Everything that has happened in the furor, disarray, and murderous violence of American politics over the past decade has led the commentariat to scramble for antecedents. That includes me. Is this unprecedented? This is the question journalists have been asking historians for a decade now. It arrives by text and voice mail. It arrives by post and e-mail. It knocks on the door and all but raps on the windowpane, tap, tap, tapping. I have been asked this question in the dog park, at the drugstore, in a hayfield, by my mailman, during a snowstorm, while knitting in my kitchen, and in every last blasted Zoom room. And historians—or most of us, anyway—answer, meekly, bleakly, dutifully, hauling out of the archives the disputed election of 1876, the 1970 shooting at Kent State, the parents’-rights movement of the nineteen-twenties, the impeachment of the Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase. Compared to x, Trump is y. But why? On the upcoming fifth anniversary of the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, might it not be best, at this point, simply to stop? Very little in human history is altogether without precedent if you look at it long enough. And what of it? If U.S. history is a map, we are off the grid, over a cliff, lost at sea without a compass. Can anyone honestly maintain that the caning of Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate, in 1856, or the shots fired by four Puerto Rican nationalists from the balcony of the Capitol, in 1954, offer meaningful points of comparison to the assassination of Charlie Kirk or the events of January 6th?journey-inline-newsletterinline-newsletter