Just to provide some backup for this:
This coup was very analogous to the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. It was a brutish attack, largely perceived as illegitimate, by powers considered to be illegitimate. The Nazis were considered clowns in the early 1920s, just as the MAGAbots are now.
In prison, Hitler realized that power could only be achieved through the appearance of political legitimacy. The Putsch happened in 1923. Hitler and others were tried and imprisoned in 1924-26. Hitler was released (1926?). Within 2 or 3 years, he was using political propaganda to spread competing messages, occupying a space within the conservative political establishment which itself already had the power. The Nazis were arguing for more extreme power. They lived for crisis and they got one in the form of the global depression and the fiscal policies of the Weimar Republic. They used political obstruction over and over again to disrupt responses and paralyze the government. By 1932-33, the Nazis were getting anywhere from 33-37% of the actual vote.
That is what forever changed the course of history - not a majority. But 37% of the actual vote. Not 37% of the entire adult population, but the vote. It doesn’t actually take a majority of people to support fascism; it just requires that a majority of people don’t care enough, don’t do enough, to confront it and stop it. That is our emergency. My estimation is that we have 2 - maybe 3 - federal election cycles to stop it.
They will be back. They will be better groomed and dressed. They will wait for their enemies to make mistakes, and to fail.
If Trump planned a coup properly he would have tried to get military support. Early on he was pretty popular in the military (a level of popularity he failed to maintain). I don’t believe the military is divided enough, any more, to make arranging a coup “easy” but it’s a distant possibility. Still, even if he pulled it off, I doubt he would have gotten enough soldiers under his banner.
If the coup fails, I would assume/hope that everyone who participated in it from officer to enlisted man would face serious legal repercussions from being part of it.
Plus the military has a lot of non-whites, who generally aren’t going to happily go along with a white nationalist dictatorship.
And somehow (I’m Canadian btw) “socialism” the label has to be stripped of its illogically negative connotation as well as the binary pov of it in the US. Like FFS what is really so terrible about guaranteeing the populace affordable health care; and your roads (except for toll highways) and public schools are socialized yet I hear of nobody complaining about that.
So, Canada is more socialized than the US, and much of western Europe (particularly the Scandinavian countries) is more socialized than Canada. I truly don’t understand the US obsession with this.
Most of the participants seem to be doing fine for themselves - off duty cops, ex military, business owners, elected officials. This coup really had nothing to do with the economy. Unemployed and people working 60 hour weeks don’t have the time and money to participate in a coup.
You have a point; I think that for now, the current band of renegades and extremists are feeling a sense of relative deprivation. I worry that in the future, more others will feel real and/or relative deprivation and that their message will have either more sympathy or that things will be so chaotic that their threats will be met with greater apathy.
Philosophical intent counts. While the Trumpist supporters “believe” that they won the majority of the recent vote, they have now made it clear to us that they would be quite content with permanent minority rule.
We are a low information electorate and it’s maddening. The word “socialist” has been completely co-opted by the right to mean something completely different than its original definition. See: Octopus.
Like I said it not so much a democracy problem these Trump supports don’t like the way the country has been going and had no politician that will carry out their view.
Trump got them out of the closet. They will just get more aggressive in the future and may lead to a civil war.
No one in power talked about immigration legal and illegal like Trump did. And other issues like abortion and LGBT and the church.
The issues the liberals talk about like LGBT, black people and immigration do not effect them.
The country will split apart in coming years to a politician can built on some thing.
This not so much democracy problem this is a major culture divide that the US had that no other first world country has because of the US history that is so different than the other first world countries.
And Betsy DeVos has just spent four years trying to end public education.
I take if from this comment asahi, that you don’t believe the nation will survive. Do you really mean that? How long do you think we have?
I think there will be an “America”; my comment is a question of what kind of America we’ll have, and for how long.
But yes, I think there’s a real danger that the United States ceases to function as a liberal democratic republic – it can survive indefinitely as something else, if it doesn’t devolve into a series of breakaway republics.
How long do we have? I think the next 4 - 10 years (2 to 5 federal election cycles) will be critical in terms of whether we continue to be a liberal* democratic republic.
