John Nacion/STAR MAX/IPx
National Guard troops arrayed outside the U.S. Capitol on the night of January 6
In the aftermath of Wednesday’s mob attack on the U.S. Capitol, peddlers of alternatives to democracy scarcely bothered to hide their glee. See how fragile democracy can be?, autocrats abroad told their citizens. In fact, it was the exact opposite. The question they ought to have asked is why the assault on Capitol Hill did not trigger a political meltdown. Such events, for them, herald the end of democratic experiments. After all, their coups or counterrevolutions have come on the back of similar riots.
Trump might have been thinking the same thing. Here was a president who hardly disguised his admiration for strongmen: Putin and Xi, Turkey’s Erdogan and Egypt’s Sisi—even Kim Jong Un. None of these masters of their society escaped Trump’s envious glance. Trump never dreamed of turning America into a dictatorship, despite the rhetorical flourishes of his critics. He just hoped to raise enough ruckus to be able to bend the rules. So he picked up a trick or two from the authoritarian playbook.
Trump’s most sinister tool has been the conspiracy theory. Its power lies in its circular logic. If you are up against a secretive, all-encompassing force—like the deep state—then by definition you cannot expose or prosecute it. Conspirators are everywhere, commonly referred to by the third-person plural: they. They sit on every court bench and political organization. They control the news media and mass culture. This is why the battle can only be fought in the shadows. In his speeches, the Egyptian president promises citizens to defeat their faceless enemy, yet cannot say how because the evil folk (ahl al-shar) are eavesdropping. Erdogan leads valiant campaigns against the foreign plots of a mysterious interest-rate lobby (faiz lobisi) and domestic ones by the deep state (derin devlet). Tehran is a tad more specific. Great Satan (Shaytan-e Bozorg) is the enemy, along with a league of little satans. And Western imperialism is of course the puppet master in Moscow and Beijing.
By sundown, the man in the Oval Office found himself utterly abandoned. What went wrong?
Grumbles against Washington elites may be as old as the republic. But with Trump, these swamp creatures acquired the mercurial character favored by dictators. The system is rigged and must be taken down. In the American case, however, it all backfired spectacularly. By sundown, the man in the Oval Office found himself utterly abandoned. What went wrong?
Trump is known for his short attention span. So he probably missed a few pointers in his cursory study of authoritarian regimes. Insurrections can indeed start a chain reaction that helps greedy politicians consolidate power. However, a few more ingredients are indispensable.
You must stir the pot of popular outrage until it boils over. Speeches and an active social media presence are woefully insufficient. Ask protesters in Cairo’s Tahrir Square and Istanbul’s Gezi Park. Ask the Green Movement in Iran, or Hong Kong activists. What you need is a national media singing from the same hymn sheet. Hence, the Egyptian security’s hostile takeover of television networks, and the imprisonment of thousands of reporters in Turkey and Iran. In Trumpland, by contrast, even Fox News, a byword for blind partisanship in media studies, could not follow the demagogue all the way. And the much-maligned Twitter and Facebook eventually suspended his account. When planning a putsch, pointing fingers at the fake-news media will only get you so far.
You also need political minions. Tactical allies are simply unreliable. Successful dictators recruit their own political class from the ranks of officers and security informers, members of their tribe or sect, crony capitalists who owe them everything. American politicians might be as opportunistic as they come, but their careers require them to play by the rules. “Count me out,” declared one of the president’s staunchest enablers after that night of horror in the Senate Chamber. The same applies to the judiciary. Legal life has indeed become too political. And Trump merrily packed the courts with Republican nominees. Still, judges unanimously dismissed the cases he brought against Biden’s election. Political coups demand judicial acquiescence.
Finally, there are the agents of coercion. Tyranny craves, above all, a complacent military. Authoritarian leaders bribe officers with economic incentives, tame them through constant purges, keep them in check via revolutionary guards. The American president used hope as a strategy. He projected an image of martial valor. Perhaps topless horseback riding or throwing opponents on a judo mat was beyond him. But like his tsarist superhero, Trump paraded his virility, adopted a militaristic tone, and populated his administration with war heroes. The commander in chief tried to forge a special bond with the uniformed class. Yet few institutions managed to distance themselves from the would-be Caesar as thoroughly as the U.S. armed forces. Resignations, open letters, and on-screen put-downs dispelled any doubt that they might intervene to prevent chaos—oftentimes the prelude to a permanent state of emergency.
Nor did the security establishment lend a hand. Where would dictatorships be without the smoke and mirrors of intelligence reports? Political rivals exposed as foreign agents; journalists and human rights advocates found on the payroll of enemy states; peaceful demonstrators denounced as pawns in underground plots. Trump desperately needed spooks on his side to give some credence to his voter-fraud allegations. Unfortunately, he had alienated all of them irrevocably, snubbing their appraisals and siding with America’s adversaries.
This is far from an ode to American democracy, whose troubling history and imperfections have been laid bare in recent times. That much remains to be done is beyond doubt. But as this perilous presidency demonstrated, its traditions and institutions are not yet ready to keel over. A dark day it may be, but there is a silver lining.
