I feel for writers and journalists who cover politics, because they have to attend to the corporate news media: Fox, CNN, the corporate broadcast networks, public broadcasting, and a range of print media. Just listening to NPR for an hour or two each morning makes me climb the walls: how much worse would it be if it were my job to follow it and all the others?
Last Sunday, for example, NPR's Weekend Edition gave airtime to an instructor in government at Dartmouth College, to opine on Donald Trump's refusal to concede the election to Joe Biden. Host Lulu Garcia-Navarro asked Brendan Nyhan "Why is he doing this? Is this a soft coup? And what I'm hearing you say is that this misses the larger picture of what's happening to democracy itself."
NYHAN: That's right. I think coup is the wrong way to think about this. We're not seeing an attempted military takeover. What we're seeing instead is a violation of the norms of democracy that we depend on to make the peaceful transfer of power possible. And as those norms get called into question, we start to see more of what political scientists call democratic erosion, where a system of government remains a democracy, but the norms and values that make democracy work start to be called into question.
Most of this is unexceptionable, a string of the buzzwords you'll hear on any network. I do take serious exception to Nyhan's claim that "coup is he wrong way to think about this." While most Americans probably do think that "coup" (short for "coup d'état") refers to a military takeover, it actually means any sudden and extralegal seizure of power in an institution. Violence is optional, the icing on the cake. An academic should know better, and clarify the issue rather than obscuring it. Instead the one substantive assertion Nyhan made was false. But this is NPR we're dealing with.
Later in the week, on Friday, Morning Edition brought in a heavy-hitter, an intelligence officer in the Trump regime until 2019. Host Steve Inskeep asked Sue Gordon, "I'm thinking about the fact that you have briefed presidents. If this event were happening in a different country and you were briefing the president about it, what would you call it?"
Gordon worded her response with some care:
SUE GORDON: We would talk about it as basically - if it were a purported democracy, I think we would say the democracy's teetering on the edge. If I were briefing the president on this at this moment in time, and this White House were doing what this is doing and I happen to be in the Oval, I would say stop it.
"If it were a purported democracy"? This is hard to take seriously. Whether a country is a "purported democracy" has little to do with its political institutions and practices and a lot to do with how the US views it. During the Trump years the US has backed and even participated in at least two coups against elected governments, in Venezuela and Bolivia. Harking back to Brendan Nyhan, in Venezuela the military didn't back the coup, much to the indignation of US commentators, so by his standards it may not count. In Bolivia the military carried out the coup with considerable violence, so Nyhan would presumably be satisfied. Mainstream US and UK commentators and political authorities were reluctant to label either action a coup, partly for reasons I'll into presently, but for now the fact that two democratically elected governments were overthrown, with various degrees of violence, didn't concern the media or the US government: they denied the legitimacy of the elections instead. (Does that sound familiar?) Contrary to Sue Gordon, in such cases US intelligence would not say to "stop it." Nor would NPR or other mainstream news media.
We all know that Trump is a very bad man, though. President Obama was good, right? Actually, no: he supported numerous oppressive dictatorships and backed the far right-wing Venezuelan opposition with millions of taxpayer dollars. He hedged a bit when the Honduran military overthrew an elected President, fiddling with aid payments for a little while, but eventually gave in.
Obama's initial response to the 2013 military overthrow of the elected president of Egypt was somewhat firmer. Obama wasn't pleased, but many in his regime were. President Morsi was unpopular in US government circles because he was a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, and his incompetent governance seems to have turned the populace against him. There were street demonstrations demanding that Morsi step down, much like those that had led to the removal of longtime dictator Hosni Mubarak in 2011. Back then Obama had been
naturally inclined to side with young, Internet-savvy protesters against an 82-year-old dictator who ran a cruel police state. But Mubarak was also a longtime U.S. ally who opposed Islamic radicals, honored a peace treaty with Israel and gave the Pentagon vital access to the Suez Canal. Younger aides like Rhodes, Power and Antony Blinken, then Vice President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, urged Obama to get “on the right side of history” and give Mubarak a decisive push. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would later describe them, in her memoir, as being “swept up in the drama and idealism of the moment.”
I wonder, though: if Morsi hadn't inspired such intense personal dislike in US rulers and their clients, couldn't they have cut him some slack, as they would for any struggling new leader? Morsi "spent much of his energy struggling against resistance from an entrenched establishment — the soldiers, spies, police, judges and bureaucrats left in place from six decades of autocracy." If he failed "to fulfill the promises of the Tahrir Square uprising" that removed Mubarak, shouldn't wiser heads have urged that Morsi be given more time? Two years in office against six decades of dictatorship isn't that long. I can't help thinking that our champions of democracy were relieved to have a "strongman" in charge again - the kind of person US elites and their cronies are accustomed to doing business with.
