Was this a Coup?

Hi Doctor, I think my country underwent a coup attempt last week, but I'm not sure. Some people are saying it was just a bout of political agitation, and not an attempt to overthrow our system of government. I'm not entirely sure because our system of government has never really undergone this sort of thing, and we've been around for about two hundred and thirty years. 

 Well, that's a pretty serious issue, can you give me a little more context? 

Sure. We had an election in November, and the sitting President lost the popular vote by about seven million votes. He also -- more importantly -- lost the vote in our Electoral College by seventy four votes. Despite numerous recounts, sixty court cases, and our democratic process playing out like usual, the President has refused to concede to his rival, and has made claims that the election was 'stolen' from him, and that there was 'massive fraud'. Earlier last week the President held a rally where he told his followers -- among other things -- "Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore," and "So we’re going to, we’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue, I love Pennsylvania Avenue, and we’re going to the Capitol and we’re going to try and give…we’re going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country." 

Alright, and then what happened? 

 They did as the President told them. They marched down Pennsylvania Avenue, and held a protest outside of Congress. This protest was not peaceful though, about an hour after it began the protestors had broken through the usual cordons that protect the Capitol, and an hour or so after that they stormed the building itself, where Congress was in session verifying the Electoral College votes. Five people died in the ensuing chaos: one police officer was killed by being hit in the head with a fire extinguisher, one protestor was shot by police, and three other protestors died of medical emergencies. 

I see, and where was the military during all of this? You haven't mentioned them, and they usually are in charge of helping to maintain control of government buildings and protect the government, correct?

Our system is a little weird, as it's a federal system where the military is controlled by the President, so the federal military was not there because the President didn't send any troops to assist in protecting the Capitol, and the district where the Capitol is is not its own state -- it's governed by the government and their state militia is controlled by the President -- so they were not deployed either. Reporting by various news outlets says that the Department of Defense -- our civilian bureaucracy that controls the military, whose leadership was recently purged by the President to install loyalists into critical positions -- actively stalled in deploying military assets to protect the government. 

That is worrisome. Did any of the military actively participate in trying to storm the Capitol? 

As of now, we are unsure. We know that retired members of the military were involved, and have been identified, but right now we do not have any reports of active military members who were there, though there are many reports of police officers being in the crowd of protestors who stormed the Capitol, and there is video evidence of the Capitol police department aiding protestors in gaining access to the building, as well as agreeing with the ideas driving the protest. But, none of our uniformed soldiers engaged in this. 

Ok. Lack of military involvement does not mean that this was not a coup, but points to why this might have failed, which is lucky for you! Are there any other symptoms that your body politic is suffering from that might be related to this? 

Yes. Our media ecosystem is becoming more and more radicalized, and many prominent members of the media have been repeating the President's false claims about the recent election being 'stolen' and lots of 'fraud' happening. 

Yes, that does seem like a contributing factor in all of this. And, one last question: was there a proposed new system of governance that your leaders, or the protestors were championing? 

Well, yes. The President has said many times over the course of his administration that he feels entitled to serving beyond the usual two terms of governance that he is allowed under our constitution, and some of his supporters call him 'GEOTUS' or 'God Emperor of the United States.' There have also been members of his faction who have openly called for an end to democratic elections, and the instatement of the President as a King. 

That is what I thought. From what you've told me it does sound like your country underwent a failed coup attempt. A coup -- short for coup d'état, a French term meaning 'stroke of state' -- is an internal attempt to overthrow the existing political order, and replace it with a new system. 

Coups are fairly common political event, though they generally are confined to states that lack a history of peaceful transfers of power, or are newly established. We might look at states like Weimar Germany with the Beer Hall Putsch, or France and its Coup of 18 Brumaire for similar historical events, though I will warn you that the context and conditions that caused both of those coup attempts seem very different, the actual coup attempt is where the similarity lies. There are currently twelve nation states whose leaders were installed via coup. It is concerning that your seemingly stable system has produced this instance, but that is not unheard of. Also, the inaction of the military, the -- as you said -- attempts to keep the military from coming to assist the government when they were under attack, and the seeming support of the police forces all point to this being a coordinated attempt at overthrowing the government, or at the very least overturning the results of the election to keep the current President in power. 

The reason you are feeling confused about this is likely because, as you said, you've never really undergone this sort of political action before. Yes, in the past I am sure there have been strident, and even violent, confrontations between political factions. Some historians have argued that the creation of your governing Constitution was a sort of coup. Your records show that your nation even underwent a Civil War just over a hundred and fifty years ago. Some have argued that the assassination of your President at the end of that conflict was an attempt at a coup, and the evidence of the broader conspiracy to murder many members of the sitting government at that time supports that, but I don't agree entirely with that diagnosis, as the individuals involved did not seem interested in overthrowing the government per se, but rather the decapitation of the government that had recently defeated them in your civil war. Either way, if that WAS a coup attempt, it happened so long ago that it is outside of the living memory of your population, and thus, there is little in the way of memory about how your state got to a place where a faction of the population sees a coup as a viable political strategy. 

