Original to:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/06/trump-mob-storm-capitol-washington-coup-attempt
Call it what it was: a coup attempt
Rebecca Solnit
I call it a coup attempt because, though I assume that it will not
prevent the Biden presidency, it certainly intended.
‘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 obey
What 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.
• Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist
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