Read on Twitter
I was on a Zoom call with three leading experts on the transition of democracies to authoritarian regimes: Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt from Harvard University, and Timothy D. Snyder from Yale University. This is what they had to say about a potential coup: a thread.
Trump will refuse to concede. Period. He’s in the classic authoritarian position: if he loses, he has a billion dollars in debt he probably can’t pay off and pretty serious criminal investigations going on in NY for which he can’t be pardoned. He’ll fight to the end.
Fortunately, it’s looking unlikely that Trump has the capacity to actually pull off a coup. If you want to successfully steal an election, you do it BEFORE election day by paying people off, intimidating people, barring candidates, and otherwise tilting the playing field.
Stealing an election ON election day is very risky, but that can sometimes work, too. But stealing an election AFTER YOU’VE LOST is much harder, and requires the military. It takes a lot of coordination. And Trump is making a last-minute, half-assed effort.
If you want to successfully steal an election, you don’t spend the weekend golfing and you don’t send Rudy Guiliani out to the Four Seasons Total Landscaping.
Moreover, Trump would need the entire Republican party leadership and media mobilized behind him, and he doesn’t have that. Right now, their support is half-hearted. So a successful coup of any kind looks highly unlikely for now. That’s the good news.
The bad news is that a recent poll showed that 70% of Republicans think that the election was fraudulent. If the 70 million people who voted for Trump don't believe that a major pillar of our democracy, namely elections, are legitimate, we are in for a serious set of problems.
The story of “We actually won, but the people who don’t actually belong to this country took it from us” is a powerful one. It’s the story Hitler used after World War I, and it helped him rise to power. The right is spreading this false narrative like crazy, and it’s working.
So what can we do to help fight this? Well, for those of us who wanted Bernie, who wanted Warren, who wanted more radical change--the answer is a challenging one.
We can spread a corrective counter-narrative. We can reinforce the legitimacy of Biden’s election by celebrating his win. We can focus on positive things on his platform like racial equality, climate justice, and an employment economy. We can hold big rallies IN FAVOR OF things.
Or at the very least, we can refrain from making people feel bad for doing the above. The right is currently writing a first draft of history that is based on a lie perpetuated by a sore loser, and we can replace it with the truth.
