On Wednesday, a coup attempt was led by the president of the United States. A rightwing mob attempted the coup in the form of a violent riot that stormed the Capitol building. They disrupted the proceedings that would have completed the recognition of the election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Those proceedings had been disrupted earlier by elected officials bringing forth bad-faith claims that the election was not legitimate and should instead produce a continuation of Trump’s presidency. This too was a coup attempt, an attempt to violate the constitution and override the will of the voters in this election. Inside and outside were two faces of the same thing, and both were fomented by the leaders of the Republican party and by the US president. The mob outside would not exist without the politicians inside. Those insiders will make noises of horror and repudiation, but they own this.Had Mitch McConnell and other Republican leaders recognized the legitimate winner of the election in early November, had there been no challenge to a legitimate election from inside the government, there would have been no mob. Having failed to suppress enough votes to guarantee a Republican presidential victory, the Republican party and the Trump administration decided to try to suppress them retroactively. Trump invited the mob and whipped it up for months and set it off today, as surely as if he’d lit a bomb’s fuse.I call it a coup attempt because, though I assume it will not prevent the Biden presidency, it certainly intended to, and is part of a campaign to delegitimize and thereby weaken the incoming administration. It was a long time coming, building up for years with white rage, especially white male rage fueled by everyone from Trump himself to the National Rifle Association, Fox News and the various rightwing pundits, the Republican party, the various faces of white supremacy, and the far-right groups such as the Proud Boys. It is a rage against the fact that other people might be equal under the law, that women and people of color might also govern as power begins to be distributed more equally, the same rage that attempted to delegitimize a black president with birtherism and obstruction. It is a rage against equality.Democracy is a set of agreements to make decisions together and respect the outcome whether you like them or not. The kind of violence we saw on Capitol Hill is authoritarian, a way to try to force other people to submit to the will of the perpetrators. This violence comes from the white men who were long the only people with power in this country imagining themselves as marginalized and oppressed outsiders because others might also have power and a voice. We saw these kind of men last summer, when they invaded the Michigan capital while carrying semiautomatic rifles and saw them again when a handful of them were arrested for a plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. We saw them in racist shootings from the Texas border to a Pennsylvania synagogue.This coup attempt was built by the more and more uninhibited ideology of violence we have seen again and again, in the mass shootings that became a norm in 21st-century America, the fetishization of guns and gun rights that made the killing machines and the death they inflict far more common, so that death by gun recently overtook death by car as a leading American way to die.As I write, I hear a Republican leader on TV say “Remember we are the party of law and order,” and, of course, the riot going on in the Capitol is technically lawless, but “law and order” as a rightwing slogan means that they are the law and they impose their version of order. Authoritarianism is always an ideology of inequality: I make the rules, you follow them, I change them at will and punish those who don’t obey, or, if I feel like it, those who do because I can. Frank Wilhoit once said: “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition … There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” They are demonstrating that nothing binds them and that they expect to have whatever they want. Entitlement is too demure a word for this.Authoritarianism is always an ideology of inequality: I make the rules, you follow them, I punish those who don’t obeyWhat is at stake in America today is the outcome of an election. But it’s also the rule of law and the rights of voters. And in the end it’s also about the authority of facts and evidence and history and science, that no one has the right to override those things for personal gain. Trump’s position all along has been that he in particular has that right. Today it came to a head and became a crisis as a mob sabotaged a constitutionally mandated procedure for the peaceful transition of power. This was always going to happen because Trump’s power was always going to be finite in reach and duration under the law, and because he wants that power to be infinite, he was always at war with the law, and he always had a volunteer army willing to help him take it. Today they acted like an army, a hostile occupying force in the nation’s capital. This is what he wanted and this is what he orchestrated and this is what we got.Trump was the most prolific public liar America has ever seen, and his lies were an essential part of his authoritarianism, a refusal to be bound by facts, even the facts of what he said or did the day before. He demanded a parallel narrative in which he won the election and laid the groundwork long before to claim, if he lost, that it was illegitimate, as he did in 2016. In a recorded video on Wednesday, Trump said to the crowd “We love you” as he told them to go home but also reasserted that the election was stolen, which is why they’re there in the first place. Ivanka Trump apparently deleted a tweet in which she called them “American patriots”.The Trumps and their loyalists in office will disavow the worst of what happened and pretend to be surprised by it and continue feeding it. Conversation about what’s been happening over the past several months has often bought into the false binary that either we have a successful coup, in which they steal the election, or we have a failed coup, but there is something insidious in-between: the delegitimization of the democratic process and the incoming administration. In this in-between state, Trump supporters continue to regard their leader and themselves as above the law and entitled to enforce it however they see fit, on the basis of whatever facts they most enjoy having. They are building a separate reality and appear to wish for a shadow government to beleaguer and undermine the legitimate one. Today, we’ve seen it in action. More
