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I know coup analysis is getting tedious and repetitive, but there is something just so hollow about this. I can't think of another time when so many people embraced authoritarianism for no good reason. The stakes are both tremendously high and weirdly low. A thread:
The Civil War came about because of a fundamental disagreement about the moral, political and economic value of slavery. The stakes for liberty, profit and political control were astronomically high. It wasn't a fake crisis, but a real one.
At other moments of extreme stress on American Democracy (1800, 1876, 1932, 1968) the stakes were also high. Would power pass peacefully to political adversaries for the first time? How would the government address crippling economic depression?...
...would the federal government continue to enforce Civil Rights and universal multi-racial political democracy? If so, how and to what degree?
You see this in other countries with Democratic contestation as well. Chile elected a real socialist government that threatened domestic capitalists and the cold war balance of powers. Weimar labored under tremendous economic and political strains.
The stakes of the First and Second French Republics included the fundamental role of the Catholic Church (and its property), citizenship, equality and future (and lives) of a monarchy and attendant nobility.
What about today, in the USA? Does Biden promise a radical agenda that will usurp capitalist power? No, and in fact that Chamber of Commerce is calling for the orderly counting of the electoral votes.
Is Biden a radical pacifist whom the military has cause to fear? Again, no. In fact, from everything we can see that is reported the upper echelons of the military can't wait for him to be inaugurated and might be pushing back on dangerous Trump schemes.
Is Biden promising to fundamentally upend the role of religion in American life? Again, no. There is no religious leader with the status of, say, the Pope in the 1790s opposing his inauguration.
So despite lacking the conventional social pillars of a right wing coup, and despite no plausible way to argue the stakes are unusually high (Biden is constrained by a right wing judiciary and will enjoy, at best, a 50-50 senate)...
A majority of the Republican Party has whipped itself into a frothing rage and terror, demanding that American Democracy be abolished if their god-king, a former real estate mogul who doesn't care about any of them, is not given a second term.
As a political scientists who also tries to be attuned to history, I just don't fundamentally understand what is going on. But that only makes it all the more scary, even if they will fail this time.
