Americans and viewers around the globe watched in astonishment as hundreds of supporters of outgoing President Donald Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday in an effort to derail the joint congressional session in which the 2020 presidential election results were to be formally certified.

Rioters chanting pro-Trump slogans broke through barricades, scaled walls, forcibly entered the legislative chambers and posed behind the empty desks in lawmakers offices. While some journalists and staffers were evacuated, others remained trapped in the lockdown, live-tweeting the chaos that unfolded in the nations capital. At least four people died and dozens of police officers were injured.

Politicians, pundits and cable news journalists expressed bewilderment at how this could be happening in the United States. Some called the turbulent scenes un-American, declaring it was like watching foreign television and further insinuating that such events only occur abroad in third world countries in the Middle East, Africa and Latin America.

CNN correspondent Jake Tapper told a reporter speaking live from the Capitol that he felt like he was talking to a correspondent in Bogota. On the ground, an ABC reporter compared Capitol Hill to Baghdad and Kabul , lamenting that it was horrible to know we are in America.

Where were headed looks more like Syria than the United States of America, said CNN commentator Van Jones.

It wasnt just journalists. Former President George W. Bush released a statement that said this is how election results are disputed in a banana republic not our democratic republic. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) tweeted that Wednesdays events were 3rd world style anti-American anarchy . Scholars and think tank analysts all peddled the same problematic rhetoric.

But the reality is that the use of violent force and intimidation for political gain has always been part of the American narrative from the days of Jim Crow, lynchings and segregation, to the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 and the plot to kidnap Michigans Democratic governor just last year. Yet many remain blinded by an illusion of American exceptionalism and cannot see that American democracy, too, is fragile and fallible. The view that political instability is only a problem in Black and brown countries is a xenophobic position that dismisses the long history of white supremacy in the U.S.

So why do Americans still jump to the Middle East or South America when they try to think of a comparison to what happened on Wednesday? HuffPost spoke to several scholars to help answer this complicated question.

Zaheer Ali, an oral historian and adjunct instructor at New York University, said that Americans collective inability to reckon with their own history has led to such problematic cherry-picking about what the United States represents.

I was more frustrated by the news commentary that sought to frame this as so unusual, unpredictable, unexpected, un-American, etc. This exceptionalism that says this doesnt happen here or this is not who we are ignores the history of America, Ali said.