Yes It’s a Coup. Again. ▉
Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny, writing on his substack about the current coup in progress here in the United States:
Imagine if it had gone like this.
Ten Tesla cybertrucks, painted in camouflage colors with a giant X on each roof, drive noisily through Washington DC. Tires screech. Out jump a couple of dozen young men, dressed in red and black Devil’s Champion armored costumes. After giving Nazi salutes, they grab guns and run to one government departmental after another, calling out slogans like “all power to Supreme Leader Skibidi Hitler.”
Historically, that is what coups looked like. The center of power was a physical place. Occupying it, and driving out the people who held office, was to claim control. So if a cohort of armed men with odd symbols had stormed government buildings, Americans would have recognized that as a coup attempt.
And that sort of coup attempt would have failed.
Now imagine that, instead, the scene goes like this.
A couple dozen young men go from government office to government office, dressed in civilian clothes and armed only with zip drives. Using technical jargon and vague references to orders from on high, they gain access to the basic computer systems of the federal government. Having done so, they proceed to grant their Supreme Leader access to information and the power to start and stop all government payments.
That coup is, in fact, happening. And if we do not recognize it for what it is, it could succeed.
In the third decade of the twenty first century, power is more digital than physical. The buildings and the human beings are there to protect the workings of the computers, and thus the workings of the government as a whole, in our case an (in principle) democratic government which is organized and bounded by a notion of individual rights.
The ongoing actions by Musk and his followers are a coup because the individuals seizing power have no right to it. Elon Musk was elected to no office and there is no office that would give him the authority to do what he is doing. It is all illegal. It is also a coup in its intended effects: to undo democratic practice and violate human rights.
This is exactly the sort of thing I had been saying privately during the election cycle and essentially this was the sort of unsaid pushback that I, and anyone like me who studied political science and history, got when we said we would lose the country if Trump won. It’s also the same reason Americans don’t seem to take January 6th seriously. They say it can’t happen here or that those things just don’t happen anymore in modern, at least western, society. It’s because they don’t look like the coups that we grew up learning about in grade or high school. To Snyder’s example above, those governments were either taken by some kind of group quickly or violently through some type of force. But coups have many forms and not all of them are obvious.
We as Americans tend to think of coups as things closer to revolutions. Messy and violent. People in the streets with guns. Americans in particular also have a tendency to think that these are things things that only happen in poor or faraway places like Africa or Eastern Europe. But they can happen here too. We all learn about Shay’s Rebellion in school. What we aren’t taught is that was a failed coup against the then Federal Government under the Articles of Confederation, before the Constitution. Like it or not, January 6th, 2021 was also a failed coup. Donald Trump lost the 2020 election was attempting to maintain power even though he no longer had any right to it.
I feel like when people discuss the fall of a democratic system, they expect things to change overnight. As I said, we expect these things to be messy and violent. That’s just not how it works with the new authoritarians. It took Hitler roughly six months to change Weimar Germany to Nazi Germany.
At this pace we’ll be full on authoritarian in about six weeks.
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