You might be feeling a little worried right now. You should be. Coup attempts are rarely one off occurrences. Barring a strong reaction by the government to swiftly and publicly punish those involved -- and by that I mean not just those involved in the actual breaking into the Capitol, but those who aided and abetted doing so within government itself -- you may find yourself facing another coup attempt in the not too distant future. The people who involved in this attempt to change the course of your government are watching, and if the state does not react strongly enough some of these individuals will be emboldened to make another, more organized attempt. 

So, what can we do to prevent this from happening again? Mostly you can provide active, vocal support for the system of government that you currently have. Reach out to your representatives in Congress, ask them to investigate, and make sure that the perpetrators of this event are punished to the fullest extent of the law. You might also read up on historical coups David Zucchino's Wilmington's Lie lays out one of the only examples in American history of a successful coup on the sub-national level, Adam Roberts in The Wonga Coup explores the 2004 coup in Equatorial Guinea, and Ali Rahnema's Behind the 1953 Coup in Iran gives a thorough historical reconstruction of the internal and external forces that brought about the coup of the Shah of Iran. This reading should give you a foundation for identifying the steps leading up to a coup against your government.

Don't feel bad about this, though. Coups are a natural occurrence in every form of government humans have come up with, and just because you had one does not mean you are destined to have another. As long as the structures and institutions of your government hold -- which, right now, they appear to be -- and the progenitors of the coup are removed from power (which, it appears will be happening either naturally on Jan.20, or before that via act of Congress), you should weather this current storm. You will need to continue to be vigilant though. Support politicians who are not proponents of conspiracy theories, speak out against those who opine that overthrowing the government is a viable political course of action, and provide aid to those working to ensure the stability of your system of government.

Thank you, Doctor Historian.

Thank you! And, remember: the past is our best guide to helping us understand the present. 

I Can't Even Be Mad...

Earlier this evening, Donald Trump's Twitter account posted a curious tweet:

May God be with the people of Sutherland Springs, Texas. The FBI and Law Enforcement has arrived.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 15, 2017

(In case it goes bye-bye, the Tweet reads: May God be with the people of Sutherland Springs, Texas. The FBI and Law Enforcement has arrived. 11:34 Nov. 14 2017)

The fact that the President's account posted a quasi-shout out to the victims of the Sutherland Springs shooting nine days after the fact is the sort of gaffe that those of us living through the Trump administration have learned to simply shrug off. Yes, of course, the President finally made a tweet nearly two weeks late about a shooting, story checks out. 

WHY  did the President's account suddenly make this seemingly ill-timed post? For those paying attention, Trump has been out of the country for the past twelve days. Owing to the magic of time zones and the international date line, and trans-continental air travel, it is likely President Trump sent this message right at the cusp of his phone losing wi-fi or cellular data service, and the original tweet got bounced back to his phone. When this happens, the Twitter app will store the orphaned tweet and attempt to send it along at the next possible opportunity. With this tweet suddenly popping onto Twitter means is that Donald either just turned on a phone where the tweet was stored, or has gotten into range of wi-fi or cellular data service as of 11:34 PM EDT. 

This is generally not a big deal for those of us who travel with phones. I know I have sat down in my seat on an airplane, written a text, or typed up a Facebook status, and watched it not send for a few moments before I have been forced to turn off my phone for takeoff. The post times out, the plane takes off, my post floats in the aether for a few hours, and when I turn my phone back on, suddenly I am making a comment about flying to MSP FROM MSP. I'm very meta. But, in my case, nobody gives a single damn because I am just a random passenger on a cheap red-eye flight. This is not the case for the President of the United States.

The security implications behind the nature of this tweet -- and the extrapolations people in the know could develop from keeping an eye on the President's twitter feed in the future -- are not insignificant (and not something I will be delving into because I enjoy not being visited by the Secret Service), but this is one of the rare instances where the absurdity of the Trump administration makes even the most innocuous gaffe into a potential headache for the administration and the government at large. Some will surely pounce on this tweet as just yet another sign of The Don's ever growing dementia. Others will downplay the significance of the missive as a technical glitch that anyone's doddering grandfather would fall into (whose parents haven't inadvertently sent a Facebook birthday message to them three months after their actual birthday? Not mine, surely). 

