Jan. 6, Seen in Comparative Perspective, Shows How Far Democracy Has Declined in America

The Outcomes of Self-Coups in the US, Venezuela, Brazil, and South Korea Tell the Story

Welcome back to Lucid, and hello to all new subscribers! Our next Q&A will be on Friday, Jan. 10, 1-2pmET. Paying subscribers will receive a link to register for the Zoom gathering at 10amET that day. And on Jan. 12, 8-9pmET, there will be a special joint event with former FBI agent Asha Rangappa and subscribers to her Substack, The Freedom Academy, which focuses on disinformation and its toll on democracy. I’ll have more information about that this coming week.

If you’d like to join these informative and congenial weekly gatherings, you can sign up as a paying subscriber or upgrade to paid here:

Upcoming MSNBC appearances: I will be speaking about Jan. 6 with Ari Melber tonight in the 6pmET hour, and with Nicolle Wallace on Wednesday between 4 and 6pmET. As always with cable news, this could change, but that’s the plan now.

For new subscribers or those who missed it, here is my report to the House Select Jan. 6 Committee. I was interviewed twice by the committee and then wrote this report to analyze the coup attempt from the perspective of authoritarian dynamics.

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Lost an election or facing impeachment, but don’t want to leave office due to greed, hubris, or fear of prosecution? As coups have made a comeback in the 21^st century, so has the “self-coup” (autogolpe) proliferated around the world as a solution for authoritarian-minded leaders in these situations. The Jan. 6, 2021 coup attempt in the United States is part of a pattern of reactions by authoritarian leaders whose power is challenged by elections, impeachment processes, and other democratic checks on the executive.

The ways political and other elites and societies respond to such power grabs is a measure of the strength of democracy in that country. A comparative view of the outcome of Jan. 6 shows just how far democratic backsliding has advanced in the United States.

Consistent with their agenda of transforming America into an autocracy, Republican elites in and out of government treated the period from Donald Trump’s defeat in Nov. 2020 to Jan. 6 as a laboratory of solutions to the “problem” of free and fair elections that don’t go your way. When the violent insurrection failed to stop Joe Biden from taking office, those elites and their media allies did not abandon Trump, nor throw their lot in with their democratic colleagues.

Rather, electrified by the breaking of taboos, they rewarded the instigator of that insurrection with increased support. They declared Biden’s presidency to be illegitimate and circulated lies hundreds of thousands of times to cement the rewriting of the assault on the Capitol as a patriotic and morally righteous response to a “stolen” election.

This gave Trump support at the highest levels of government and among his base to mount a successful bid for re-election. This shocking situation is the clearest sign of the GOP’s exit from democracy—democracy being understood as a political system in which election results are respected, transfers of power uncontested, and violence refuted as a means of solving political problems.

Trump supporters storm the Capitol, Jan. 6, 2021. Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images.

We need only look to Venezuela in 2024 to see what happens when an authoritarian incumbent has had years to capture a party and corrupt institutions, making his self-coup far more likely to succeed. Despite a landslide victory by the opposition, President Nicholás Maduro, who had been chosen by dictator Hugo Chavez to continue his legacy, refused to vacate the presidency.

Buy-offs of the military and the use of civilian gangs (colectivos) as enforcers allowed him to use violence against protesters and force the rightful winner of the election, Edmundo González, into exile in Spain. González has been on an international tour to secure support for his plan to return home and be inaugurated on Jan. 20 —the U.S. and other countries recognized him as the winner of the 2024 election—but Maduro has threatened to arrest him if he enters Venezuela.

But when political, military, and other elites of a country are still committed to democracy, self-coups often fail. That happened in South Korea in 2024, Brazil in 2023, and Peru in 2022. In these countries, the memory of the toll of past dictatorships (South Korea’s ended in 1987, Peru’s most recent one in 2000, and Brazil’s in 1985) was likely a factor in spurring legislators, the judiciary, and others to act on behalf of democracy when it was most threatened.

In Peru and South Korea, self-coups happened as a reaction to challenges to the leader’s authority outside of elections: they were desperate attempts to avoid impeachment. Authoritarian leaders take such risks because they have a proprietary notion of power. They don’t recognize boundaries between public and private. For them, having to leave office and endure the shame of impeachment and possible prosecution for any corrupt activities is a situation that warrants exceptional action.

For example, despite South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol’s claims of an impending threat from Communist North Korea, the only emergency was a personal one: Yoon, whose approval rating was down to just 17%, would have had to step down and face an influence-peddling scandal without the protections of high office. So he declared martial law. Political and judicial elites delivered a rebuke that caused his power grab to fail, and he was impeached and banned from foreign travel.

In Brazil, Trump’s great admirer Jair Bolsonaro staged a version of Jan. 6 on Jan. 8, 2023. Having lost the 2022 presidential election, and plagued by several investigations, he set up camp in Florida to have plausible deniability for his self-coup, while his hard-core supporters camped out near the targeted sites of Congress, the Supreme Court, and the Presidential Palace.

The outcome differed because the new Brazilian President Luis Inácio Lula da Silva took immediate action. This included arresting thousands of rioters, suspending the powerful Brasilia governor Ibaneis Rocha, a Bolsonaro ally with oversight of the police in his area, for 90 days, and investigating those who funded the foot soldiers. Ultimately, Bolsonaro was convicted of spreading election fraud, and banned from running for office until 2030.

All of this throws into relief the lack of a political will among American institutions to hold Trump accountable. Authoritarians view the absence of restraints on them as a sign of weakness. Although the House Jan. 6 Committee cast a wide net and held hearings that engaged the public, delayed action by the Department of Justice and half-hearted investigations into extremism within the military and U.S. security forces made it increasingly clear that Trump would not meet the same fate as his foreign counterparts.

This non-action further emboldened those who wish to facilitate the destruction of democratic ideals of leadership and create a legal context for strongman governance, which is why the far-right operatives on the Supreme Court decided to grant the holder of presidential office immunity from prosecution for “official acts.”

Failing to punish Trump for trying to overthrow the government also accelerated the plans of Project 2025, the Federalist Society, and myriad other partners to transform America into an autocracy and realign the United States with anti-democratic countries abroad. We and our allies will pay the price for this dereliction of democratic duty for years to come.