I know, I know, it’s becoming harder to counter that counter with anything other than this.
By any reasonable definition, this is no longer a peaceful transition of power. Not only did the person who lost the election refused to concede, he falsely claimed until the very end that he had won in a landslide. While asserting that he had the right to continue his administration rather than turn it over to the legitimate winner, the president gathered his supporters on the very date that his loss was to be certified and directed them to march on the seat of government to disrupt the process—and they certainly tried. Some may have been in ridiculous looking costumes but others had guns, Molotov cocktails, explosives, zip-ties for hostages, kevlar vests, helmets and other tactical gear.
There are reports that the president refused to authorize help from the National Guard and rebuffed desperate attempts by others in the administration to get him to make a public statement urging for this mob to retreat. He did not do so. The only videos the president posted during the event started with stating “yes I won and the election was stolen fraudulently” (paraphrasing since Twitter took them down very quickly) before doing a cursory “but go home and be peaceful” along with a declaration of his love for the insurrectionists. This is not a call to stand down at all. (If indeed he had won the election by a landslide, and the victory was stolen by a cabal, and a fraudulent president was about to be installed illegally, what else should people do?)
Consequently multiple people are dead and many are injured, and the legislators had to be evacuated or cower behind barricades and benches. One of the insurrectionists was killed by the police (while trying to climb through broken glass into an area where the legislators had gathered) and so far, one policeman has died (after being hit in the head by a fire extinguisher). Three others are dead: from being trampled and two medical incidents, one of them may involve the taser the insurrectionist brought with him going off, resulting in a self-tasing that led to a heart-attack.
Meanwhile, crucially, the same evening, after the Capitol was cleared, the legislators moved back under heavy military presence and… many of them proceeded to vote to throw out the results of the election. Eight GOP senators and 138 GOP representatives (65% of the GOP caucus in the House) still objected to the electoral votes being certified.
Stay with me because that’s the most important part. That’s the reason why this matters so much: not just because of how outrageous it is to have thousands of people overrun our Capitol, but because they had allies who shared their objective, strong allies, at every level of government from the executive to the legislative.
There was no pretense that this was about electoral processes, rather than who won the presidency. Representatives from Pennsylvania, for example, objected to the results of the presidential vote in Pennsylvania—the very votes that had seated them. To add to the blatant nature of the attempt, the voting process that allegedly caused the issue in Pennsylvania was put in place by its GOP state legislature. To the degree there was any attempt to pretend there was anything to this besides not liking the result, the key claim they raised was that Pennsylvania had unreasonably extended its voting period. North Carolina, however, had an ever longer voting period but GOP legislators did not object to that one at all. (The difference is left as an exercise for the reader).
Worse, this was a toned down attempt to overturn the election. There would have been more senators and representatives if the overrunning of the Capitol—and the resulting deaths—hadn’t embarrassed some of them or if the results in Georgia hadn’t changed the political calculation for them. (For example, Senate Loeffler, who lost her re-election bid, decided to withdraw her objection despite being an ardent Trump supporter and often echoing his false claims—she probably decided that this wasn’t how she wanted to go back to civilian life).
Imagine being escorted back to chambers like this, and still voting to overturn the election. (That’s Senator Josh Hawley right there in the middle). Yet, that’s exactly what they did.
Now, it’s true that this time, they knew it wouldn’t succeed. But given all this, it’s very difficult to argue that if they had a path, they would not have tried, or if they are not deterred, they never will again.
Hence we come to some crucial parts from the counter from Maciej Ceglowski.
It’s important that we admit that norm-breaking behavior by Trump in 2020, even his flagrant attempt to overturn the election, is not the same thing as his norm breaking when he first got into office. We’ve had four years to get the measure of the man. We know how the movie goes. He’ll rage for a while and it will be over.
