Authoritarian Coups Are Gradual then Sudden
Meanwhile, all across social media, the word is spreading: “The storm is upon us.”
In 1926 Ernest Hemmingway published his novel The Sun Also Rises, which has this extraordinary bit of dialogue about how change happens in most aspects of life — and how governments rise and fall.
“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.
”Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”
”What brought it on?”
“Friends," said Mike. "I had a lot of friends. False friends.”
For some unfathomable reason, Democrats insist on calling their Republican colleagues their “friends.” They are not friends. They are systematically destroying American democracy with the clear objective of replacing it with strongman authoritarianism, a new and American version of what Benito Mussolini called fascism.
Right now they’re moving gradually:
Infiltrating police departments and the enlisted ranks of the military
Taking over school boards and local boards of elections
Firing principals and teachers who defend multiracial, multicultural democracy while banning and burning books that contain such “dangerous” ideas
Gerrymandering states so regardless of how people vote, Republicans control the levers of power
Changing election laws so they can both make it harder for city-dwellers to vote and to ignore and then change the outcomes of elections they don’t like
Building media structures that will support the authoritarian takeover when it happens
Organizing armed paramilitary militias, with back-channel connections to local police
Creating legal organizations to sanitize and rationalize ending messy democracy
Radicalizing average Americans through social media and an ever-growning network of hard-right podcasts
Spreading antisemitic conspiracy theories about Democrats and Jews drinking children’s blood
Firebombing Texas Democratic Party’s Austin headquarters and threatening them that if they don’t stop trying to get Democrats elected worse will come
It was “the other 9/11.” Everything seemed normal until General Pinochet declared he was taking over the government of Chile on September 11, 1973.
The Chilean government had been run democratically since 1923, the longest in South America, but Pinochet (with a little help from our CIA and ITT) had already infiltrated and gotten the loyalty of both the police, the army, and the civilian paramilitaries he’d spent the previous few years nurturing.
So when he rolled up to the presidential palace and declared he was taking over, nobody came to the defense of the elected president, Salvador Allende. The police were already loyal to Pinochet, including the police who defended that nation’s capitol. Allende, along with a few more than 30 supporters, held the palace for a few hours, gave a national radio address, and he then put a gun to his head and ended his presidency.
Gradually, then suddenly.
When Chileans poured into the streets, Pinochet swept them up and held them in the national stadium, where tens of thousands were tortured, murdered or simply disappeared. One of the favorite tactics of his military were to throw “liberals” out of helicopters over the ocean to kill them, a practice celebrated by rightwing militia around the US today.
Pinochet’s democratic political opposition lost all its power and went underground; it would be seventeen years before anything resembling democracy would return to Chile, a process that is still pulling itself together.
If Mike Pence had gone along with Trump’s plan to imitate the election of 1876 and install the guy who lost both the popular and the electoral vote as president (as happened that year when Democrat Samuel Tilden won both votes but the House of Representatives instead installed Republican Rutherford B. Hayes as president), America would be a very, very different country today.
Gradually, then suddenly.
Trump had previously proclaimed his desire to change the nation’s libel and slander laws so he could sue or imprison his political opponents and those in the media who opposed him; that would have happened by now, and people like me (and maybe you) would be in jail.
Trump had previously promised his violent partisans that he’d pardon them and pick up their legal fees; by now hundreds of Kyle Rittenhouse’s would have “defended themselves” against Black people, “Antifa,” and “commie liberals.”
A constitutional convention like rightwing billionaires have been promoting and annually rehearsing in Washington, DC would be underway to rewrite our founding document; the right of all Americans to vote, separation of church and state, civil rights, protections of free speech and assembly, the right to due process and equal protection under the law, even the obscure Emoluments Clause would all be on the chopping block.
Trump-friendly corporations would be running political purges reminiscent of the Republican “Red Scare” and “Blacklist”1950s all across the country as social media accounts were examined for evidence of “leftist” leanings; Johnny McEntee began that process when he was “Deputy President” to Trump and was firing people in the executive branch for “liking” postings by “leftwing” entertainers like Taylor Swift.
The process Trump started in Portland and Seattle in the summer of 2020 of unmarked vans and stormtrooper-like police with no identifying patches kidnapping people off the streets would have expanded nationwide; tens of thousands would be in custody without charges.
Private prisons would expand to take in the hundreds of thousands of people arrested protesting in the streets or speaking out on social media; for most Americans who voted Republican or were completely apolitical, though, life would go on as normal (just like in the early years of the takeovers of Chile, Russia, and Hungary — or Italy, Germany and Spain in the 1930s).
A handful of high-profile progressive politicians would have been assassinated or survived assassination attempts; the police and the FBI, however, would have been as clueless about their killers as they were about 10,000 people planning to storm the Capitol and assassinate the Vice President and Speaker of the House on January 6th.
