Lessons for Europe from a Surreal American Coup — Part I
It feels like it’s been years, this US election season and the attempted coup that went with it. As democracies are under attack by authoritarians, there are crucial lessons for Europe to learn from what has unfolded in the US, away from all the noise in the headlines.
Somehow we all thought that when 2020 melted away into 2021, the world would wake up to a new reality, free of all the malaise, of Trump, Covid, lockdowns and distress. Alas, of course, it didn’t quite work out that way. Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial, acquittal and aftermath are testaments that this has not just been a bizarre bad dream, it really happened, and it’s still with us, and the bottom of the rabbit hole is indeed our new reality.
And so, in an effort to learn lessons from what we have lived through in these past years, Europe needs to pay attention to what happens across the pond, a point I’ve emphasised in previous columns here. Democracy follows similar patterns in different places, especially when authoritarians around the world are well coordinated and well resourced.
So now, as Trump and the GOP get off Scott free, and Senators voted to absolve themselves from a coup they attempted and also got away from, here are a few lessons about the surreal reality we must come to terms with. Pro-democratic media outlets, liberals and progressives too often tell themselves the story they would prefer to hear, rather than confront uncomfortable and unpalatable conclusions. And yet.
1) Look at the trendlines, not the headlines. Face the bigger picture.
Everyone keeps talking about the Coup and insurrection in the US as if it was Trump’s doing, or a fringe segment of the Republican Party, or as if it happened on January 6. In fact, the US Coup was carefully planned and orchestrated by the GOP across the US, in Congress and in State governments and legislatures for months on end, if not years. Trump was simply too incompetent and sloppy in the execution of the act, and GOP leaders had to distance themselves just enough to divert attention away. The Coup and the 6 January attack on the Capitol does not belong to Trump or Ted Cruz, it belongs to Mitch McConnel.
The GOP spent months and years limiting the ability to cast mail ballots, or to vote at all, to limit capacity to count votes, or count them early. They happily went along with a total fiction that the election was rigged, and voter fraud (by mostly black voters of course) was a threat. They then packed the Supreme Court ahead of the elections, to be sure that any fabricated legal claim would land before a friendly bench. After the election all of the GOP, with almost no exceptions at all, went along with Trump’s bizarre claims in order to try to win Georgia. In the minutes before the Capitol attack, while white supremacists were breaking into the building, Mitch McConnel said that it was in fact Democrats who had undermined trust in elections, because they questioned the outcome in 2016.
The GOP set the stage carefully, and waited for Trump’s team to deliver a fabricated Bush v Gore victory. When that coup plan failed, the predictable violence that followed did not phase their support.
The world needs to urgently stop thanking Mike Pence for somehow “doing the right thing” in certifying the elections, he literally had no other possible recourse. Pence was part of the coup, Trump just decided to throw him under the bus. That makes Pence no less guilty.
Those who mistakenly go along with the narrative that Republicans are “afraid”, or somehow reluctantly acquiesce in Trumpism, or shift the blame to Trump, QAnon, or extremists, simply give them a free pass, and a chance to rehabilitate their reputations. All this has been a naked calculated power play from the GOP, a mercenary group that has no loyalties or ties to any set of values left. The Republicans who voted to acquit Trump are not cowards at all. On the contrary, they are bold-faced robber-barons with a calculated plans for authoritarian take over. They successfully drove away from the scene of the crime with their loot, and they’re ready for the next heist.
History shows us that when conservative forces abandon civic duty and embrace populist authoritarianism wholesale, then “the centre cannot hold.” Responsible liberals and conservatives alike must see this for what it is.
2. They made it through
In recent years, we’ve seen over and over again that when far right nationalists make it to power, they are very difficult to vote out again. We’ve seen this with Turkey, Israel, Hungary, Poland, and the UK, to name a few. In the US, massive voter turnout and mobilisation, in spite of all the suppression, managed to get Trump out, and take back Congress. That is something for Europeans to rejoice in, learn from, and emulate.
3. …. But only just
The entire Democratic strategy for the elections was to win big, so there was no way to dispute the election outcome. In fact, that didn’t happen. No matter how much Americans would like to feel better about Biden’s victory in the popular vote, that was not the strategy. In fact, the Democrats scraped it through by a hair in just about enough places, so that luckily the GOP could not find a way to force a legal battle, or enough momentum for a serious attempt by armed forces to get involved. Given the enormous increase in turn out for Trump, and the crisis situation of Covid and the economy, in an election without Covid, or had Trump handled the pandemic just slightly more reasonably, he would have likely been re-elected in a landslide.
Although Biden’s victory is fortunate, glossing over it as if it was a great success is an enormous disservice to democracy. There will need to be a lot of very hard thinking about how Trump almost won. Democrats must spend time and effort now in understanding why they did not win big under the circumstances if they want to prepare for the next round.
4. The Constitution and institutions failed.
Trump is out of office, and despite of everything, a free and fair election took place, and so did a transition of power. It’s tempting to claim that the US Constitution held firm.
In some ways, the rigidity of the US electoral system, the set dates and procedures, the inert and immobile nature of its timings made a coup that much harder to execute. As a headline, yes that is where the Constitution stood its ground. However, it takes a lot of wishful thinking to ignore the fact that no peaceful transition of power took place. There was a transition, but it was preceded by a violent insurrection.
For four long years, Trump was in breach of every possible rule and norm that could apply to a president. He was in violation of the Constitution from the very second he was sworn in as he was actively being bribed by foreign governments through his businesses. He committed treason publicly and grotesquely and flaunted it to the world with every enemy America could possibly ever have — the Nazis, the Confederates, Russia, Ukraine, China — like a comic book villain on steroids. He had a secret bank account in China and he employed his own children at the White House. He wanted to nuke a hurricane and inject people with bleach, he packed the Supreme Court, and fired the head of the FBI, the Attorney General and Defense Secretary whenever it suited his personal interests. All the while the GOP were trying to rig and steal an election by supressing votes and lying about voter fraud. What a laundry list.
And for all that, over 4 years, there were no checks or balances, no barriers, no brakes and no accountability, no justice — impeached twice, acquitted twice. What good are US institutions if they do not prevent this kind of outrage?
5. US citizenship won
What did remove Trump from office was not the Constitutions, but people taking action and exercising their citizenship. Civil society organisations, movements, and organisers brought out voters inspite of all the risks and threat and won the elections. A resistance movement which started with the Women’s March in 2017 culminated in the victory in Georgia in 2021. These organisers, more than anyone else, deserve the credit for saving American democracy. This is why having active organised citizens matters. Stacey Abrams in Georgia proved that organising, mobilising and turning out can make the difference. An entire ecosystem of movements, nonprofits organisations, trade unions, businesses, and media outlets came together to prevent a coup and outbreak of violence. This experience has proven the indispensability of working together to defend democracy, a lesson that Europe urgently needs to learn.
The reason that the US armed did not intervene on behalf of Trump in the elections, apart from his own lack of skill and competence at organising it, was their own commitment and civic duty. Whatever it says in the Constitution, at the end of the day, their identity as Americans, and the image Trump projected to them, did not allow them to get in a tank and roll in to support a strongman dictator. Had things panned out somewhat differently, they might have, but as it happened, they did not. Political culture matters here.
And where do we go from here? All that and more in Part II
