A YEAR later after the violent storming of the U.S. Capitol by Donald Trump supporters, there is far from national consensus.

A Quinnipiac poll found that 93 percent of Democrats considered it an attack on the government, but only 29 percent of Republicans agreed.

In a recent CBS-YouGov poll, 85 percent of Democrats called the riot an “insurrection” while only 21 percent of GOP voters did.

Republicans (56 percent) were more likely to explain the rioters as “defending freedom.” A poll by The Associated Press and NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that about 4 in 10 Republicans recall the attack — in which five people died — as violent, while 9 in 10 Democrats do.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said then that “the president bears responsibility” for the attacks. Sen. Mitch McConnell, then the majority leader, said: “They tried to disrupt our democracy. They failed.”

But since that day, separate versions — one factual, one fanciful — have taken hold.

The Capitol riot — the violent culmination of a bid to delegitimize the 2020 election and block its certification — has morphed into a partisan “Rashomon,” the classic Japanese film about a slaying told from varying and conflicting points of view.

“We keep using terms like post-factual, but it almost feels like there’s this national psychosis or amnesia about what happened a year ago,” says Charles Sykes, the former conservative Wisconsin radio host and founder of the website The Bulwark. “It’s not just that we’re two nations. It’s as if we live on two different reality planets when it comes to the memory of Jan. 6.”

And a lot of people have been working hard to chip away at the memory of Jan. 6.

Rep. Andrew S. Clyde has described the siege as like “a normal tourist visit.” Rep. Matt Gaetz has claimed the rioters were leftist militants “masquerading as Trump supporters.” Trump has continued to insist that the election — Biden won by a wide margin, with scant evidence of fraud — was the real insurrection.

Alexander Keyssar, a professor of history and social policy at Harvard and author of “Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College?,” believes a full-fledged investigative commission, like the one that followed the Sept. 11 attacks, might have fostered more national consensus on Jan. 6.

Instead, many Trump supporters have adopted the former president’s denial over the 2020 election. In the last year, Republicans have passed dozens of laws in 19 states to restrict voting. More election battles loom in the 2022 midterms and beyond.

“It’s obviously dangerous because it becomes precedent,” Keyssar says of the Capitol riot. “It has become a prism through which events are viewed. The prism for a large segment of Republican adherents is that you can’t trust the outcome of elections. If you can’t trust the outcome of elections, that will be true in the future as well. It becomes, as the great historian Bernard Bailyn once said, ‘a grammar of thought.’”

(SD-Agencies)