“A mob set on violence” has attracted more scrutiny in two weeks than most phrases do over generations. It is a cliché (though sometimes true) to say that violence is what a mob does, as an end in itself. But is that because a mob does not (or cannot) know what it wants? A lynch mob certainly knows what it wants. Supporters of Donald Trump came to the Capitol on January 6th wanting something, and the things many of them brought suggested it was violence. At a minimum, most wanted a line to be crossed, but it’s hard to know how many knew that once whatever line had been crossed, they became insurrectionists.

The rage itself wasn’t haphazard; it was only the rioters’ scattered attention (many seemed more concerned with livestreaming themselves in the Rotunda than stringing up Mike Pence) and lack of any deployment plan or tactical training that prevented more of the intended targets and their protectors from getting hurt or killed. Their impromptu defense was that it was all adult fun, some kind of Dad’s-Day-Off cosplay adventure where both sides ought to know the rules (or at least the safe word). I suppose they expected the public to envision a stadium of drunk football fans with painted torsos, men already engaged in playing out Braveheart fantasies of battling competing clans with hammers and axes.

However terrifying the scenes outside the Capitol right before the mob’s entry, the videos inside got to me more. They showed our leaders in the panicked moment of being surrounded and outnumbered and not knowing what was happening. The strange images of senators lying on their stomachs conjured for me U2 lyrics: I was on the inside when they pulled the four walls down. The very refrain of “I Will Follow” could apply to the Capitol corridors once the insurrectionists were in: If you walk away, walk away / I walk away, walk away / I will follow. Although that song is about the teenage Bono losing his mother, the album (Boy) is about the transition from childhood to manhood, begging an important question: Does this transition involve going from inside to outside or from outside to inside?

Another transition from childhood to manhood that January 6th conjured for me is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1831 story “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” where the boy at the center definitely goes from outside to inside.

A nighttime ferry drops Robin, a teenager from the country, at the port of an unnamed colonial Massachusetts town that might be Boston. It is nine o’clock, and the penniless lad is looking for his wealthy cousin, a magistrate of the Crown who has promised him work. Robin’s initial confidence (he considers himself “shrewd”) is gradually diminished as he walks about the labyrinthine streets of the darkened town asking after his cousin. The rough and crude residents on the streets and in a tavern turn hostile at the mention of Major Molineux and laugh at the boy’s quest. Robin encounters a disturbing man who appears to have horns protruding from his forehead, and he notices groups of young people dressed in costume and excitedly headed somewhere. His confusion and sense of dread culminate when a frenzied mob approaches with a cart carrying the captive Major Molineux who’s been tarred and feathered.

In this Gothic version of our origin story, the innocent, humble son of a clergyman goes from loathing the rabble to joining with them against his own kin—all within a matter of hours. The horned man he’d encountered earlier reappears to lead the mob procession: “The single horseman, clad in a military dress, and bearing a drawn sword, rode onward as the leader, and, by his fierce and variegated countenance, appeared like war personified; the red of one cheek was an emblem of fire and sword; the blackness of the other betokened the mourning that attends them.”

“Trumpets vomited a horrid breath,” and Robin sees his demoralized cousin: “His face was pale as death, and far more ghastly; the broad forehead was contracted in his agony, so that his eyebrows formed one grizzled line; his eyes were red and wild, and the foam hung white upon his quivering lip. His whole frame was agitated by a quick and continual tremor, which his pride strove to quell, even in those circumstances of overwhelming humiliation.” They “stared at each other in silence, and Robin’s knees shook, and his hair bristled, with a mixture of pity and terror.” But then the fierce swell of the mob overtakes him:

Robin seemed to hear the voices of . . . all who had made sport of him that night. The contagion was spreading among the multitude, when all at once, it seized upon Robin, and he sent forth a shout of laughter that echoed through the street, — every man shook his sides, every man emptied his lungs, but Robin’s shout was the loudest there. The cloud-spirits peeped from their silvery islands, as the congregated mirth went roaring up the sky! The Man in the Moon heard the far bellow. “Oho,” quoth he, “the old earth is frolicsome to-night!”

In writing about his own country, Hawthorne often seems like Charles Darwin traveling on The Beagle to strange and distant lands. He sees our “native” history as tribal, animal, visceral. As settlers of a virgin land (though this is a lie; we were conquerors of settled lands), we are always living outside laws tethered to another land—no Magna Carta, no Cnut—in what F. Scott Fitzgerald much later called the “fresh green breast of the new world.” Nature was not fair. Not only that; nature was violent. The bawdy, ale-drinking rebels who tar and feather their British overlord in “Kinsman” would, in some respects, seem worlds apart from the stern, humorless, rule-abiding puritans of The Scarlet Letter. But the underlying desire for violence—what H. L. Mencken called the puritan’s “lust for relentless and barbarous persecution”—is a through-line that determines inside from outside. Hawthorne saw this natural will to violence within Americans as a menace that could erupt at any moment.

