When Coup Planning Becomes Public
When Coup Planning Becomes Public
Controlling the Flow of Information is Key Whether Your Coup Succeeds or Not
"There was a PowerPoint for the coup," tweeted the political analyst and former FBI Special Agent Asha Rangappa of the detailed plan hatched before Jan. 6 to keep Donald Trump in office.
Trump White House chief Mark Meadows turned the Jan. 5 presentation, titled "Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 Jan," over to the congressional committee charged with investigating Jan. 6 before he ceased to cooperate with the government. It instructs the former president and his inner circle how they can invalidate the 2020 election through bogus accusations of fraud and foreign interference sufficient to justify the declaration of a state of emergency on national security grounds.
Only a select few conspirators, Trump among them, were supposed to see this classic coup planning document. Yet the existence of our democratic justice and legislative system and free press brought it out of the shadows and into the hands of journalists, who made it available to the public, including on Twitter.
Controlling the flow of information has been crucial to building the personality cults of strongmen who come to power via coup --and equally important for damage control if, as with Jan. 6, the operation is unsuccessful.
Coups involve secrecy and speed. Their power lies in the element of surprise - the shock of the unthinkable happening, and happening fast. Coups are "coordination games," in Naunihal Singh's words: operations governed by the expectation that each participant will keep the secret and act in ways that advance the common goal of taking over the government --or, in an autogolpe, or self-coup, staying in office by illegal means.
The conspiratorial element of coups means we are not often privy to the details of their planning. If the coup is successful, it may become part of the origin story of the new national collective. Then a leader may release details about it to enhance his reputation for daring and bravery. This was the case with Muammar Gaddafi, who planned his 1969 coup for years and was its undisputed author.
What if the leader who comes to power via coup was the last person to come on board, either because of his cautious nature (Francisco Franco) or because the coup's instigators did not fully trust him (Augusto Pinochet)? Then it can take a long time for the truth to come out.
Pinochet joined the 1973 Chilean coup against Socialist President Salvador Allende, which was years in the planning, only three days before the event, and he waffled until he was given an ultimatum by other conspiring generals. He then quickly asserted his personal power and became dictator for 17 years.
Because the American government helped to create the conditions for this right-wing authoritarian takeover, we have ample (if often heavily redacted) CIA and other documentation (like the Chile documents at the National Security Archive). Yet we had to wait for Pinochet to leave office in 1990 to see coup planning narratives that are less Pinochet-centered and show the contributions of non-American foreign actors, like those from Brazil's own military dictatorship.
When coups fail, the government that survived the coup attempt might release details of the planning in order to turn public opinion against the plotters and justify whatever punishments are given.
This was the case with the 2016 coup against Recep Tayyep Erdogan, planned by Turkish military officers. Being a 21st century coup, though, the records of their WhatsApp group chat from the night of the operation also made their way to investigative journalists and then into the public domain. It was amazing to have that chat on hand when I wrote about that failed coup in Strongmen.
Jan. 6 was a self-coup, but it was also a rescue operation prompted by the strength of Trump's authoritarian personality cult. That's one reason why damage control by the faithful, like Meadows, has focused on removing the former president’s personal liability. The Washington Post's Greg Sargent has a good analysis of how Meadow's new book tries to exonerate Trump, even arguing that the former president was "mortified" by the assault on the Capitol.
The release of that PowerPoint, and reporting that retired Army Col. Phil Waldron, who was involved in its creation, met with Trump in the Oval Office on Nov. 25, shreds Meadows' claims.
But no matter: authoritarianism requires more vehement shows of loyalty when the cult leader is in trouble, even if everyone knows the claims about him are false. One day, when Trump has discarded him, Meadows can think about the many ways he was used.
In the meantime, we can think about the preciousness of our open society that still supports freedom of the press, accountability, and transparency --things that authoritarians who take power via coup swiftly eradicate. Without it, that PowerPoint, a document of treachery and subversion, would have never seen the light of day.
Interesting to see what is happening in Chile at present.
The necessary complement to a successful coup is the failure of pro-democracy forces to prevent it.
