The Great Unwakening
The Great Unwakening
Don Departs to 400,000 Dead
Was that a coup attempt?
Yes. That was a coup attempt.
We can debate the exact meaning of the word “coup,” but by America’s historical standards, that was the first attempt to overturn a presidential election by direct force, ever. In my last edition, the morning of Jan. 6, I called it “Attempted Coup Day.” I wish I had been wrong.
Maybe it was an autogolpe, a self-coup. It didn’t have generals in epaulettes. It lacked firepower—despite a few guns among the protestors, the weapons were mostly flagpoles, fists, and fire extinguishers. It lacked sanity, coherence, and effectiveness. It was more farce than force.
But it was a violent attempt to block the Constitutional transfer of power from one president to another. That’s a coup attempt, no matter how .…
Stupid. Just as we had “Stupid Watergate,” in the earlier lies and impeachment over Russia and Ukraine, now we have “Stupid Coup.” Both Trump scandals are rooted in the same mass denial of facts, and the alternative fantasies of Trumpism. From birtherism in 2015 to blaming Antifa for the Jan. 6 attack on the capitol, the signature reality of the Trump project has been this rejection of reality.
The Stupid Coup was rooted in Trump’s lies about the election results. His landslide victory, the millions of stolen votes, the 5,000 absentee ballots from dead people in Georgia, the voting machine hack, the Chinese servers, all were lies, disproven as fast as they appeared. Yet today about 75 percent of Republicans believe Trump won the election. Almost the same percentage claim that when Trump urged thousands of MAGA supporters to storm the capitol wearing red caps and waving Trump flags, that was somehow a false flag operation by Antifa.
This is a social phenomenon, built on mass psychology, where group membership depends on performative loyalty.
And we are social animals. This isn’t going away.
Case in point: the Oregon Republican Party just attacked conservatives who voted to impeach Trump. They claimed that “emerging facts” prove Trump won, and the invasion of the Capitol was a false flag operation.
Denial at this level is religious. It was already clear that Trump drew a core constituency from the people politely referred to as “Evangelicals.” That’s an insult to Christianity. The Great Awakening of the 1830s has become the Great Unwakening of today, in which Christian Nationalists and gullible allies dream their way into an righteous fury. The followers of radical pastors have closed the circle of conspiracy thinking with the QAnon simpletons and the hate-filled ultraconservatives who blame all their problems on a conspiracy by god-destroying liberals. Lin Wood, the president’s semi-official election attorney, actually accused tens of thousands of Americans of carrying out a treasonous plot on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party.
His mental illness is not the problem.
The collective mindset is the problem.
By waving the flag of their tribal war band, Trump followers demand a leader who rules only for them, not for all Americans. They hate everyone else, which is why they thrill to the insults and threats that Trump always heaps on his opponents. Liberals and other targets of their wrath aren’t entitled to vote, or win, or exist, because they aren’t “real” Americans. Like any cult, loyalty is truth.
I’m indebted to Anne Applebaum for insight about the centrality of nostalgia and “resentment, revenge, and envy” in authoritarian movements worldwide. In her Twilight of American Democracy she pins the blame on the roughly one third of people (anywhere) “who cannot tolerate complexity.” They hate the USA as it exists today, in reality, as a pluralistic and tolerant society. Instead, it is their nostalgic, resentful tribalism that is the real danger to this republic. They prefer strong, simplistic ideas, bright lines between good guys and bad guys, and unity over divisiveness, which just makes them angry. They want homogeneity, and have a “desire to forcibly silence the rest.”
That doesn’t go away today. The 400,000 dead of Covid—a roundly horrible number to usher Trump out the door—cannot go away. I believe strongly in celebrating the inauguration, the end of the Trump presidency, and our survival. Celebrate. And then be ready for more delusional pseudo-politics.
I was just thinking about the stages of grief. Now that the political rapture that was sure to come didn't (no, Trump did not assuredly and miraculously replace Biden on the podium), will the conspiracy theorists be able to move onto the next stage of grief, toward acceptance? Or, will they sit and stew in a fit of violent rage, waiting for what will certainly be the next real date of reckoning? Do they think that they just got the date wrong this time, but the next one will surely be the real thing?