The Republicans accepted this fact of life earlier than we did, and concentrated on achieving whatever political goals they could pull out of the chaos of his administration. And so they got their tax cut, their Federal justices, and Supreme Court appointments. When it became clear Biden had won the election, they made the correct, if not very noble, political calculation that they should just wait and let Trump sulk for a while. Like a lot of political calculations the Republicans have made in the past four years, this one was both enraging and accurate.
...
All this is to say that a departing Trump is the least of our problems, no matter how much he roars and bellows, and that policing norms around his departure and around electoral legitimacy will do nothing to get us out of the political glue trap we are stuck in.
...
In these circumstances, I understand the appeal of fighting to preserve political norms, and taking seriously threats (like coups) that are outside the American political experience. But Trump is done. He’s on his way out. And at some point, the constant warnings about a descent into authoritarianism become a kind of denial. We want to believe that what happened in our country is an aberration, a misstep, some trick of the light, and that there is a pathway back to more ordinary and humane politics.
I’ll conclude this counter-counter with this note. This clearly wasn’t just politics as usual, and not because of the mob that took over the Capitol. This was a trial run for a self-coup that could very well be tried in the future. An overwhelming majority of the GOP representatives in the house spent the day in lock-down and came back and promptly voted to overturn the election. In a future scenario where the election had come down to PA—for example if Joe Biden hadn’t very very narrowly won Georgia and Arizona by a total of about 23,127 votes out of total of about hundred-and-fifty million cast, or if Trump hadn’t just contributed to the loss of two senate seats in Georgia for the GOP, and thus the loss of the control of the Senate. It’s absolutely plausible to me that even more Republicans would have joined this blatant attempt to overturn the election and that their base would mostly have been fine with that. The (self)-coup train wasn’t something that was just for show; it just wasn’t close enough to work this time.
If anything, I think the mob action may make that a little less likely in the future because it exposed the blatant nature of the attempt to overturn the elections using extralegal means that appeared to fit procedure (senators and congresspeople spoke within their allotted time) while being completely illegitimate in nature. There is indeed more to say about this—being willing to overturn elections and expanding minority rule does not mean the said party also doesn’t win elections. In fact, that is a very common scenario of authoritarian or minority rule, combining blatantly anti-democratic forms of governance—structural minority rule like the senate, opportunistic ones like gerrymandering and kneecapping the powers of offices that have been lost, etc.—with outright antidemocratic moves, like using control of institutions to throw out results of elections.
I’ll conclude by quoting from a piece I wrote the day before the mob stormed the capitol and the legislators voted to overturn elections anyway.
…Having one party’s top presidential contenders competing to convince voters that they will be the best candidate to steal elections—because that is what they are offering to help Trump do—is a five-alarm fire for a democracy. It compounds our ongoing crisis, in which various aspects of our system that empower minorities either constitutionally or opportunistically have been used to create conditions in which an electoral minority can impose its will on the majority. States containing less than 20 percent of the nation’s population elect a majority of the Senate. The Republican Party has used its control of this chamber to capture the Supreme Court and the rest of the judiciary. Through gerrymandering and the uneven distribution of the population, the GOP does about 6 percent better in the median House district than it does in the national popular vote.
And the GOP also enjoys a significant advantage in the Electoral College, which elects the president, and thus controls the executive branch. …The attempt to undermine whatever victories an electoral majority can eke out is the logical next step of persistent and entrenched minority rule as well as a significant escalation.
But that’s not all that’s happening. A theater show is performative because the actors and the audience know it’s a performance. If a gun is hanging on the wall in a Chekhov play, we know two things: that it will go off by the end of the play, and that it must actually be a fake or unloaded gun, because it’s only a play. When a loaded gun is brought out in real life, the fact that the person holding it is incompetent or clownish doesn’t make that gun performative; it’s still a gun. When the president of the United States calls up electoral officials to threaten them, he’s leveling a loaded gun at our democracy.
So here we are. Yes, their aim wasn’t great, but the gun was loaded. Very loaded. And it’s not over. How we respond will determine what they’ll bring out next time.
