An “imprecise analogy”? “Mad Carolinians,” Samuel Wiley Crawford, 31, called the populace of antibellum Charleston, South Carolina in a letter to his brother after Abraham Lincoln’s election. Even the children were caught up in secessionist fervor, he wrote, and perhaps the women more so than the men, Erik Larson recounts in “The Demon of Unrest.” Larson sees parallels in the events of January 6, 2021: Planters who had been wearing ordinary clothing one day turned up the next in elaborate uniforms, red sashes glaring—their “soldier’s toggery,” as Mary [Boykin Chesnut] put it. With so much tension in the city, she wrote, the atmosphere was “phosphorescent.” The streets were full of soldiers in uniform marching and singing; at night she heard the heavy rumble of ammunition wagons moving over cobbled streets—no one could sleep. Ken Silverstein at The New Republic cites another passage unearthed by Larson in his book “In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin.” A diplomatic cable sent from Berlin to the State Department in June 1933 described the atmosphere in the German city under the recently installed Nazi regime: “Wherever one goes in Germany one sees people drilling, from children of five and six on, up to those well into middle age. A psychology is being developed that the whole world is against Germany and that it lies defenseless before the world.” “With few exceptions, the men who are running this Government are of a mentality that you and I cannot…