The Democratic Party would have been labeled the aggressors and as subversives by rightwing media; its ranks by now would have melted away as quickly as the union-aligned parties did in Italy and Germany in the 1930s or the Allende Socialists in Chile in 1973.
First abortion would be criminalized, then birth control, then women in business and politics would find themselves under constant attack in the media and the workplace; white male dominance would by now be close to reattaining the status it had in 1972 when women couldn’t legally get an abortion, execute some contracts, or even get a credit card without the signature of a father or husband.
Newsrooms across the country would be purged by now of liberals and running editorials in support of the “new patriotism” proclaimed by the GOP; the hedge funds headed up by rightwing billionaires — who today own over half of all the nation’s newspapers — would be snapping up the rest of the nation’s media like Viktor Orbán’s oligarch buddies did in Hungary.
Every time these sorts of coups happen, the nation’s people are shocked and surprised. They had no idea how far things had gone. It even happened that way with the American Revolution and the Civil War.
Gradually, then suddenly.
Trump’s supporters are openly calling for the end of democracy, for book burnings, and for public executions of Democratic politicians. The leader of the Republicans in the House of Representatives refuses to even reprimand Representative Paul Gosar for openly celebrating his fantasy murder of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
A multimillionaire former head of The Carlyle Group with no political experience, running on a platform of auditing the 2020 election and not much else, won the governorship of Virginia by spreading the naked, racist lie that Democrats in that state were indoctrinating white children to feel ashamed of the color of their skin; not a single elected Republican and only a rare few in the media called him out.
When Franklin D. Roosevelt faced the fascist “America First” movement within the GOP, he went to political war with them and the Supreme Court that backed them. “They hate me,” he thundered to cheers, “and I welcome their hatred!”
President Biden, a creature of deal-making and backroom back-slapping in the Senate, appears to think he can negotiate with these people who want to remake America in Pinochet’s image (with the same type of Chicago School neoliberal advisors who helped Pinochet turn Chile into an autocratic nightmare).
He’s wrong.
They are building their power and their organizations right now; armed paramilitary groups are expanding across the country as the GOP has become so radicalized that they now proclaim Liz Cheney as their enemy.
They are openly preparing for a second Civil War.
In Michigan, a militia group nearly kidnapped and killed that state’s governor; they were stopped by an insider who turned states’ evidence.
Meanwhile, all across social media, the word is spreading: “The storm is upon us.”
January 6th was a rehearsal; they're now planning 2022 and 2024. Coups build to an explosive tipping point, then suddenly appear as a fait accompli.
Unless we stop them in-process, this may be our last chance.
Gradually, then suddenly.
They'll have to come up with a new smiley-face slogan; the delicious irony of "Truth, Justice, and the American Way" would be way too laughable. How about "Work Makes You Free" -- or was that one already taken?
You never cease amazing your audiences with your encyclopedic knowledge, articulate discussion, and wise counsel. I have no idea how any one person could have managed to acquire so much extensive knowledge, expertise, and the sort of accurate analyses of crucial information in one lifetime that you have. But I am a bit mystified about why you appear not to be aware of the inherent dangers of joining school and state at the hip and have not seemed to give the issue of education the time and attention it deserves.
How has it been so easy for the right-wing to radicalize “average Americans through social media and an ever-growing network of hard-right podcasts” or to take over “school boards and local boards of elections”? Is a big part of the problem that when authority is both arbitrary and illegitimate, those who are more self-serving, devious, and ambitious find it much too easy to overwhelm and overpower those whose motives are to serve and protect? Are Americans “servile and dumb” as Holt said, because of the conditioning, programming, and obedience training that is the most salient inherent feature of compulsory attendance?
You have spoken often about the desire of those on the right to destroy public education (you are referring to public schools, I’m sure) and about the need to teach civics in schools. However, it is pointless to try to save what has already been lost without figuring out what led to the loss, and it is futile to hope that good teaching will rectify a situation which bad schooling has created utilizing counterproductive strategies.
When you speak about authoritarianism coming to us “brick-by-brick” you should acknowledge that in school, it is coming truckload-by-truckload, while education is a shadow of itself there.
Here is the first short chapter of the first draft of my third book.
Education without thinking is no education
In becoming educated, one thing is more important and more basic than anything else. That crucial single thing is simply the opportunity and the ability to think clearly, continuously, and in a way which allows a student (or any person) to formulate ideas and questions in their mind and to work through an analytical process without undue interruption to arrive at answers, solutions, or more specific questions to ask and answer. That is education in a nutshell. It matters not if the student has the best teacher or the best curriculum if that student has not yet developed an adequate thinking process or if something prevents that process from being carried out. Thinking is key to learning. Thinking for oneself is key to living free.
Children enter school with varying skills and aptitudes. Some have the cognitive abilities which we ordinarily associate with children of school age; some possess more advanced skills and thinking capacities, and some have lagged others (or the “average”) to some extent in various ways. Accounting for those differences adequately requires intensive attention and a degree of intimacy which is only possible with highly trained professionals and one-on-one observation. This would require a massive budget.