Many in Hawthorne’s time believed that education was the answer, that by educating the citizenry to make informed decisions, a centralized democratic government would promote the equality of opportunity that would mitigate against violence. America achieved its greatest literacy per capita between the Revolution and 1830—ironically under the presidency of Andrew Jackson, an uneducated man who had to be tutored to write. In January 1828, the Journal of Education gave a glowing account of the state of affairs:

Our population is 12,000,000, for the education of which, we have 50 colleges, besides several times the number of well endowed and flourishing academies leaving primary schools out of the account. For meeting the intellectual wants of this 12,000,000, we have about 600 newspapers and periodical journals. There is no country, (it is often said), where the means of intelligence are so generally enjoyed by all ranks and where knowledge is so generally diffused among the lower orders of the community, as in our own.

An yet many Americans resisted education and literacy as anathema to what was necessary to succeed. As Richard Hofstadter observed in Anti-intellectualism in American Life (1963):

Primitivism has displayed itself in some quarters as a quest for the spirit of primitive Christianity, but also as a demand to recover the powers of “nature” in man; with it one may be close to Nature or to God—the difference is not always wholly clear. But in it there is a persistent preference for the “wisdom” of intuition, which is deemed to be natural or God-given, over rationality, which is cultivated and artificial.

Hawthorne made his name as a writer of Gothic fiction, the heart of which is fear—not just of the supernatural but of technology’s encroaching limitations on the unknown. It wasn’t just congressional fighting over the extension of slavery that made the late antebellum years so violent: as the west was mapped and settled, the closing frontier of the imagination sparked a reconnection with primitive impulses. The once-bountiful outside was not just disappearing; it was being claimed by the wrong inside. Hawthorne could sense not just Americans’ resistance to the rationality of education but their embrace of what gushed forth from that sacred space of “natural” intuition: violence.

In “Chiefly about War-Matters,” an 1862 essay in the Atlantic Monthly, Hawthorne expressed doubts about the South ever changing its ways even if it could be vanquished. Many of his Northern contemporaries thought his essay grossly disrespectful of the war dead and President Lincoln, but there is a part of him that can’t avoid seeing absurd humor in this mass purging of young, innocent life on both sides—all for some fantasyland that had never existed. Hawthorne could see the Civil War as the ultimate test of inside and outside, and he half-facetiously suggested that America would be better off without the South: “heaven was heaven still, as Milton sings, after Lucifer and a third part of the angels had seceded from its golden palaces,—and perhaps all the more heavenly, because so many gloomy brows, and soured, vindictive hearts, had gone to plot ineffectual schemes of mischief elsewhere.”

Although equating the South with Lucifer might seem brutal, Hawthorne surely understood that the Satan of Milton’s Paradise Lost is a tragic hero, his author unsure of whether the fallen angel is the victim of tragedy or the cause of it. Milton’s Satan tries to rationalize his failed rebellion by claiming he has been liberated from fear, but he is nonetheless resentful of God and Christ, his son; of the good, non-rebellious angels; and of Adam and Eve in Eden. In Book IV, he says to his fellow banished angels:

All hope excluded thus, behold, instead
Of us outcast, exil’d, his new delight,
Mankind created, and for him this World!
So farewell hope, and with hope farewell fear,
Farewell remorse; all good to me is lost;
Evil be thou my good.

Given the Lost Cause repercussions of the war’s outcome, Hawthorne’s analogy to a figure of grievance, prideful cynicism, and a predilection for violence is eerily apt.

So is this the story of who we are as Americans, this conflict between inside and outside in which we don’t even know which side owns what? In data collected in the fall of 2020, a team led by Larry Diamond of Stanford University found that about 1 in 5 Americans with a strong political affiliation say they are willing to endorse violence if the other party wins the presidency. This correlates with data from the same year finding that 1 out of every 6 U.S. adults lacks basic reading skills. So maybe those Jackson-era optimists were right about violence and education.

But we are still left with the question of which comes first: a primal hate that denies education any entry, or a void of rational thought into which hate can pour itself. In many people, if you take away the hate, there’s not much of a life left. Like Spanish moss, hate needs something to hang on. As Paul Waldman explained in the Washington Post: “Trump fights and fights, angrily, bitterly, endlessly driven forward by his hatred of the people his supporters hate. That’s what the base loves, and every other Republican knows it.” Does Trump’s base specifically hate Democrats, or do Democrats fill their need to hate? Is the thing they love the fighting itself? Is all rebellion driven by a desire for violence? Rationalizing his call for the death penalty for the wrongly accused Central Park Five, Trump told Larry King in 1989: “I hate these people and let’s all hate these people because maybe hate is what we need.” You might say that Trump gave his followers—and specifically the January 6th insurrectionists—permission to do what they already wanted to do. Thus we have to wonder how many Americans were actively looking for a Trump—someone who considers hate a necessity—and how many, like Hawthorne’s Robin, fell in with the mob when they recognized it as the true and only inside. §