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, whose rulers feared elections and dreaded them even more if they were presented as Islamic, lobbied hard to convince Washington that Mr. Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood were a threat to American interests. And American officials later concluded that the United Arab Emirates were also providing covert financial support for protests against Mr. Morsi.Wait a minute - Saudi Arabia is afraid of Islamism? That does not compute: the Kingdom is a notorious Islamist regime. And the UAE were undermining Morsi? Who's at fault here, really?
When a murderous autocrat is a longtime ally to the US and a friend to Israel, his country becomes an honorary "purported democracy." Democracy is all very well until the wrong people win an election, and then "drama and idealism" must be set aside. Obama wasn't exactly pleased, we're told, when General Sisi massacred at least a thousand pro-Morsi demonstrators, but what can you do?
Supporting a military coup would hardly send a positive message about democracy. But declaring Sisi’s power grab a coup would, by law, cut off all U.S. military aid to Cairo. So be it, argued Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, who wrote in the Washington Post: “we may pay a short-term price by standing up for our democratic values, but it is in our long-term national interest to do so.” Obama wasn’t prepared to go that far. The administration publicly danced around the word “coup” for weeks until, at an August 6, 2013, briefing, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki memorably announced: “We have determined that we do not have to make a determination.” (“What is a coup?” Wael Haddara, a senior adviser to Morsi, asked the New York Times. “We’re going to get into some really Orwellian stuff here.”)
At first Obama dug in his heels, freezing military aid, cancelling joint military exercises, demanding "credible progress" toward a "democratically elected civilian government." John Kerry replaced Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, and Kerry
declared a few weeks after the coup that Egypt’s generals were “restoring democracy” to the country and quickly worked to reverse the aid freeze. Kerry had an ally in Hagel, who had developed a relationship with Egypt’s top general. Both men believed they could moderate Sisi’s behavior. “Kerry thinks he can get guys to do things because they trust him, even if it’s not necessarily in their interest,” says one former State Department official. Hagel sent Sisi Ron Chernow’s 904-page biography of George Washington, urging him to read a chapter about Washington peacefully relinquishing the presidency.(I love that last bit - it reminds me of Ronald Reagan sending a copy of the Christian Bible to Iranian leaders in 1986.)
As it turned out, Kerry was wrong: he couldn't get Sisi to "do things." He announced after a 2014 meeting that Sisi 'gave me a very strong sense of his commitment' to human rights issues." The very next day, Sisi cracked down violently on dissent, but it all turned out okay: he "was officially 'elected' Egypt’s president with a reported 96.1 percent of the vote." So Egypt was officially a "purported democracy" again. In 2015 Obama restored military aid to Sisi's regime, personally calling the General to pledge his fealty. As Glenn Greenwald wrote at the time,
Obama’s move is as unsurprising as it is noxious, as American political elites — from Bill and Hillary Clinton to Henry Kissinger and Madeleine Albright — along with the Israeli Right have been heaping praise on Sisi the way they did for decades on Mubarak. (“I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family,” said Hillary Clinton in 2009. “So I hope to see him often here in Egypt and in the United States.”)
Two things to notice here. One is that the wise adults running US foreign policy, who sneer at youthful idealism, have a vastly overrated estimation of their competence. That's familiar from more than a century of American imperialism and support for repressive dictators, aka "the Free World." There's something about swarthy men in uniform forcibly holding down the primitive brown-skinned masses, who just don't know what's good for them, that makes our leaders go all moist.
The other is that the word "coup" isn't just a word: using it has legal consequences. If a coup overthrows a government you dislike, for whatever reasons, then you simply don't call it a coup, because then you'd have to take action against it. And that wouldn't do. Maybe the remedy is to stop pretending that the US cares about human rights; our historical practice down to the present proves otherwise. The law clearly doesn't place any constraint on our government, let alone others.
It's pointless to fret about how the US media, intelligence agencies, and government officials would react to Trump's current efforts to overturn the 2020 election, because we know how they feel about coups. If it were happening in a different country, there might be some division in their ranks -- some unrealistic idealists -- but the sensible, responsible, realistic ones would hail Trump for "restoring democracy," and Trump as the savior of freedom. Hillary Clinton would remind us that she considers Mr. and Mrs. Trump to be friends of her family, as indeed they are. John Kerry would send Trump a copy of Barack Obama's new thousand-page memoir. Obama himself would order idealistic young people to stop complaining and learn to work within the system. We wouldn't want to alienate our good allies by stirring up trouble.
