For the super-rich, 2021 has been casting lots of shade—from the Sackler family’s weaseling out of any accountability for opioid deaths to the Pandora Papers’ exposure of billionaires’ offshore and domestic tax havens. We had reminders of how America’s richest families keep that “super” before the “rich”—like with tax loopholes allowing them to pass vast sums of wealth down to their heirs by avoiding capital gains taxes. We also learned from the New York Times that in the homes of the wealthy, many basic kitchen appliances are now being hidden within bespoke cabinets, and only the initiated know where. (For instance, a regular person could not find the fridge chez Cher.)

And yet after Democrats failed to get the votes for a corporate income tax hike to pay for President Biden’s infrastructure and social spending bill, they are also unlikely to pass a proposed billionaires’ tax that would make the super-rich pay annual capital gains taxes on the value appreciation of their humungous assets. That’s a shame since there are more billionaires than ever in the United States: 719 in 2021, an increase of almost 17% over 2020.

Perhaps the ultimate irony of the Trump era arrived during the voted-out President’s most recent impeachment trial, with a video montage of prominent Democrats using the word fight. After four years of the defendant’s “I know you are but what am I?” playground logic, Americans heard his lawyers do the exact same thing in attempting to show that there was no difference between someone trying to steal an election and those trying to stop him from doing that. Somehow, telling a mob to go down to the Capitol and “fight like hell” on the day Congress was certifying electoral votes is the equivalent of using the word fight on MSNBC.

I doubt it mattered what kind of argument Trump’s legal team made. On February 13, 43 know-nothings in the Senate Chamber affirmed their knowing nothing of Constitutional law (Brandenburg v. Ohio, for instance, which holds that protected First Amendment rights do not include “inciting or producing imminent lawless action”) by acquitting the election’s loser of incitement of insurrection, the article of impeachment against him.

The two weeks between the Capitol assault on our democracy and the inauguration of our 46th President roughly coincided with Sotheby’s “Americana Week.” Leaving aside the strange fact that Americana Week went on for 14 days, what drew me to the Sotheby’s ad for furniture and folk art up for virtual bid was View of Hallowell, Maine, an American School painting described in the catalog as “a mother and her son gazing upon the bustling waterfront and business district . . . from Butternut Park on the Chelsea side of the Kennebec River.”

The anonymous painting strikes all the right notes of historical nostalgia—one that, for me at least, was implanted by the historical-society reproductions in my grade school textbooks. These kinds of documents of our national past are among the few you could today deem kid-safe—the primitive full-body portraits of children as miniature adults, usually holding a flower, a butterfly, a piece of fruit, or an unfortunate kitten by the neck; landscapes with giant rectangular cows and sheep anchoring patchwork farmsteads, with rolling hills and towns across rivers like the Kennebec, enlivened by the occasional sailboat or tugboat.

“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.