By “liberal” I don’t mean that America needs to be liberal to survive, but it has to have values that are liberal, as opposed to illiberal. We have to have a system that’s pluralistic as opposed to majoritarian.
I think that even had the rioters managed to murder all the Democrats and have the remaining Congresspeople declare Trump President-for-Life, that wouldn’t ultimately have mattered.
I think it’s unlikely that the States collectively would have tolerated a usurpation of power like that, including a lot of Republican-led ones. They’d have straightened it out one way or another, and totally within their rights to do so, since the power of the Federal government flows UP from the States, not the other way around.
If this election had been closer, this incompetent coup would have been successful.
Trump’s position on immigration is that it doesn’t matter whether it’s legal or illegal, only what color the immigrants are. White illegal immigrants are so good, he married one. Brown legal immigrants are thrown in cages.
On abortion, it might be true that nobody talks about it like Trump, because he might be the one single person in the country that doesn’t talk about it at all.
I don’t know what singular entity you’re referring to by “the church”, but Trump’s policy towards churches is to gas them.
Trump didn’t win over anyone on his positions, because he doesn’t have them. Well, aside from racism, which apparently did win over a lot of people.
A salient question (IMHO) is if there is or is not a critical mass, nationally, of Trumpists. I believe that with the apparent numbers of Trumpists in the US this can’t be easily and quickly fixed; ISTM that basically half the country is populated by them, therefore only the other half has what should be regarded as normal, accepted norms.
I wouldn’t say half the country is Trumpist; in fact, that in some ways is the very essence of the problem. I would say that it’s more like 30% of the voting population that is radically pro-Trump even to the point of being willing to foment violence against everyone else. They’re a minority.
That is why they seek extra-constitutional means of gaining power. They cannot win in the marketplace of ideas, and they know that, which is precisely why they are dangerous as hell. They have a victim complex; they believe that decades of immigration and liberalism, which they did not consent to, gave away their country to “others.” And they’re fucking furious about it.
The history of democracy makes one thing perfectly clear, too: a minority can gain political power, even through mostly legal means, and dominate everyone else. That is what they are trying to do now; it’s what they’ve been trying to do for quite some time, actually. But it was the election and presidency of Donald Trump was a huge step in that direction. He accelerated that trend in ways we cannot yet process.
We need to see the Capitol insurrection for what it was: we have to acknowledge that it was an attempt to disrupt and destroy the usual constitutionally-sanctioned transfer of power. There’s an opportunity to effect some positive change but I don’t think impeaching Trump post-presidency is going to change much, even if he’s convicted; in fact it might even make him more popular and his base more defiant.
The real key, as I see it, is to interfere with and suppress the dark social forces that have enabled this monster to grow to the extent that the law and good judgment will allow. For instance, I think it’s good that tech companies recognize their role in enabling conspiracy theories – that’s a start but just a start. We need regulation to establish standards so that we don’t end up with companies like twitter being forced to arbitrarily who gets the platform and who doesn’t. We need standards of behavior that bind all companies to enforce the right kinds of ethical conduct. We need to go after the political fundraising ecosystem too, and publicly raise the profile of companies and individuals who promote the kinds of crap we’ve been seeing the last few years. I could go on…
Umm, a large number of Republican Congresspeople tried to reject the Electoral College Ballots on the basis of a very creative interpretation of the law.
Remind me, what are the States doing right now to ensure such a thing does not happen again?
That those Congresspeople still hold their offices is prima facie evidence that the States collectively have tolerated a usurpation of their power.
I was wondering if the mechanisms for recall elections have started rolling for any of these objectors yet. It usually starts with petitions, right? Or can the legislatures initiate it?
Any fallout from that hasn’t shaken out just yet; and in some cases the states themselves may not have provisions for recall or things like that. As pissed as a lot of Texans may be about Ted Cruz (and there are a LOT of us who are pissed), there’s just about nothing we (the people or the State Government) can do about him, save voting him out next time around, or calling for his resignation.
Anyway, my point was that the States as a group aren’t really going to go for the level of intrusion into their sovereignty that would come with a dictatorship, or near-dictatorship. If Trump had retained power like that, do you think he’d continue to respect the Federal/State separation of powers? I suspect not, and he could only demand so much that the State governments would put up with, before they tell him to go pound sand.