Like a lot of people, I spent an insomniac night Googling, "What to do if there's a coup." I learned a ton of surprising stuff. Which boils down to:

For activists, coup rules are different from normal rules.

Stopping a coup involves *defending the status quo*.

Thread:

The most useful resource is Hold the Line, a practical guide, written by experts on activism and coups, specifically on how to deal with the particular range of possibilities of an attempted Trump coup.

https://holdthelineguide.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Hold-The-Line_-A-Guide-to-Defending-Democracy.pdf

Key insights:

1. Coups succeed or fizzle, fast. The key period is a period of weeks or months.

2. Activists need to make alliances with centrists. In particular, the institutional pillars: judges. Clerks. Administrators. Corporate managers. Centrists are the key to the fizzle.

Lakey tells this story about a coup attempt in 20s Weimer. When soldiers, lead by right-wing leader Wolfgang Kapp, stormed the capitol, they thought they'd won. But all the government workers had just gone home. And they didn't know how to... do anything. Coup fizzle.

It was hard to wrap my head around, but I think it's because - if you're a progressive/leftist/activist in America, you're used to trying to create systematic change, to shift the status quo.

But if you're resisting a right-wing coup, you're defending the status quo.

The key idea of Holding the Line is that activist efforts to resist a coup should be spent trying to form alliances to convince the center - everyday business folks and government clerks - not to go along.

Coup rules are different.

In resisting a coup, you want to form temporary alliances with anybody whose interesting is in preserving the current situation.

Like: maybe the Koch gang really doesn't want American institutions to be violently de-stabilized. Maybe that seems unprofitable. Potential allies.

Other important thing I learned:

No coup attempt has survived over 3.5% of the population peacefully resisting.

In the present circumstance, I find this... as reassuring as can be hoped for.

(Like a lot of people, I found about Hold the Line through this excellent article, and its interview with George Lakey, coup expert. The article is a decent summary, but if you're actually worried, you should read the whole doc.) https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/what-can-you-do-if-trump-stages-a-coup

PS - I don't actually think there's probably gonna be a coup. I think more likely they're firing up the base or stuff like that. But I'm not completely sure, so... reading this guide one insomniac night felt like a good damn use of my time.