A big election day is coming up, and I have been thinking about January 6, 2021. Considering everything that has happened since, the events of that day grow in significance. January 6 now seems like the midpoint of a monster movie—the bloody event that makes clear just how bad the situation really is. Yet I fear that the most damaging legacy of that day lies not in its events, but in the lessons that everyone took from them.

Apart from hardcore MAGA acolytes, everyone will tell you that January 6 was bad. But why was it bad? The standard answer, the conventional wisdom of most people across the political spectrum who aspire to be seen as reasonable, is that the participants of January 6 are loathsome because they defiled democracy. They forcefully interrupted the solemn business of Congress; they shattered the stately windows of our nation’s Capital; they scuffed the polished floors of the rotunda with muddy boots that they later disrespectfully propped up on the desk of the Speaker of the House. There was generic condemnation of the day’s violence, yes, but more specifically, the coverage of that day settled on revulsion at the fact that a mob of rabble too it upon themselves to assault with force the heart of America’s system of democratic governance. Lawmakers and political commentators alike—all of whom professionally stroll the very halls where the rioters rampaged in violation of decorum and dress codes—recoiled against the idea that these people would attempt to use force to thwart the noble, peaceful transfer of power that has carried America through centuries of turbulence.

This view of the morality of January 6 is wrong. Not only is it wrong, but it is actively harmful. What it fails to reckon with is the fact that most of the people out there on January 6 believed that they were the ones trying to prevent a stolen election. They believed that they were the ones defending democracy against being hijacked by a gang of corrupt insiders. Washington, DC is a city that valorizes the Boston Tea Party and the American Revolution inside of museums that are steps away from the Capitol. It is a city strewn with statues of early American insurrectionists who illegally took up arms against their duly appointed British leaders. Consider the absolute incoherence of holding the founding fathers up as heroes, while condemning thousands of modern Americans who saw themselves as upholding the very same values, with the same tactics. That is not clear thinking. Internalize that contradiction at your own peril.

The reason why January 6 was bad is that it was motivated by a lie. Its purported cause was false. The members of the crowd were misled and deluded. They thought the election was being stolen, but it was not. The man they wanted to seat as the winner had in fact lost. They therefore found themselves in the role of anti-democratic mob, rather than as the brave pro-democratic patriots of their own imagination. The fault for this lies with the participants themselves, certainly, but even more so with the half-mad narcissistic president who enlisted them in his pathetic quest to cling to power at all costs, and even more so with the vast apparatus of right wing media and craven Republican politicians who knew deep down that Trump lost, but were willing to go along with his ad hoc attempt to overthrow the American government because they figured they might get some personal benefit out of it. Many of the violent rioters of January 6 deserve to be in jail, but there are sitting United States Senators who are even more deserving of being in jail for their actions during the 2020 post-election chaos.

Delusion as a motivation for crime is not a legal defense. Allowing yourself to be drawn into delusion because you are racist, bigoted, selfish, or hateful is a serious failing. But all of the middle American suckers who rode buses to DC on January 6 under the mistaken impression that they were going to Stop the Steal have a far greater moral defense of their own idiotic actions than do the members of the Republican establishment who goaded them into that belief, while knowing full well that it was all bullshit.

It is not surprising that members of Congress would take the position, “Under no circumstances should you storm the place where I work.” It is reasonable that all of the police officers and security guards and receptionists and Congressional staffers and janitors and journalists and curious passersby who found themselves threatened by the riots on January 6 would take the position, “Hey! What the fuck??” It goes without saying that Trump’s personal project of pardoning the rioters is nothing more than an aspiring strongman rewarding what he hopes will be his own personal army of thugs, the actions of a gangster. Yet there is a serious danger in allowing ourselves to settle into the rote, kindergarten-esque, teary-eyed conclusion that January 6 was a purely deplorable attack on Our Values, a sad spectacle of brutality defiling the hallowed rights that our Founding Fathers won for us all.

“What country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms,” wrote the most famous Founding Father. “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure.”

Election day is next Tuesday. Though the future is unpredictable, there is every indication that the election will be a bad one for the president. And this president has proven, for year after year, through countless outrageous actions, that he is quite enthusiastic about asserting than any electoral loss for him and his party are a result of mythical corruption. In addition to the many unfortunately legal methods of electoral corruption that we are already subject to—gerrymandering, mid-cycle redistricting, dark money spending, voter suppression, the use of federal agents to intimidate voters, and so on—it is reasonable to assume, based on past conduct, that the President of the United States and his loyalists are already thinking of ways to try to steal the midterm elections, or at least to alter the results in their favor in contravention of the voters’ will. That is not a prediction. It is just an observation that if such a thing were to happen, the number of warnings that it was coming would be astounding.

If the midterm elections are stolen—through force, corruption, and lies—what would you do? Would you think back to January 6, 2021, and reflect upon how bad that day was, and conclude that you should sit at home and accept the final word of the White House and allow the theft to play out? Or would you get on a bus, go to DC, take to the streets, and do what you could to shut down the city? If riot police flooded the streets and declared the protests illegal, and if Senators went on TV and accused you of being part of an anti-democratic mob of criminals that was out to overthrow the nonviolent process of Congress as it assisted the president in stealing the election, would just salute and go back home? There are no easy answers here. Facing down government power, even with nonviolence and civil disobedience, is a scary prospect. But now is the time to get clear in your own mind that resistance in the streets is not, on its own, something to be condemned as criminal and irresponsible. It depends on why they are happening, doesn’t it?

America is the most successfully violent country in the world. We killed everyone here and took the land and then we killed people in other places to secure our spot as the global superpower. Given that, the sort of contradictory things we claim to believe about political violence are pretty funny. If you listen carefully, you may detect a degree of hypocrisy in what is classified as terrorist mayhem and what is classified as praiseworthy revolution in defense of patriotic ideals.

Is that citizen uprising against a stolen election good, or bad? Well: was the election stolen, or not? That is important.

Remember to vote.

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