I’m encountering a great deal of alarm among progressive activists regarding continued Republican claims of a stolen election. Do these anti-democratic efforts mean a coup attempt is under way?
Despite being among the first to write about the possibilities of a coup, I have to say (as of this moment) the answer is “No.” My colleagues at Choose Democracy — who have been preparing Americans to defeat a power grab for the past several months — have also stopped short of describing what we’ve seen and heard this week as a coup. In a release today, they said: “What we have seen has been slow, poorly rolled out, and has none of the surprise elements associated with a traditional coup.”
So what are we to make of the Trump campaign’s lawsuits, Republicans refusing to honor the election results and the Department of Justice looking into “allegations” of supposed voter fraud? If this isn’t a coup, then what is it?
The politics of grievance
I believe Trump’s “stolen election” claim is a choice to continue a kind of politics that has served him well in the past — so well that he’s re-shaped the Republican Party in its image. Trump specializes in the politics of grievance.
Millions of words have been written since 2016 about manipulating grievance to gain political power. The question for the politics of grievance is never whether or not something is true — it can be laughably untrue. The claim that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States was obviously bogus, but it was useful as a way to reduce his legitimacy as president and fit nicely into the politics of grievance.
I believe the point of claiming a stolen election is not to set the stage for a coup, but to add more juice to the right’s list of grievances for building political power in the future. The bigger the publicity that’s produced around this claim, the more juice is created — and that’s what they are trying to do now.
Count on it: the juice will ferment in 2021 and be stronger in 2022. Everything that hurts Americans will be laid on the door of Biden, “who was fraudulently elected!”
What can we do about it?
First, as the Choose Democracy team advises, “Breathe.” Our anxiety doesn’t actually serve us in this case. Additional immediate action steps are also recommended on the site, including writing elected officials and supporting and thanking poll workers.
Second, in the coming months pay attention to the grievances that arise from the circumstances of living in a declining empire. It’s no accident that exit polls showed more people who earned less than $50,000 favored Biden than those with higher incomes. That was also true for those who didn’t work full time. More people also favored Biden who saw the nation’s economy as “not good” or “poor.”
It makes sense: More well-off people supported Trump more often because they are more able to insulate themselves from the deteriorating conditions of American life.
The Green New Deal is a vision that pays attention to some of the real grievances: job insecurity, climate disasters, neglected infrastructure, exploding rents.
The third thing we can do is build a liberatory political culture that substitutes empathy for political correctness. The electoral map makes plain the results of bi-coastal condescension. If you were looked down on, why wouldn’t you want a champion who says “Fuck you” to elitists? This is a grievance that’s within the power of progressives to do something about. As I’ve explained many times, the make-over starts with a sober examination of how classism distorts our understanding of oppression.
A great place to start is with sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild’s beautifully-written book about Republicans in Louisiana, “Strangers in their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right.”
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SupportWe have momentum
In some ways we’re in good shape for growing in numbers and power in the Biden years. On multiple issues we’ve been on the move, and we’re not likely to make the tragic mistake of progressives in the Obama years of expecting the Democratic Party to do the job for us. The neoliberal Democratic Party leadership will do what Democrats did last time: allow conditions to grow that invite a grievance-based Republican take-over in the next election.
Empathic social movements that retain a big picture of our country and world — and stay independent of co-optative moves from the Democrats — can grow rapidly by developing visions like Medicare for All that respond to the real needs of people, especially in rural areas, who otherwise are tempted by the grievance party. Police and public safety are one example of an issue mired in the dynamics of racism until more work in alternative visioning is done.
We can do all this. The workshops of Choose Democracy were designed to help prepare for movement-building on the chance we wouldn’t need to defeat a serious coup attempt. That chance has arrived.
Thank you, Prof. Lakey, for framing our current moment with a phrase that makes sense — the politics of grievance to fan the Republican base seems spot on. But will it hold up in court? If it does, for some inexplicable reason, what comes next?
Thank you for your awesome work–ever inspiring.
Thanks for wise and visionary take on the Turnip recounts. To read about them incites uncertainty and anxiety. Your explanation of their purpose is VERY helpful. I will share it in my circles.
