The Capitol mob images shouldn’t surprise you. Open insurrection was always where we were headed.

If you’re not sick to your stomach looking at the images coming out of Washington, you will be. And if a lawless mob carrying Confederate flags, braying open sedition and storming the Capitol doesn’t sicken you, it will sicken your children — if the nation survives.

Last summer, when Black Lives Matters protesters came to Washington to protest police violence against African Americans, National Guard troops lined up in a phalanx rows deep on the steps of Lincoln Memorial. They were there, they said, to protect an important symbol of our democracy. Today, the racist remains of the party of Lincoln attacked not just a symbol of democracy but also its process and function. As the president incited a riot and then egged it on with tweets stoking grievance, over an election that he lost by no small margin, angry crowds did the unthinkable: They bypassed or overwhelmed police lines, streamed through Statuary Hall and took to the dais of the Senate chamber, shouting obscenities, inanities and treason. Even after he called for his forces to stand down, President Donald Trump continued to stoke the same anger that animated them, inspiriting them with the same emotions that brought them to the Capitol, to clamber over walls, preen and posture and scream with rage.

The whole drama, the body language, the flags and the onslaught, was borrowed from other dramas — genuine displays of revolutionary fervor against autocrats, authentic acts protesting illegitimate governments. But it was a charade. Not civic or selfless, but corrosive, destructive and illegal.

In real time, journalists and pundits expressed disbelief and wondered aloud: How can this be happening? There was a simple, terrible and chastening answer, and one that will sicken decent Americans for generations to come: It happened because we refused to believe it could happen.

Many Americans once considered this blindness to cataclysm latent in every democratic government, including ours, to be a peculiarly American form of strength. Our naivete was a talisman against disorder. The power of precedence, the comforting illusion of a stable history, the fantasy that our institutions were so just and well ordered that nothing could shake them, might well have seemed a bulwark against today’s attempted coup. Surely Americans, who are by our own fatuous self-definition fundamentally decent, would never attempt the unthinkable, no matter how angry. And so people who get paid to dither on television suddenly began talking at it, repeating again and again their disbelief, as if the arrival of this ugliness was as unexpected as an errant asteroid or alien invasion in a bad science-fiction flick.

But over the past four years, as Trump attacked again and again, dividing the country, inflaming anger, exacerbating every conflict and pouring salt into every wound, the unwillingness to see today’s events became more than a weakness. It became culpable.

We could muster the National Guard to defend bricks and mortar against the possibility that perhaps some angry protesters against police brutality might spill a little paint or hurl water bottles. But we couldn’t, or wouldn’t, defend the Constitution and the republic against open rebellion, a rebellion foretold by every act of a lawless president who has never been coy about his real intent.

One moment in Wednesday’s appalling mayhem was telling. As they filed through Statuary Hall, some of Trump’s thugs snapped selfies of themselves, as if they were merely tourists. Meanwhile, windows were being broken, room trashed, historic spaces defiled. You might think it odd that the hardcore Make America Great Again crowd would damage a beloved symbol of the country they profess to support. But not if you understand the deeper dynamic. This was never about who wins elections and the right to govern. It has always been about ownership. Trump’s cult believes that they are the sole, legitimate owners of the country, and if that’s true, then there can be no sin in damaging what is rightfully yours, right?

Which explains why the nation’s capital went into a defensive crouch last summer and enlisted the military to put down peaceful demonstrations, when multiracial crowds gathered to demand that the country live up to the promise of its founding documents. These were outsiders, aliens, invaders. But when the Congress met to formalize the peaceful transference of power, suddenly one of the most fortified buildings on the planet was defenseless against amateur insurrectionists.

In the doctrine of white supremacy, articulated in the deeds, acts, executive orders and repellent speeches of the president himself, some people legitimately own America, while others are merely suffered to live here by the consent of men like Trump and his supporters. Police will mostly defer to the former with circumspection and polite restraint; they will beat down and gas the latter even before the hour of curfew has arrived.

In this most recent escalation of a four-year putsch — abetted by some of the same representatives and senators whose chambers were attacked by the mob — we see the last few threads of Trumpism that were never explicit now made manifest. Trumpism was never about governance or stewardship of the country. It was about a right to possess so deep that it includes the right to destroy.

That is what is so sickening today, what will sicken us for decades to come and what has shamed us before the world in perpetuity. There is only one way out of this, only one redemption. We must see what has happened today for what it is, with no mincing of words and no obfuscations. A minority of Americans, encouraged by a reckless, cornered and irresponsible lame-duck president, sought to take full possession of what they feel they, and they alone, legitimately possess, which is the right to run the country without a Constitution, without laws, without equal rights for all people.

We knew this was coming, we had the evidence, none of it was a mystery.

Those who claim otherwise, who pretend that this wasn’t the inevitable last act of a presidency grounded on white supremacy, now bear the shame of America. They aren’t blind or foolish, they are guilty. Let them retire from public life and reflect with penitence on what we have seen today. And then let us a remake a capital city that will never again leave itself open to this kind of tawdry insurrection.

Philip Kennicott is the Pulitzer Prize-winning art and architecture critic of The Washington Post. He has been on staff at The Post since 1999, first as classical music critic, then as culture critic.

The views expressed here are the writer’s and are not necessarily endorsed by the Anchorage Daily News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary(at)adn.com. Send submissions shorter than 200 words to letters@adn.com or click here to submit via any web browser. Read our full guidelines for letters and commentaries here.