and associate editor of The SpectatorRelated TopicsAdvertisementRelated TopicsWe rely on advertising to help fund our award-winning journalism.We urge you to turn off your ad blocker for The Telegraph website so that you can continue to access our quality content in the future.Thank you for your support.Need help?Visit ourpage.Close

Imagine for a moment that after the last UK election the Conservatives had clearly won but the Labour Party had refused to concede.Imagine, furthermore, that the last time Labour won an election, senior Conservatives refused to accept that fact, claiming instead that foreign powers had installed the Labour government.Play that scenario out and you get close to making sense of what the hell happened on Capitol Hill this week.It has been plain for a number of cycles now that American democracy is close to broken, if not smashed apart. After the 2016 election, many US Democrats refused to...

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Crowds attract the strangest folk, be it here or in the US

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