Your analysis is cogent and seems well-founded. However, I am still concerned that Plan A for 45 and his allies is to actually throw the decision to the House of Representatives, by, as Steve Bannon put it, “flooding the zone” with B.S. In other words, creating clouds of misinformation and attempting to use that as cover to actually override the votes of the people so that the House can give the presidency to 45. (See Hayes-Tilden election of 1876.) The Trump campaign may not be confident that this will work, but I am very concerned about the firing of Mark Esper, as he is the one who refused to use the U.S. military in the context of the election. His firing seems particularly sinister if the plan for responding to “flooding the zone” is for us to hit the streets when the administration tries to discredit the electoral college entirely and substitute the will of the House. I am heartened by state election officials pushing back against the false narrative of the Trump campaign, but I am concerned that they do not have the megaphone that the administration has. I think Plan B, definitely, is what you describe, and your solution is right on. But what if Plan A is to steal the election? Are we ready? Thank you so much for all you have done and are doing to keep our democracy functioning.
Thank you, George. I feel myself calm down some. I do, however, worry a lot about the volunteer militias. There are a lot of angry people out there who have hate and guns, as well as military training, and don’t feel a need to be formally nationally organized. It’s a powder keg. And many police, also armed, trained and angry, side with them. These are people who will not care to wait for political strategy to work.
“Are we ready,” you ask, and it’s a great question. I figured we weren’t in July, which is why I sounded the alarm in my July WagingNonviolence article and led the training program for Choose Democracy which created itself to catalyze a national movement for readiness.
Now, after these months, I think we’re far more ready than we were. A couple things may be reassuring. One is to look at political scientist Stephen Zunes’ study of successful nonviolent resistance to coup attempts (on the ChooseDemocracy.us website): in none of those successes had people prepared themselves for resistance — because it was a surprise to them. Nevertheless, they succeeded, plus others that didn’t make it into Stephen’s study who were equally unready.
A lot of us may imagine that it’s easy to pull off a successful coup, whereas the literature suggests that it’s quite hard — and even harder in a country like ours where so much political power is decentralized. Trump wasn’t able to stop even cities from defying him when it came to sanctuary for immigrants, much less states. On a different issue: California drives him crazy with its policy of self-determination regarding auto emissions (in defiance of federal standards), but Trump is unable to force California to knuckle under. A different example from this summer: Oregon’s governor forced him to withdraw his federal “enforcers” from Portland.
I wrote this article partly because I think it’s easy to mistake the noise this circus clown makes for deliverable, political power against solid institutions. Trump has so much trouble even within the administration he presumably runs that he’s constantly firing his people for not getting done what he wants!!!! This is an old story: President Harry Truman complained that the hardest thing for a U.S. president is to get people to follow through on his orders!
Can Trump make trouble? Obviously, yes — disruption is his great talent. Can he run anything as complicated as the U.S. against the will of a large majority (that would include an estimated third of the Republicans)? Not if we use what we know about nonviolent resistance. From Florida teens to BLM moms to United Auto Workers members that forced General Motors’ concessions to climate activists, we know a whole lot about nonviolent resistance — and WagingNonviolence.org teaches more all the time!
George
Wonderful essay George.
Keep up your good work.
Solidarity,
Tom Paine Cronin
Thank you for the referal to Arlie Russell Hockschild’s book. As she says in the Preface, she went seeking the “deep story” of people on the right, how life feels to them. This has been a silent understanding of mine for some time now. It is wonderful to know that there are people digging in this mine.
Thank you again, George. I do check ChooseDemocracy.us for the coup-o-meter regularly. 🙂 Locally, we began organizing in August, and many of our local and state government officials are on the record supporting democracy. We also have built a local coalition that includes labor. I’m grateful for the groundwork that has been laid! I fervently pray we don’t need to be “ready,” but I’m glad for what we have done. I hope it makes a small contribution to the collective sense that a coup attempt cannot succeed!
Being a old school Radical, I don’t agree with views of today’s “progressives” who vote for the party of slavery – the Democratic Party – for any reason. Progressives should be progressive. The Democratic Party is and has always been a regressive party of oppression. Bigger government is the same as plantation government.
The 2020 election is being stolen by Democratic Party elements in 5 key cities along with un-constitutional changes in voting procedures in 5 states. There’s ample proof if one chooses to look for it. It’s been reported.
No, I did not vote for Trump in 2016, but I could not sit by this time, and I have studied the election results which are still ongoing.
A progressive conservative is Radical because the issue is Freedom and Responsibility.
Non-Violence is but one of our shared views.