A story like this -- which would make the top two stories on Fox News had Obama done it -- will be a charming anecdote for those of us lucky enough to survive the Trump administration. Remember that time Donald forgot to clear out his drafts folder in the Twitter app? Good times. We will regale our children of this moment as we sit around a campfire eating hobo beans and drawing lots to see who has to go scout into the radiation zone for more beans. But, we can't even be mad about this. It is simply another great moment in Trump's presidency that defies expectations and challenges our assumptions about the people we have put into positions of absolute power over our lives. Just as every rose has it's thorn, every day of the Age of Trump has a gaffe.

Rage And America

A recent Politico expose on the year anniversary of Donald Trump's election presents a stark reminder for those paying attention that the current President of the United States was not elected solely on his merits, but also because America's new number one pastime seems to be using the vote as a way to express communal rage.

It is a nearly worn out trope that the American political process has been warped by a rising tide of rage. Ethnic rage as shown by the slow growth of the white supremacist Alt-Right, economic rage as seen in the voting patterns of those living in Pennsylvania or Michigan -- to make no mention of Occupy Wall Street -- rage over health care, gun control, police corruption, sexual assault, the direction of American politics both in general and specific, immigration, people not saying Merry Christmas, and on and on. I am not turning over new ground in suggesting that the American id has become enthralled in the service of resentment and fury. Americans seem angrier than at any point in living memory and more able and willing to share their collective aggreivement with one another in social settings.

While it is not news to suggest that contemporary America is a rage fueled nation, where personal resentment and anger dominate the landscape. But what is up for debate are the root causes of this period of great strain. While all are generally in agreement that there are many causes of our recent outbursts, but they are divided as to the main force propelling us down this path. Some argue that economic anxiety is the primary driving force behind this roiling fury. Others claim that the root cause is a toxic media environment whose constant diet of otherization has pushed a wedge between citizens. Still others point to a collapse of the social consensus, and the rise of new political norms that are signalling the dawning of a new American political era (or, perhaps harkening back to earlier eras democratic of disagreement.

Owing to the longue duree that historians deal with in their work, I am more inclined to see the recent outbreak of political and social angst as a regression to the mean of American political activity. Thomas Jefferson believed that the American republic was healthiest when the citizenry was occasionally driven to revolutionary fervor. Americans have long disdained migrants coming into their nation as criminals and drug addicts (and have frequently simply shifted their animus towards migrants from one ethnic group to the next as the complexion of American immigration has changed). The American Civil War -- arguably a near-fatal brush with the consequences of political alienation for the American state -- was fought as a result of Southern anger over abolitionist agitation against the institution of slavery and fears that the practice would be abolished by President Lincoln. Americans are not special when one examines the fractious nature of their politics and society for much of its history. The last seventy years of politics dominated by a post-war generation who understood the costs of unchecked anger and their children raised in an era of nearly unparalleled economic growth while simultaneously sheltered and threatened by the blanket of nuclear deterrence can be seen as an anomaly when viewed with an eye towards the scope of American history.

Americans are no more angry than their ancestors, but perhaps they are coming out of a long political coma. Issues that -- even as recently as five or ten years ago -- could be swept under the rug and ignored have come to the forefront of the American consciousness.

The New Grad School Tax

The latest revelation from the latest GOP tax plan is that it would tax tuition waivers for graduate students. For someone who has two post-graduate degrees, and who benefited greatly from tuition waivers covering the cost of my education, I can say that this is a blow to graduate students everywhere. In essence what this change to the tax code means is that the tuition waiver that students receive, will be taxed as income, despite the fact that money never changes hands between the student and the institution. When I had my tuition waived I never even received a statement telling me what I owed (one semester there was a bit of a mistake with the Student Finance Office, and I did get to see what Clark charges for tuition, but more on that later).

In order to give some sense of what this change to the tax code would mean to a graduate student, I am going to give a brief breakdown of what my tax situation looked like while I was a Teaching Assistant and Graduate Student at Clark University (where I earned my Ph.D.). Since at the time I did not have to pay any tuition to Clark University, outside of a $100 'Activities Fee' every year, I left graduate school essentially debt free. This has been a major boon for me in my job search as I have been able to forestall getting a full time position and exist in the part time world of adjuncting, because I do not have loans to pay back. That said, even though I came through debt free, I did not rake in the money while a graduate student, as at most I had about $2,000 in my bank account at the end of the six years of work at Clark.

