Have you ever wondered why your phone (or banking site, or pretty much anything these days) locks you out for a while if you type the wrong password a few times?
This will be relevant to the coup, really.
It’s because there are people out there constantly trying to guess passwords to get illegitimate access to pretty much every piece of computer equipment, all the time.
And they’ll just keep guessing until they get it right if the system doesn’t lock accounts out for repeatedly guessing wrong.
Well, State systems are just like computer systems in that.
If there are no consequences for trying to abuse them, then people who are inclined to try in the first place will never stop trying.
Ever.
And, eventually, inevitably, they’ll succeed.
And that’s how the United States has ended up in the middle of a fascist coup: a history of not imposing any consequences for attempts to abuse State power.
The obvious examples, of course, are then-Presidents Nixon (for Watergate) and Reagan (for Iran-Contra). As very public examples of the United States’ unwillingness to actually follow the actual laws that would punish the famous and powerful, these failures set the stage for a later President to get a bit more blatant about it.
Enter Trump, damn his name.
After his first Presidency ended in an attempt to overthrow the government on his behalf, there were a whole bunch of opportunities for the system to have dealt with the upcoming problem by imposing some consequences:
- the Senate should have upheld the impeachment over that insurrection attempt and removed him immediately from office
- they should also have forbidden him from holding federal office ever again
- no states or territories should have allowed him on the ballot in the next election
- the Supreme Court should have upheld Colorado’s decision to actually do that
- Congress should have refused to accept electoral votes for him, for the same reason
The states and territories, Congress, and the Supreme Court all had clear obligations to act that would have prevented the current crises. Of all of them, only Colorado actually did it’s duty when faced with an actual attempted coup.
So yay, Colorado?
You did your duty, and you did it alone when everyone else failed. You can have the rest of this post off to go read a book, or something.
But the rest of you?
The rest of you get an “F” in democracy.
But, while it is actually your fault for not having done the things you clearly should have done that would have prevented this situation, it’s not entirely your fault.
The system failed you: it wasn’t up to the task of defending against a coordinated coup supported by members of all three branches of the federal government.
And U.S. political and legal culture failed the system: it wasn’t strong enough to impose consequences on generations of powerful people trying to abuse the system for their own purposes. It stopped many of them, but by never arresting or prosecuting them for those crimes it failed to stop future generations of abusers from trying again and again.
And now, one of them has succeeded big time.
Direct, personal control of the federal bureaucracy with an advance guarantee of personal immunity from the courts.
That’s the biggest prize an aspiring autocrat can get in a democracy without actually changing the constitution to stop it being a democracy anymore.
So now it’s down to the last line of defense any democracy has: the citizens as individuals.
And Trump, damn his name is publicly threatening the execution of representatives in Congress for reminding the members of the military of this fact: each person, as an individual, is now responsible for the decision uphold the principles of the Constitution personally.
The courts have failed, Congress has failed. The states and territories have failed.
The laws and structures of the executive branch have failed.
So now it’s down to just the people themselves.
Don’t fail.
