A Test Run to Destroy Democracy
The attempted coup of 2021 was an opportunity for anti-democratic forces to test the waters for a full-out assault
Like so much of modern politics, the events surrounding the 2020 Presidential Election and the state of our current crisis gets boiled down to focus on Donald Trump. As infuriating as this is, it’s understandable. Our media is tuned to profit off of sensationalism, controversy, and personalities, and Trump has hacked that system to profit himself and gain immense political power.
What our media is so, so, so much worse at is detailing how large, complex systems work. How individuals, forces, and circumstances combine like so many weather patterns to produce incredible events. That takes time. That takes focus. That takes the kind of nuance that leaves viewers to either tune out or turn off. And, not to mention, courage to wrestle with the forces of capitalism that drive the very networks and publications themselves.
In the best circumstances, these failures lead to general ignorance. In the worst, they empower dangerous forces hellbent on destruction. Regarding the election and an outright attack on democracy, it’s the latter, and watching it happen is beyond infuriating. With each passing day, more stories emerge detailing how Trump planned on seizing voting machines while declaring a national emergency. Or, how the insurrectionists of January 6th intended mass violence and the possible overthrow of the government.
Unfortunately, what keeps sliding beneath the surface, avoiding much detection, is where these ideas originated. Trump, for all of his repulsiveness and impetuousness, is not a mastermind. He is simply someone willing to do the things that most people would recoil from in horror. The things presented to him, cooked up in think-tanks around the country funded by the wealthiest donors imaginable and suggested by extreme ideologues obsessed with overthrowing liberal democracy itself, are much more pressing than this failed-businessman-turned-second-rate-reality-TV-star-turned-disastrous-demogogue.
Whether we realize it or not, this is the fight we are already in and it is the fight we have literally no alternative but to win.
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There is a reason why this coalesced with Donald Trump. Though the antidemocratic, authoritarian movement has been growing for some time and finding limited representation with efforts like the Tea Party (which was, of course, funded by these same billionaires and millionaires), Trump represented a new personality willing to toss to the side any hesitation to appeal to people’s worst instincts and dispatch even a limited reverence for tradition. Other Republicans at least played the respectability game, always hiding their racism and classism behind the veneer of focus-group tested rhetoric. Trump was too undisciplined, too narcissistic to care.
What he exposed, through his destruction, was that the guardrails of American politics were either completely nonexistent or withered to the point of in-consequence. There wasn’t a need anymore to adhere to them. In fact, there was the entire world to gain from going full-bore and giving the base the extremism it so desperately wanted. This terrified many Republicans, some of them into retirement once they used the phenomenon for their own ends. It changed the party, cleared out any remaining “principles” they still pretended to hold, and focused the body on its main priority: power.
For a long time, the GOP has been nothing but a public relations front for the wealthy, but in this new phase that fact has only become more obvious. By peddling conspiracy theories about “stolen elections,” “satanic pedophile cabals,” “CRT,” and any number of other paranoid fantasies, Republicans have prepared their base for nearly anything, including illiberalism and authoritarian violence. This preparation, specifically done to rewire the country and eliminate democracy as a threat to profit, is the ultimate goal held by twin forces: the extremely wealthy and extreme neofascistic ideologues.
Trump couldn’t communicate any of this. Probably couldn’t even understand it if pressed. His natural inclinations and instincts lead to the same conclusions but, on an ideological level, there’s nothing more there than an unused, forgotten condo in Trump Tower gathering dust. His haphazard, abusive nature, however, was absolutely essential in destroying the last impediments in a project that before he arrived might have been more fantasy than reality.
Unfortunately, that isn’t the case anymore.
While Trump and his conspirators toyed with coup plots designed by think-tanks funded by the wealthy and powerful, what transpired at the Capitol on January 6th was one of the most troubling and confusing moments in modern American history. Though many have tried their best to dismiss what happened or dispatch it with an oversimplified explanation, it remains a confounding mess.
It isn’t hard to understand the motivations of many on the ground. There were, of course, MAGA devotees there to support Trump, QAnon adherents certain they had reached their fabled Storm, and extremists determined to do some damage to the government they wished to topple. But the strange elements, including law enforcement and military intelligence riddled through the crowd, the orders to stand down or standby, the interlocking groups and personalities and allegiances, defies simple explanation. It is much easier to dissect the environment, including a loss of trust in the government and society as a large, than it is to pinpoint which individuals did what things for what purposes.
What isn’t hard is to see what January 6th represents. An all-out assault on the federal government of the United States of America. An attempted coup that could turn into a successful coup should we not recognize the actual danger. A test-run of sorts for what could be coming.
The same individuals and organizations that funded Trump, those around him, the myriad of conspiracy theory-fueled attacks on public education and democracy, the busloads of January 6th participants, and continue to fund think-tanks who plan and orchestrate all of this, were able to gain a grasp on where their work stands. With the right president, with the right conditions, with the right operations, they saw that the systematic destruction had yielded results.
In Trump’s recklessness, they saw opposition to their plans was negligible. In fact, they found that our guardians in politics and media were not only incapable of stopping him but benefited from the destruction.
In the coup attempt, they found willing accomplices in the GOP, some within the administration, others throughout Congress, who hardly even hesitated at the prospect of overthrowing an election. And, around the country, they discovered slews of people ready to question elections and carry out the functions necessary to dismantle them.
On January 6th, they saw a base primed and ready for the necessary violence in carrying out their plans.
And, in the aftermath, they have seen a public in aggressive denial about what has happened, what is happening, and what is bound to happen.
When we talk about this, when we really get down to the nuts and bolts of what happened, we aren’t discussing the past. We’re discussing our present. Our future. And by simply turning a lens to Trump and his cronies, we’re missing a much, much larger picture.
