How likely are Republicans—or Americans in general—to support a coup? Let's take a look:
These are not all the same thing, of course. I was just trying to get a quick and dirty sense of how open Republicans are, in general, to the notion of a coup if they think that things have gotten out of control. Roughly speaking, we have three polls over the past decade that suggest support of 38%, 43%, and 47%. In other words, Republican support for Donald Trump as our "real president" isn't really anything new. It's just a more concrete version of their usual vague support for coups.
Is this good news or bad? I think it's probably . . . good? Maybe? It sort of shows that all the coup talk is just typical right-wing talk and probably doesn't mean that much. But then again, maybe it means that a lot of Republicans are really and truly coup supporters and will jump on board for real the next time there's a chance.
Either way, it's disturbing as hell. Even the lower level of Democratic support for coups is nothing to brush aside. What the hell is wrong with us?
Can this country be saved?
Looking at the apparent views of somewhere approaching half of its people, does this country even deserve to be saved?
If you still believe in "America" and aren't frightened, you're not paying attention.
Who are these 3% who claim to be Democrats who think Donald Trump is president?
I think they aren't Democrats at all but people who were only asked their party affiliation at the end of the poll so thought they'd fuck with it.
People who still know Bernie would have won.
Republicans are the enemy. Many democrats remain in deep denial about this fact, sadly. Republicans own guns and are ready to use them. They are threatening election workers (see Reuters) and just generally treating violence. So you all know what they will do and yet some imagine there is an infrastructure bill worth passing in congress or some possibility of a voting rights bill. How naive. How utterly silly.
Republicans are the enemy. It’s either them… or you. Prepare yourself for the coming war.
Putin needs to train his messengers better.. Too hamfisted.
Republicans are your friends? Then I suppose you are content if they win. Silly.
https://youtu.be/4ZRrbixpVV0
It may be worth noting that the Taliban comprises a minority of Afghans, yet because they are committed and militarized, with access to advanced weapons, they have soundly defeated the United States and taken control of that region (aka "country") again. It took near twenty years, but they hung in there until we left.
In the United States, the Trumpist wingnuts are heavily weaponized, hold onto their lies with religious fervor, and have already tried several armed insurrections, one in the nation's capitol. And, as the surveys suggest, they're a significant minority of Americans.
Just sayin' ...
Mullah Omar has only one eye. The other was lost in war in Afghanistan.
Dan Crenshaw has only one eye. The other was lost in war in Afghanistan.
This tracks.
But will Liz Cheney's North Slope of the Rockies Alliance be our Rasheed Dostam & the Northern Alliance?
You never see them together, do you?
Son. Of. A. Bitch.
They haven't soundly defeated us, they stuck it out until we left because they had nowhere else to go where we did.
Remind you of something...
My cat in re anything at all.
Oh, you mean that other thing.
And Robert McNamara thought all we needed to do to win the war was to convince the Vietnamese we were more serious about it than they were.
Fake it til you My Laik it.
Indeed, and as such I think you’ve exceeded the hand waving budget by a non-trivial margin. If you were still at Mother Jones I’d wonder if you’d posted this to try to get more eyeballs past their current fundraising pleas.
I don't know. Conservative militants look and act more and more like the brown shirts, except they don't wear brown shirts and have a lot more guns.
Or, another way to look at it, over the past decade Republican support for a (possible) coup has increased steadily at a rate of approximately 1%/year, and is now 23% higher than it was in 2010. Meanwhile, Democratic and Independent support for a (possible) coup---which were already both lower than GOP support---has remained flat or declined.
“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.” --George Carlin
I do miss him....
Carlin might be the one standup I could not see going MAGA. Prolly not prior, either.
But Hicks, Hedberg, Giraldo... even Patrice O'Neal? Yeah, definitely.
Still surprised Seinfeld didn't express sympathies for the white working class. & pretty sure only reason Cosby didn't was that he was in jail.
Yup. I expect many of those 35-40% have only the haziest idea of what they claim to be supporting, and certainly have not thought through the consequences.
The Achilles heel of democracy is that it gives power to the people, but the people don't understand how that power works or how to hold onto it.
Was Carlin deliberately confusing average and median?
Social conservatives are inevitably blind to the fact, like most other facts that aren't about how great they are, that a military coup overthrowing a democratic government has not once produced a beneficial outcome for anyone but organized crime.
Not once, not anywhere on Earth, never.
The 2015 question is ridiculous:
Is there any situation in which you could imagine yourself supporting the U.S. military taking over the powers of the federal government?
The answer from all respondents should be YES because *any* includes, well, any situation, including:
All members of Congress, the president, vice-president and cabinet, and the federal judiciary are dead from a disease (or solar flare).
