A year ago, it felt as if the sunshine was dispelling memories of a bad dream. Donald Trump’s malign grip on the Republican Party seemed to have been broken. In defeat, the president had revealed himself as what he was: an overgrown toddler whose fragile ego had imperilled American democracy.

Throughout his life, Trump had displayed a pathological inability to accept defeat. Whenever anything went against him – a court judgment, an awards ceremony, a round of golf – he would allege malpractice and insist that he had won. That he should take the same attitude towards his country’s highest office was hardly a surprise: in 2020, as in 2016, he had declared before the first vote was cast that the only way he could lose would be through fraud. But whipping up his supporters to march on the Capitol when it was about to certify the result was a step too far for almost all Republican Congressmen.

It takes a real effort, now that they are again abasing themselves before their capo, to recall what they were saying 12 months ago. Republican Congressional leaders recoiled from the tawdry coup attempt. And they knew exactly whom to blame.

“The President bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters,” said Kevin McCarthy, the GOP leader in the House of Representatives.

“President Trump is responsible for provoking the events of the day,” declared his Senate counterpart, Mitch McConnell.

The same line was taken by every senior Republican, including those who are now the most servile in their professions of loyalty. “The President needs to understand that his actions were the problem and not the solution,” averred South Carolina’s Lindsay Graham. “The President’s language and rhetoric crossed a line, it was reckless,” agreed Texas’s Ted Cruz.

Sadly, their attachment to constitutional propriety did not last. When Democrats moved to impeach the president, Republicans opposed them in the House by 197 to 10, and in the Senate by 35 to 5. Since then, they have sunk lower, pretending to believe that the election was indeed stolen, stammering out their loyalty like broken victims of Stalinist show-trials.

On Thursday, Senator Cruz went on Fox News to grovel for having referred to the rioters – who, let us remember, injured 138 police officers – as “terrorists”. Apologising again and again to the “patriots” who had protested the election result, he said that the word “terrorist” applied to BLM rioters, not to the honest citizens who stormed the seat of government.

How are we to explain this U-turn? After all, Republicans, as their name implies, are meant to defend the republic and its foundational principles. Their first president, Abraham Lincoln, was in no doubt as to which was foremost among these principles: “Let reverence for the laws be breathed by every American mother to the lisping babe that prattles on her lap; let it be taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges; let it be written in primers, spelling books, and almanacs; let it be preached from the pulpit.”

How did his party so suddenly and so totally lose its bearings? How did it come to abandon, not just the political precepts it had held before Trump – small government, a balanced budget, free trade – but its deepest and most fundamental creed, namely that the offices of the republic are bigger than the politicians who occupy them?

Part of the answer has to do with tribalism. It is often observed that supporters of the two American parties increasingly live in different counties, watch different television stations and believe different facts. The number of cross-party friendships is at an all-time low, and fully 50 per cent of Republicans and 48 per cent of Democrats admit to hating each other.

In such a climate, people become reluctant to disavow bad behaviour from their own side; and their reluctance enables the worst elements. There were very few Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917, very few jihadis in Syria in 2011. But, in both cases, the extremists were able to draw support from those who shared their enemies – social democrats who loathed Tsarism, non-violent Muslims who were sick of secular dictatorship.

The same dynamic is at work on both sides of the American divide. Plenty of liberal Leftists are uncomfortable with cancel culture, but they keep quiet because they can’t bear to line up with the Republicans who are its loudest critics. Similarly, plenty of conservatives know in their bones that it is unpatriotic to challenge an election by force. But they are riled by the way Democrats keep punching the bruise.

On Wednesday, marking the first anniversary of the violence, Vice President Kamala Harris made an extraordinary statement in which she placed the Washington riot on the same level as the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the Twin Towers abomination: “Certain dates echo throughout history, including dates that instantly remind all who have lived through them where they were and what they were doing when our democracy came under assault: December 7 1941, September 11 2001 and January 6 2021.”

Faced with such absurd histrionics – 2,403 Americans were killed at Pearl Harbor, 2,657 in the 9/11 attacks – it is understandable that Republicans become defensive. Some dismiss the protesters as oddly-dressed losers who had nothing to do with Trump. Others celebrate them as patriots who were seeking to prevent the theft of an election.

According to an unbelievably depressing poll in the Wall Street Journal, two thirds of Republicans do not believe that the invasion of the Capitol building, an invasion expressly intended to prevent Congress from certifying the election result, was an attack on democracy.

In the aftermath of the violence, Trump’s approval rating among registered Republicans drifted down slightly; but those of McConnell and of vice president Mike Pence, who did their duty and approved the outcome, went off a cliff.

This is the water in which GOP politicians must swim. To have any chance of a career in the party, even to hold their seats against a Trump-backed primary challenger, they need to pretend to believe that the election was stolen.

It is impossible to exaggerate how dangerous that claim is. A democracy depends on restraint from winners and consent from losers. Deep down, most Republican Congressmen understand this. But a year of having to maintain the opposite in public has skewed their moral compasses. “Sometimes,” as John F Kennedy put it, “party loyalty asks too much.”

Things were not always like this. On January 6 1961, following a presidential election in which there truly was credible evidence of vote-rigging, it fell to the defeated candidate and outgoing vice president, Richard Nixon, to certify the result.

He prefaced his declaration by remarking that it demonstrated “the stability of our constitutional system”, and offered his warm congratulations to JFK. On January 6 2001, it fell to Al Gore as vice president to rule out of order a series of objections brought by Democrats to the election that he had just lost.

This elevation of the rules over the rulers was America’s greatest strength. When post-fascist nations turned to democracy in 1945, they were in large measure copying America. When Eastern European countries in 1989 threw off Soviet occupation, they too demanded a system where those in power could not make up the rules as they went along.

Democrats from Cuba to Kazakhstan have the United States in mind when they protest against dictatorship. Or, rather, they used to. Now it is their autocratic leaders who point delightedly at the American example as justification for their own arbitrary rule.

I remember the way dissidents in the Soviet bloc used to talk of democracy as “normalisation”. But, as the years pass, I have come to the unhappy conclusion that there is nothing very normal about it. Yes, a few Western countries have managed to elevate process over outcome. But for how long?

Think of the way in which, in both the US and the UK, BLM demonstrators were given a free pass because their declared cause was thought to matter more than the letter of the law. Think of the way our entire establishment, more decorously than the Capitol rioters, but also more determinedly, strove to overturn a referendum it had previously promised to respect.

I’m afraid it is our countries that are being “normalised”, in the sense that we care more about whether our side wins than about whether the rules are followed. And that is the most depressing thing of all.