Cold-take analysis: What happened in Washington yesterday should not come as a surprise to anyone.

What’s surprising is the rhetoric espoused by the outgoing president didn’t incite a deadly riot earlier.

There remains an intellectual disconnection that doesn’t allow some Americans and observers elsewhere to see the parallels between the discourse in Washington and what has led to violence in failed or failing democracies elsewhere in the world.

This has been a genuine concern since Trump’s inauguration.

Critics who raised those concerns were often gaslit.

The belief the U.S. is somehow immune defied observation of the fault lines present in that society for decades ... or the rhetoric of more recent times.

Any dispassionate student of history or geopolitics could see the connection.

But it was the most passionate people - American Blacks, Jews, recent immigrants and anyone else with a recent experience with oppression or a cultural memory of it - who spoke out early.

They were treated as partisans down south.

The Thomas theorem is now almost a century old.

“If humans define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.”

The Thomases wrote that before Nazism and Communism.

Language matters. Rhetoric matters. No one is just a clown or a joke when they hold genuine power.

I’m done stating the obvious.

(And yes, I’m aware the Russian revolution preceded the Thomas theorem by six years.

Communism took a few years to assume its totalitarian form in the USSR.)