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Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics, life and culture.

My name is Freddie Gray. I'm the deputy editor of The Spectator.

I am delighted to be joined today by Daniel McCarthy, who is editor of modern age and a columnist

for The Spectator. And we're going to be talking about the future of the Republican Party.

Now, Dan, this week we marked January the 6th, the anniversary of the storming of the capital.

And while we touched on this and, well, the last podcast we did was about this on Americano.

So we probably shouldn't dwell on it for too long.

But I just wanted to get your

sense of the feeling about it in America, because it seems to me like the Democratic Party are

trying to sort of memorialize it in an attempt to banish the ghost of Donald Trump, which will lead us

on to talking about the future of the Republican Party. Is that what you think?

That's basically correct. So if you look at the opinion polls about January 6th, you find that

most Republicans think that this was a riot, it was a criminal act, but it was not something that

poses a danger to the Republic. If you look at polls of Democrats, a lot of them are comparing

the January 6th riot to the 9-11 attacks, to Pearl Harbor.

They have an extremely melodramatic view of what happened. And then if you look at independence,

they're about in the middle, and they are, you know, slightly more concerned about January 6th

or somewhat more concerned about it than the Republicans are, but they're not as alarmed as the Democrats.

And I think the Democrats have seriously misplayed their hand here by basically defining their party in large

part in the sort of first troubled year of the Biden administration by being the party of

hyping the January 6th attack and trying to make this a threat to our democracy.

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