In the highly unlikely event that something wipes out all 3 branches of the federal government so fast that they can’t be replaced and still follow some semblance of the succession plans already developed during the nuclear era, I’d rather all 50 states simply became independent countries than having a military dictatorship installed. Most of the states could go it alone if they had to (excepting of course the states that would be fiscal basket cases without dollars from DC pouring in).
I believe that the question rather implied something like January 6, not a nuclear armageddon scenario (in which the question is moot anyway; when everybody on Capitol Hill is dead and everybody in the White House is also dead then regular Americans are going to be even deader. Nobody will require a government.
To add on: January 6 is far from a world historic first: It happened in numerous countries between the two World Wars and it is happening now as we read this in quite a few places.
-1 dissident journalist on the flight manifest of a Greece to Estonia flight
Estonia is hella woke, but not in the usual sense.
Okay, Latvia is, but close.
https://www.amusingplanet.com/2010/06/blonde-parade-in-riga.html
One fairly common situation in which a coup is not only justified but has been beneficial is where an elected civilian government has ceased to be democratic and the army ousts the civilian government on a "caretaker" basis. There have been quite a few such cases in post-colonial Africa; the cynical take on that was "one man, one vote, once". When the duly elected president proclaims himself president-for-life, military intervention can be helpful. I was in Ghana when Kwame Nkrumah was overthrown. The military government stayed in power a few years, installed a new constitution that was intended to better entrench democracy than the old one, and then held an election.
Thus far, the US has not quite reached that situation, although I have no doubt Trump would have tried to become president for life if there had been any slightest chance of getting away with it.
Remember when Julius Nyrere of Tanzania was asked to become President-for-Life by a bunch of his sycophants? He refused, stating that there;s only one way a President-for-Life leaves office.
Okay, and do you think that conservatives have a more active imagination than liberals?
That's the problem I see. Of course I can imagine such a scenario where there's no civilian government left at the federal level.
But conservatives aren't known for their imagination.
The important thing is what the generals think.
I never thought I would support a military coup. But now I am not so sure. I frankly would prefer the military taking over if the alternative is a new Trump (or Trump clone) presidency. But they probably won't do it: professional ethics and all that (which is why I trust them in the first place).
Junta means we're all in together now.
LOL. You're pretty funny for a lefty. And apparently can 'hablar Cristiano' too.
It looks like I'm one of the 5% of Democrats who think the election was rigged. But despite all the Republicans' efforts to suppress the Democratic vote, they lost anyway.
As a stand-alone question, this seems either bizarre or frightening, but the answer is rather obvious when you look at the groups which make up the Repub coalition.
Its not that all Rs are racists, but all the hard-core racists are Rs, if you see the point.
Its not that everyone who believes abortion is not ideal is an R, but all who believe abortion should be criminalized are Rs.
The Rs now have assembled four or five groups who only care about their issue and care about it to a crazed degree.
There are plenty of anti-abortionists who would have to problem with thier state leaving the union if they could criminalize abortion. Some poll should ask that question.
In other words, R is a filter with the dregs caught in it?
They ask themselves… these republicans.,. Who would you shoot?
https://morningshots.thebulwark.com/p/who-would-you-shoot
An AR-15 is not just a tool of last resort: It is a declaration that the last resort exists, a reminder that there are outer limits to the abuse of power.
Political debate is over. War is the only option… according to them! Believe them when they tell you what they want to do. They want to kill you. Wake up democrats. Your life is in danger.
It's somewhat fascinating that, in the 2010 poll, the group with the lowest percentage support for a coup is Independents. Frequently, Independents tend to occupy a midpoint in views between Dems and Republicans. Here, I wonder if partisan identity is playing a role--when asked to envision a coup, some folks think "it might not be so bad if it were *my* side," and if you identify as Independent, maybe you're less likely to figure it would ever be *your* side that would be the entity achieving the coup?
"...What the hell is wrong with us?"
While quite understanding the spirit in which the question is asked, it is not the right question, because these particular data points do not show that there is anything "wrong" with "us". What "we" are doing is trying to respond to a situation in which institutions have failed. Now, that is an unacceptable situation, and therefore, by definition, there are no acceptable responses to it. The majority response has been (for longer than a human lifespan), and still is, to pretend that the institutions have not failed. This lowers the psychological barriers to other forms of pretense; and the lowering (unto abolition) of those barriers is something that is wrong with us.
The real problem here is not so much what "the people" think about who won the election or if a coup is a good idea. It's what the people in power think or at least are saying that they think. We've got a former president insisting every day that he really won and essentially an entire political party (except for a few holdouts) agreeing with him. This is a serious problem no matter what polling shows.
