Thread by @thomasafine

Imagine if this was a Muslim protest that turned into a riot, which masked a highly organized and well-prepared group of terrorists who successfully infiltrated the Capital building with intent to take hostages, while insiders hindered police and national guard deployment.

All you have to do in the previous tweet is change "Muslim" to "Trumpist" and this is exactly what actually happened.

Where is the outrage?

This is in many ways worse than 9/11. Far less dead people and in some ways less dramatic. But 9/11 never put our actual functioning government in danger.

And this being done by domestic terrorists ought to be more scary, not less, than

As a whole, our culture is primed to react, or even overreact, to attacks we perceive as coming form "outsiders". But we are dumbstruck when those same attacks come from within.

This may be an inbuilt thing in the human species. Tribal thinking.

The answer is that Trumpists can not be thought of as part of our tribe.

I have argued strongly in the past that the only way we can survive as a nation is if we repair national unity between the left and the right.

I stand by that idea.

But the limit of that tolerance must be that we reject those who are literally trying to destroy our nation.

I have also argued in the past that cultural norms are what controls our culture. Racism is contained as long as society as a whole agrees that it is taboo. It is not contained when we don't agree.

Similarly this is how Trumpism must be contained.

So we have two big challenges related to this. To put this into tribalist terms, we need to move our culture to a place where:

1. black people are uniformly regarded as "us".

2. Trumpists are uniformly regarded as "them".

(And these two challenges are not unrelated.)

And both of these things involve changing our mythology about the founding of our nation, the building of that nation, what it represents, and who it serves.