Will People Watch the January 6 Committee Hearings?

Does it matter if they don’t?

I have a 9/11 section on my bookshelf. Do you? On the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks last year, I wrote about the best 9/11 books. These books are ones I actually try to read every couple of years — the best ones are 102 Minutes and Fall and Rise, released in May 2019 and tragically underread — just to remind me of the horror of that day and how much it changed American life forever. I also read them as a promise to myself I made on that day. I was in New York City that day, a day that was so awash in horror and confusion that I vowed that, someday, when the dust had settled and we had perspective on everything that had happened, I’d learn everything I could about it. I’d read every book, I’d watch every documentary, I’d listen to every story. It was so awful that educating one’s self on what happened felt like a public duty. You had to do whatever you could to make sure that it never happened again.

I thought this exact thing on January 6, 2021. What I was witnessing was so disorienting, so unfathomable, that I found myself staggered. How had it come to this? What could we do to make sure nothing like this ever occurred again? You can make a strong argument that it was the worst, most destabilizing day in American history since September 11, and a day we, once again…