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Dr. Tüfekçi's Antlantic piece "America's Next Authoritarian Will Be Much More Competent" predicts a danger more serious than COVID: A Fascist Dictator. Unaware of her article and prior to the Attack on Congress, I had written the following piece with hopes of publishing it somewhere substantial; but, it ended up just an article for my FB friends. It is in line with Dr. Tüfekçı's piece, and I am sharing it here. I am new in this Forum, and please excuse me if I am out of turn.
“DO NOT REJOICE IN HIS DEFEAT…”
German playwright Bertolt Brecht had the following lines in his 1941 play, “The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui”:
“Do not rejoice in his defeat, you men.
“For though the world has stood up and stopped the bastard,
“the bitch that bore him is in heat again”.
The play is an allegory for the rise of Adolf Hitler, in the person of a fictional gangster, Arturo Ui, who attempts to control a certain racket in 1930s Chicago, with ruthless methods.
It would be tempting to find those lines of Brecht applicable to the current events of today’s America. There is a defeat: Trump lost the election. There is a resulting rejoice of Democrats over this defeat. There are concerns that Trumpism will continue to dominate Republican Party for some time to come. But, is Trump the “Bastard”, the omen mentioned in Brecht’s play?
No doubt, there are many similarities between Hitler and Trump. Both did many things in total disregard of established Constitutional order and traditional lines of governing. Both lied to denounce their opponents and to praise their own actions –Trump lied to praise even his non-action on COVID. Trump has displayed a strong tendency to be first an autocrat, then a dictator; Hitler started as an autocrat, and became a dictator. One may find many other similarities between Trump and Hitler. However, these similarities should not make us overlook many essential differences between these two personalities and their historical backgrounds.
While Hitler had a monstrous soul, we have not seen so far that much of an evil soul in Trump; it seems like he can at least love his children. This should somewhat console those who fear that Hitler and Trump are identical soul twins. However, there are quite a few issues with Trump to offset this consolation. Hitler loved his dog and treated his female associates with respect, as opposed to Trump being a pet-averse, and reached his female entourages’ private parts, and even boasted about it. Hitler was against marital infidelity, as exemplified in his intervention on Goebels’ extra marital affair, upon a request by Frau Goebels. On the other hand, we read about several stories of Trump’s adulteries. These are some behavioral differences between Hitler and Trump.
As for the differences in their intellectual capacities, we can observe a greater gap. Hitler was able to re-organize the NAZI Party and to make it an effective fighting machine against all Europe. In Trump’s background, we find inheritance, bankruptcies, failed enterprises, millions of dollars of debt. Hitler could concentrate long enough to be able to draft a military campaign plan against France that succeeded stunningly, allowing victorious Hitler touring Paris in 1940 – a plan that was objected by German generals initially, and that gained their respect for Hitler subsequently. As opposed to that, Trump is said to have the attention span of a toddler in the discussions of governmental affairs. Until towards the end of the Second World War, Hitler had the trust and respect of his generals; Trump has been the butt of a banquette joke by his former Secretary of Defense, General Jim Matthis who said "I earned my spurs on the battlefield... Donald Trump earned his spurs in a letter from a doctor," referring to a medical deferment for bone spurs that enabled Trump to dodge draft during the Vietnam War.
Considering these contrasts, from the standpoint of these two personalities, rather than Hitler in the form of Arturo Ui who was focused, purposeful, and serious, and whose authority rested not only on fear but also on respect, Trump is more like Adenoid Hinkel of Charlie Chaplin’s 1941 film Great Dictator which also spoofs Adolf Hitler –a buffoon.
While Hitler’s favorable attributes over Trump is mentioned here, Hitler, with his ridiculous personality and sick soul, could not have become the leader of a people like Germans, a nation of philosophers, poets, musicians, artists, and scientists if the post-World I Germany had been any different.
Germany suffered economically from not only the consequences of the war, through heavy reparations and a legendary inflation but also from the effects of Great Depression in the World. Germany suffered also psychologically. They felt humiliated to lose territories, to be subjected to disarmament, as a result of a War they had started to believe they were winning or they should have won – after all, no part of Germany was invaded by their enemies.