But it's not really a coup if I do it.
Climate change is a big enough problem that it's worth a coup to force the changes needed to stop it. Tell me the scale of the disaster and suffering isn't bigger than a coup.
That said I don't support a military coup. By it's nature the military is a conservative institution. So a bad idea if you are on the left.
I seem to remember police precincts being seized and burned, or abandoned under threat of violence. I seem to remember a section, small, but central, of a major American city declaring itself autonomous and setting up barricades and checkpoints with armed guards. I seem to remember those armed folks actually killing a young black kid and sending another to the ICU. I seem to remember a dude shooting up an ICE facility. I seem to remember a 'right wing' protestor being gunned down in Seattle. I seem to remember a federal court house coming under sustained attack for more than a month, with the local and state politicians refusing to protect it and, indeed, actually interfering with federal LEO's attempts to protect that symbol of American law, order and justice.
Was this all a dream?
Umbrella Man was one of yours.
Whatever happened to 'Umbrella Man'?
Ask at your next 0lanning session.
Actually I've kinda followed ol' brolly. He seems to have disappeared after a few days of media coverage of the 'white supremacist provocateur'. Not so much as an arrest as I can see.
There were a few 'bugaloos' involved in the six months of G. Floyd inspired violence...but they were on *your* side. E.g. Steve Carillo.
Nothing you said is true. (I had friends there in Portland. That some carjacker was killed was because pooice refused to respond and arrest him peacefully.)
Maybe I was wrong about conservatives having a wild imagination.
Social conservatives will leap out the first window they come to, inevitably the most histrionic one.
Big Rod Dreher energy.
The black kid was killed by 'guards' of the CHAZ/CHOP zone in Seattle. This is all documented, including in conversations among antifa that at first celebrated the shooting/killing (they imagined it was some crackers trying to breach their perimeter) and then slowly realized what had actually happened.
You people lie so readily.
I could be proven wrong some day (I hope not) but I continue to believe political violence is a vastly less dangerous risk than constitutional shenanigans by the right. There was never any realistic chance that January 6 was going to somehow enable Trump to remain in office. He's an intellectually lazy buffoon, who, in this instance as in so many others, hadn't thought things through. If anything Republicans dodged a bullet in that the insurrection wasn't more deadly. It's possible a larger body count -- especially one claiming the lives of members of Congress -- would have resulted in more furious blowback.
The big danger was and is "coup via manipulation of laws and contempt for norms." GOP/MAGA wasn't equipped with the right kind of laws (and sufficiently corrupt elections officials) in the last election. They were pretty much making it up as they went along and throwing Hail Mary passes. But their lawyers and operatives were taking notes, and next time the country won't be so lucky. (And I flatly have a hard time believing Congress will allow a legitimate Biden victory to result in a second term if both houses are controlled by Republicans in January, 2025).
If you ask me if there's "any situation" in which I'd favor a coup, I'd have to say yes.
That doesn't mean I'm not committed to democracy. It just means that I can imagine a democracy curdling into something so bad that a coup might improve matters.
Don't you wish the July 20 plot had succeeded? That was a coup attempt.
Or perhaps you think it's impossible that, in America, a murderous thug could come to power by passably democratic means and then, once in office, dismantle the democratic processes that could remove him?
That's always been at least conceivable, to any student of history, and ought to be a good deal moreso now than it was five years ago.
Impatience with democracy is always present, it just takes different actionable forms.
(A certain wing of) The Democrats were able to get most of their agenda through in the 60s via the courts, an agenda that clearly would never have passes via voting. Regardless of whether you think that agenda was great or evil, the previous statement is a fact.
In the early 30s (pre Roosevelt threats) the Republicans achieved the same thing, in that case having the courts prevent what would have been (was!) voted for.
Now you can make all manner of justifications for why court decisions count as democracy (though you'll find most people don't have the intellectual flexibility to manage to justify their preferred outcomes in the 60s and the 30s as both "genuine democracy"...)
But the point is democracy in the US has never been ONLY about the outcome of votes. And the side that is unhappy with the non-democracy of courts is the side that's big on talk about how "we should take back the system" -- once again, the left in the 30s...
You can paint this as a property of Republicans today, but I think that misses the big picture. The Republicans today are the party that is more angry at the fact that court law, rather than voter law, is dispositive over so much of society. If their various on-going attempts to install a judiciary closer to their tastes, with a big rollback especially of the Affirmative Action Constitution, bear fruit over the next twenty years, you'll find find the Democrats being the ones complaining that "the system refuses to listen to the voice of most people, and we need to do something about that".
Zombie Apocalypse?