What happened was something more inchoate, multifocal, socially deep, something anchored not in seditious conspiracy, but in the waning of respect and trust and in the emergence, unexpectedly, of a cause – the right to assemble – capable of bringing together heterogeneous disaffected elements, at least temporarily. The most important legacy of the conspiratorial insurrectionists was thus to have distracted the attention of the authorities from the real task at hand, which was to recalibrate the processes of government in such a way as to meet and channel the expectations of an increasingly
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