Throughout history, people could weather economic difficulties and gloomy political debates. But, there has been no long term tolerance to violence. What wore Germans after the War was the political atmosphere that spilled from conference halls to streets in the form of armed rival gangs. Right wing was out to threaten and assassinate opponents, Left was out not only to counter them, but also to attempt building a new Socialist German State, in fact there was founded even a short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic. Germany had become a battleground between rival political gangs.
When a people run into a tyrant at every corner of their country, they have always preferred to have just one tyrant. Hitler and many others before and after him have satisfied that preference.
While there are great differences between Hitler and Trump, the differences between Weimar Germany and today’s America are only superficial. Though caused by different reasons, American people today are psychologically, economically, politically as unhappy as those Germans. Perhaps, today many Americans are prone to be deceived by a demagogue more than those Germans. When Hitler made them believe that Jews were out to destroy not only German people but also the whole Aryan Race, he could at least tie that ridiculous claim to seeming BS evidence that many leaders of German Socialist, Social Democrat, Communist Parties, which nationalist blamed for the ills of the country, were Jews, that many leaders of Soviet Revolution were Jews. Today, a sizable portion of American population can believe that leaders of Democratic Party, as members of a Satanic cult, aided by Hollywood, are running a criminal ring devoted to the abduction, trafficking, torture, sexual abuse and cannibalization of children, and that Donald Trump is the only person willing and capable to mount an attack against them.
Yes, Trump is not as capable as Hitler, which is a consolation against a fear of Fascism by him; but, the population he has preyed on is more gullible than that which Hitler had found. Therefore, while it seems like his first attempt to be the villain of Brecht’s play has failed, America must be prepared for his second attempt, or new attempts by more capable “Bastards”.
To counter the dangers of a Fascism in America, Americans who are loyal to the spirit of the Founders of this country must be on alert, and launch initiatives to remedy true social, economic, psychological, and political ailments of this country, addressing the legitimate concerns of their political rivals. For example, instead of spending time on endless discussions on fringe matters, they should spend time on legislations to prevent would-be dictators to flourish. For instance, in order to prevent a fiasco like that of today’s, when a President resists to leave office after an obvious defeat, a constitutional change may be contemplated by which both President and Vice President would be required to leave office, in favor of some constitutionally determined persons, some time prior to an election.
“World-historic facts and personages appear twice”, Hegel said, and to which Marx added “first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” In historical reality, they may appear many times alternating between tragedy and farce. Trump Era, hopefully, is turning out to be just a farce with its “Pizzagates,” “Rigged Elections,” “COVID Hoaxes”. However, if decent Democrats and Republicans do not act wisely, they would be the midwives of that “Bastard” waiting to be born and to bring tragedy.
January 2, 2021
Sabahattin Sakman
Former News Commentator of Turkish TV Channel Kanal-E (later CNBC-E)
Former columnist of Turkish daily newspaper, YURT.
Zeynep, please write about specific actions any of us can take. I respect that Insight is meant to be a community for deep thought, not a political platform. But I'm asking for suggestions, anyway.
I absolutely agree with your messages about underlying dynamics (averting repetitions of this disaster starts with understanding that yes, this is a coup; and whatever limited damage this time can't be counted on in the future). Changing thought and perception precedes changing what we do. Each of us who agrees with this can try to effectively persuade those outside one's bubble to see things differently. (A big lift!)
But for those of us who are already in agreement with you, what actions can we take?
Agreed that minority rule encodes all of this. I see plausibly effective opposition via
(1) the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/ which would, de facto, make POTUS elections dependent on the popular vote and
(2) Fair Vote https://www.fairvote.org/ which is currently focusing on Ranked Choice Voting.
What else? Those in agreement sit here, anguished. We must have a place to direct that energy.
Thanks to all who are at least trying to make sense of this.