Compare that modest gain with the following math. For the six years I was at Clark -- and I graduated ahead of schedule in my field -- my tuition was meant to be around $42,000 per year. On top of that, for four of those years, Clark paid me to take on the role of Teaching Assistant in the Department of History for about $10,000/year. So, for four out of the six years, under this tax plan, I would have "earned" $52,000, and for the remaining two my "earnings" would be $42,000. We will be calculating the tax rate based upon the Republican tax plan as it is proposed, and can be found here. Thus, for the years I earned $52,000 as a single filer, I would be taxed at the 25% rate, meaning I would owe: $13,000 before any applicable deductions. For the other two years, where I only "earned" $42,000 my tax liability would be: $5,040. All told, for all six years of my graduate studies I would owe the federal government $62,080. Remember: at the end of grad school, without this sort of onerous burden, I was only able to save about $2,000, under this plan I would owe approximately thirty times that amount.

This sort of tax burden would have undoubtedly have forced me to take on loans, and likely would have made me reconsider going to graduate school, which is likely the point of this tax plan in the first place. Trump's constituents tend not to be those with graduate degrees, and the Republican Party seem entirely fine with the idea of restricting education as much as possible. The problem with this plan is that it is going to further skew the nature of education in America, and will absolutely lead to many young, ambitious, graduate school considering students to travel overseas for their education, where they will not be saddled with the tax burden of high tuition -- as most non-American universities charge a pittance compared to the American educational system. The knock on effect of such a migration of intelligent young people will surely be that it is more difficult for American businesses to attract workers who have moved countries, many of whom will start a life of their own in their newly adopted lands. Because of this, it is possible that the United States will find itself lagging behind in research intensive fields, which could potentially be a major issue for the American military-industrial complex, as well as America's standing in the world as a whole.

This plan is a misguided, and short-sighted attempt at grabbing as many dollars as possible to try and make sure that the budget conforms to the Byrd rule, and another attempt by the GOP to kick the ladder out from under the next generation, as it tries to climb out of the economic rubble that the Baby Boomers have left in their wake.

The Problem of Interesting Times

The last week has been a whirlwind of revelations, firings, appointments, beginnings and endings. Unless you have been living under a rock, here is a recap of just the biggest events over the last week:

• The Firing of FBI Director James Comey has created a political firestorm that has quickly raged out of the control of the White House and President Donald Trump. [Atlantic]
• One reaction that will undoubtedly loom large over the events of this week has been the appointment of Comey's predecessor as Director of the FBI, Robert Muller as a Special Prosecutor by the Department of Justice to investigate the Trump Campaign's relationship with Russia. [NYT]
• Longtime head of Fox News -- and Ohio University's most infamous alum -- Roger Ailes died at age 77. [CNNMoney]
• Bodyguards of Turkish...Premier? Erdogan were involved in a melee -- apparently at Erdogan's direction -- with anti-Erdogan protesters in Washington DC [Guardian]
• Today, the 18th of May, aircraft from the United States attacked Assad-aligned militias in Syria. [Independent]
• And what might be my favorite revelation of yesterday: The King of the Netherlands has secretly been a commercial pilot for the last twenty odd years. [CNN]

And these are just a sampling of the many, many important events that have been happening around the world the last few days.

There is a famous Chinese curse: "may you live in interesting times," and if these are not the times that the architect of the jinx meant, then we must not be far off. 

In part the deluge of information pouring out of the political realm is a product of the hyper-real-time news world that we live with in the information age. This particular political period has been likened to the obvious Nixonian moment where his Presidency started to crumble under the weight of the Watergate investigation, or the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, or the collapse of Soviet hegemony over Eastern Europe, and while all of these momentous occasions are good reminders that crises have always plagued the political fortunes of nations, these comparisons are lacking.

The Presidency of Donald Trump has been in the eyes of close observers a study in chaos and disorganization, and for those without such a keen eye for politics it has been a grating 119 days of scandal, missteps, and self-inflicted wounds. The issue with this constant barrage of information about buffoonery of the Presidency is that it ultimately may normalize the outrageous. Humans have an excellent capacity (and, some may argue an inherent appetite) for novel things, and keeping the breaking news dial turned to 11 is only going to diminish the power that these events have.

Additionally, as I alluded to above, the constant pouring over of the minutiae of large daily events leads to a clouding of one's perspective to anything that exists beyond the horizon of the big important event. On top of this, as we -- understandably -- react to this large event, our reactions create further noise that future historians will use to fill in the corners of their dissertations (there are probably about two hundred historical dissertations waiting to be written on the events of this week) and monographs. Historians are acutely aware of this phenomena, and many historians have built careers by focusing on the one big event (Gettysburg, the Second World War, the Diet of Worms), but by getting caught up in the moment, the big event, the large players it is easy to miss the broader picture of what is going on in the world. One website I frequent barely mentioned the bombing of Syrian troops by American aircraft, despite it usually being front page news for a week, for example.

None of this should be news to anyone, but some food for thought as we are about to dive into a six month, or year, or years long process of investigation of the highest office in the American political system: things may be interesting, but we need to try to keep our perspective in order to help tie our interpretations to the broader context of our day.