In the coups discussed by RBG, “secrecy” was essential, so the “journey into the public domain” of information about them was problematic. In contrast, the slow-motion coup that is now taking place in America is being carried out in plain sight. The plotters have made their intentions and plans explicit and public. Their ongoing successes are public as well; to cite a couple, there are the January 6 assault, and the autocratic connivance and atavistic behavior of nearly all elected Republican officials, including their enactment of voter suppression and election subversion legislation.
Biden has expressly stated that he recognizes that American democracy is under threat. Perhaps he does not understand that Americans are suffering from mass psychosis, and that halting the coup requires addressing that psychosis, specifically by setting limits in the form of severe legal punishment of the plotters. But he certainly understands that democracy cannot exist without the rule of law, and that America cannot remain a democracy when one of its two major political parties is dedicated to destroying democracy, and to that end engages openly and with impunity in massive criminal activity, including subversion, and in public incitement to such activity. Before Biden took office, Robert Mueller documented major crimes committed by Trump, and stated that Trump could be prosecuted for them after he left office. Biden could have appointed an attorney general fit for the job, who would have set prosecution in motion in January 2021, while informing the public of the general lineaments of his efforts. Instead, we are not even getting a counterpart of Joe Manchin’s congressional stalling-charade. (According to Sarah Kendzior, Garland’s lifelong political mentor is a self-described mob lawyer.) Garland‘s motto seems to be that of the British Empire: “Never apologize, never explain.” As in Charles Dickens’ novel “Bleak House,” we will be let in on the joke, that there was never going to be anything there, only after it’s too late to do anything about it.
Biden’s long political record shows that he has a more oligarchical conception of American democracy than most Lucid readers probably have. But he cannot want to be a one-term president, remembered for being the last American president before the line of American Caesars began. The failure of American democracy to defend itself, using the means it clearly possesses, requires explanation.
Why is Biden failing to do something he knows must be done and that he has the means to do? What is constraining him? Is there a model for the knowing and willful failure of a democracy to protect itself from its internal enemies? There is the “Neville Chamberlain” model for appeasement, that is, for passively submitting to a militaristic foreign autocrat. There are the “Quisling” and “Vichy regime” models for collaboration, that is, for being a puppet for a foreign autocrat occupying one’s country. And Hindenburg and Papen are notorious as members of an elite who foolishly submitted to a nascent domestic autocrat. But “Hindenburg” and “Papen” hardly resonate as generic terms for a type of historical phenomenon as do the terms “Neville Chamberlain,” “Quisling,” and “Vichy regime.” Apparently, assisted suicide committed by a democracy is not well understood.
The only explanation I can think of for American democracy‘s assisted suicide is the hand of our plutocracy, hidden in plain sight. The federal government is their almost wholly-owned subsidiary. Corporations have long been understood to be more powerful in many ways than any government. In plain sight, our plutocracy is doing nothing to protect American democracy. Their inaction is of course not discussed in the mainstream media, because they own the mainstream media. The perversions of Fox News are a convenient distraction from what the plutocrats are doing by not doing.
What our plutocracy is really doing should be understood in the perspective of the historical evolution and expansion of American plutocracy. First our plutocracy presided over ethnically cleansing native Americans and stealing their continent. Then it presided over the enslavement of millions of people, serving as a major basis for the creation of American wealth. Then it presided over the acquisition and maintenance of an empire that continues to plunder the resources of other countries and to exploit their people as captive markets and cheap labor. Now in the 21st-century, many nations, including Russia and China, have become mafia states, states controlled and run by criminals for the purpose of self-enrichment. The mafia state has been globalized, with plutocrats and politicians in every country inextricably involved in the operations of (in Sarah Kendzior’s phrase) an international crime syndicate masquerading as sovereign governments. American plutocracy is an integral and major part of this international crime syndicate. (Some investigators believe the global flow of the dark money of plutocrats is larger than the legitimate global economy; South Dakota is one of the major centers of international money laundering.) Evidently the syndicate’s tentacles have metastasized so deeply throughout the economic and political fabric of every nation, including the US, that it is impossible for any government or corporation, let alone any individual official, or businessperson, to resist it. Perhaps the autocratic coup now underway in America is better understood as democratic assisted suicide.