So, we have encountered two major and chronic problems with the traditional school paradigm already within the first three paragraphs! In the typical classroom uninterrupted thinking is rare, if not impossible. And, when the budget only permits a ratio of one, two, or three dozen children (give or take) to one teacher, who is seldom qualified to diagnose learning disabilities or to even detect simple regular blocks to comprehension or obscure personal issues and mysteries which confound or confuse a student, that thinking process we have identified as essential is thrown off-track, sometimes permanently.
Asking Schools to do the Impossible
We can put all our heads together and work on possible solutions to the myriad problems that schooling presents. There are things we could do (and that have already been demonstrated in many places and times) to improve our institutions and opportunities for personal growth and amelioration. While perfection should not be an objective, there are measures that can be taken to relieve pressure and to help students. There are many wonderful, dedicated, self-sacrificing, and highly competent people in the field. No one will suggest that we throw up our hands in surrender.
Indeed, if miracles large or small happen, it is the teachers and a few other extraordinary people going the extra mile who deserve all the credit. If you have spent much time in a traditional school, you are surely aware that rules must be bent or broken, and ways must be found to circumvent the maze of bureaucratic constraints and red tape in many cases for children to get the attention and tolerance they need to thrive.
However, there is one thing which MUST be understood before we proceed. Write this down. Imprint it upon your strongest memory circuits. SCHOOL IS NOT THE PLACE FOR EDUCATION.
School has been wrongly conflated with education for far too long. Those individuals who have attended school and who simultaneously became educated invariably created their knowledge more outside of the school apparatus than within it and more through their own efforts and initiative than through that of others as a rule.
Education is a personal thing. Education is a consequence of personal interest, curiosity, diligence, focus, determination, and intellectual rigor. Education is ineffable and primarily a solitary journey or quest. But schools have other immediate and pressing concerns and priorities.
Even were we to shrink our hopes and expectations for mass public education down to mere basic literacy through mandated attendance in schools (or participation in some authorized substitute, such as home schooling), it turns out that great disappointment is inevitable.
In the third decade of the twenty-first century, a sizable proportion of adults remain semi-literate, or illiterate as shown in plenty of statistical data. Schools under a compulsory paradigm tend to degrade into anti-intellectual bastions of convention, propriety, and authority-seeking along with obedience training attitudes and behaviors. The foundation of education may be literacy, but literacy does not guarantee education by any stretch of the imagination.
Schools can and do serve many worthwhile purposes. Students are occasionally inspired to greatness and scholarly endeavors when the stars align and when their relationships with dedicated and charismatic teachers reinforce initiative, discipline, and ability. Nevertheless, for the most part, education is NOT EVER the primary business of school. The noise and confusion and the need for control and conformity are not conducive to the degree of contemplation and concentration necessary for education. Education begins at or prior to birth and has no identifiable end point.
Education is Serious Business – When Will We Start Treating it as Such?
If one asks any educator if education is serious business, they are sure to insist that it is ‘as serious as a heart attack’. Yet relying on laws to force children to attend schools, which have never demonstrated that they can deliver on the promise of authentic education for more than a small minority, and by merely putting our foot down selectively to assure compliance, and then blaming the child for any failure to become properly or adequately educated, we have accepted no duty and no responsibility to educate anyone.
In a country ruled by a dictator, the dictator can arbitrarily declare that there should be education and laws will be passed, schools will spring up and there will a system which is meant to educate the children or the public. (((Please note: Dictators are not afraid of education as they define it. They know that they can control the curriculum and the narratives in those countries, and they do. And if they were to look at what has passed for education in this country, they would feel comforted in knowing that independent thought is no longer an outstanding characteristic even here.)))
Trying to force people of any age to become educated is a veritable absurdity. If we can force school attendance with the illusion that it will assure mass education, why should we not require a diet of healthy food to avoid disease in our population, enforced exercise regimens for strength and physical endurance, church attendance or 12-step meetings to guarantee morality, spirituality, and sobriety, and the like? What other exceptions to democracy and respect for individual choice will we pass into law?
Taking education seriously would require us to know first how we define it and how we obtain it. In truth, there is no one-size-fits-all definition or formula that can be applied universally – especially if we wish to remain a democratic republic.
It is no less true also, that there are many diverse ways and avenues to obtain education, with no authoritative expert or wizard to lead every single child to an agreed upon destination. We will either have a free country, or we will have someone or some group of authorities who are our masters making the “right” choices for us because we cannot be trusted to make them for ourselves. As it turns out, the supposed education experts and gurus have been stuck in first gear for three centuries. They are still acting as if cognition is disembodied because that is what ancient philosopher Descartes preached!
If we are ever going to get serious about maintaining and preserving the greatness of the US with education, we will have to stop pretending that we can manufacture it in factories like so many refrigerators and Jeeps. We will have to give up on herding children into crowded classrooms and dazzling them with our own brilliance and entertainment skills.