The continuing coup
Like the fascists in Spain after the death of the dictator Francisco Franco who staged a coup to derail democracy, Republicans in the United States attempted a coup to negate the results of a democratic election that their leader Donald Trump had lost.
The parallels between these two failed coups did not occur to me until a few days ago as I contemplated the spectacle of most of the leadership of the Republican Party and the rank and file persisting in the belief in the Big Lie (horror) while tearing each other apart like dogs in a pit (delight) over adherence to that very falsehood. And it is no wonder that the thought did not come to mind to me or to anyone else as far as I know, at least in the United States. It has been almost exactly half a century since the dramatic events in Madrid that day. Most of the people alive today had not yet been born. And, in general, people in this country lack an interest in the history of other countries and doubt that it has any lessons for us.
And yet there is a compelling similarity to the events, from being motivated by the same purpose (stopping the election of a president) and being carried out in the same manner (a violent storming of the national legislature), to being identified by a date (January 6, 23-F) rather than a name, to the fact that both failed because a single individual in authority refused to go along (U.S. Vice President Mike Pence, Spanish King Juan Carlos).
Wikipedia offers a concise and accurate description of what happened:
“The 1981 Spanish coup d’état attempt (Spanish: Intento de Golpe de Estado de España de 1981), known in Spain by the numeronym 23-F and also known as the Tejerazo, was an attempted coup d’état in Spain on 23 February 1981. Lieutenant-Colonel Antonio Tejero led 200 armed Civil Guard officers into the Congress of Deputies during the vote to elect a President of the Government. The officers held the parliamentarians and ministers hostage for 18 hours, during which time King Juan Carlos I denounced the coup in a televised address, calling for rule of law and the democratic government to continue. Though shots were fired, the hostage-takers surrendered the next morning without killing anyone.”
There are other similarities. Franco presided over four decades of reactionary rule that looked toward Spain’s “glorious past.” For four decades the Republican Party has been lurching farther and farther to the right so that by the time Donald Trump came around to make America great again he was not an anomaly ideologically but rather the culmination of a long unacknowledged trend toward the hard right in the GOP. Trump was not an alien virus but an entity the immune system of the Republican Party at first failed to recognize before reading its DNA and realizing it was flesh of its own flesh, blood of its own blood.
With the eventual coronation of Donald Trump by most of the Republican Party, the cult of personality that developed around him, the reign of fear Trump brought to bear against those within the party that failed to bow and scrape before him, and the coup attempt that Trump engineered and most Republican legislators later implicitly supported with their votes to impugn the Electoral College votes, the Republicans went full fascist.
Forty years create in a ruling group a feeling of inevitability and permanence. The most militant elements within the ousted order, such as the Guardia Civil or the Proud Boys, refuse to accept the change and use violence to force a restoration of the old order. Most of the losers will not engage in violence but they will be resentful and recalcitrant, some for a lifetime.
Since Ronald Reagan, the Republican Party has been carrying out a counterrevolution against history, against fact and science, against difference, against economic fairness and, finally, against democracy itself.
Joe Biden is doing much to lead America in rejoining the main current of history. He has made it clear, in contrast to Trump, that white supremacy is real and the worst terrorist danger to the country. He is returning to the progressive Democratic legacy of FDR and LBJ and the promise and hope represented by Obama.
Republicans will continue to carry out their abortive coup by other means, mainly through whatever ploy they can come up with to prevent Blacks, Latinos, and other people of color from voting — and everyone else who will not vote for them. But know this, Republicans: Your four-decade run for plutocracy and against democracy, for white supremacy and against equality and diversity, for natives against immigrants, for the rich against the middle class and the poor, for the logic of profit against the logic of science and fact, for an imagined glorious past, is finished. Get over it. Live with it.
I hereby confess to schadenfreude. I take pleasure in the misfortunes of the reactionaries, the racists, the America firsters, the Trump chorus, the Republicans all, without a single exception. If Kevin McCarthy goes for Liz Cheney’s jugular (politically speaking), great. They are both reactionaries who voted for the Trump tax cut, so they are both architects of the edifice of the Great American injustice: breathtaking economic inequality.
I hear a lot of talk about “the future of the Republican Party.” I hope to see it where the Titanic was found, so deep under the sea that it cannot be recovered or restored even as a relic. Those who were aboard that boat, and who survived the sinking, are long dead by the time the wreck is found.
I do not know for sure that this is how things will go, but I believe it. One thing of which I am sure: I will do everything I can for the rest of my life to make it so.
