December 1, 2010
Is It a Coup?
Then
Last Tuesday in my local newspaper syndicated columnist Paul Krugman said, “The fact is that one of our two great political parties has made it clear that it has no interest in making America governable, unless it’s doing the governing. And that party now controls one house of Congress, which means that the country will not, in fact, be governable without that party’s cooperation – cooperation that won’t be forthcoming.”
This is quite serious. At a time when we have weighty issues to deal with, one political party is essentially hijacking another. It has been, from the inauguration, as if Democrats did not win the election. The Republicans will not let them govern and will use any dirty tricks to win back control of the government.
Is this guerilla warfare? Do we have what is in reality a coup d’état? Will we end up as a one-party country? Do conservative Americans believe that minority citizens cannot be true citizens because they did not help write the Constitution and they don’t understand Democracy? What will we do to prevent a Republican “coup”? What are our choices assuming we will have use a media solution or other peaceful means (which we must)? Will we still be America if we allow such a “coup” to take place? I am appalled by the things I see happening in Washington right now. I am not at all sure Obama is strong enough to come up with a plan to resist this “coup” and let our elected leaders do their jobs. Will civility win the day? I would like to believe it can.
Paul Krugman put his finger on the key problem we are facing right now, the problem that is taking precedence over all others. When a party gets elected by the people of the United States is there any way to prevent the kinds of tactics currently being used to stop the winning party from actually governing. We will have to solve the problem of who’s in charge before any of the people’s business can be undertaken, even though we believe we already answered this question using our election process.
Now
Even though the Democrats control the Executive and the Legislative branches of our government the margins of control are slim. Republicans can still obstruct any piece of legislation from coming to the floor of the Senate for a vote because two Democratic Senators are voting with the Republicans.
It’s unclear why the citizens of America are electing Democrats but reining in their power to legislate by giving the Senate the power to continue to block laws written to benefit the middle-class. People are sold on the trope that Republicans understand the American economy better than Democrats because Republicans claim that they give America boom times. These claims are a myth. If you do any research into this matter Republicans manufacture booming times by taking risks that often backfire. The Great Depression followed a Republican boom. Several Great Recessions have followed Republican administrations that relied on faulty economics. Trump’s pre-pandemic economy may have seemed to be booming, but it wasn’t booming for everyone, and it did not make it through this long and global pandemic.
That 11 years ago there was already talk of a Republican coup to take over governing America should shock us. Republicans are playing a long game. Every time there are setbacks you can almost hear them groan. Then they just settle down and continue with the same tactics that are gradually killing off the Democratic Party. The Democrats have the best ideas, ideas that reach down to troubled spots in America and try to smooth out inequalities that cause anger and upheaval. The Republicans decided to tap into people’s anger, they blame “others” for troubled spots and use hate to get middle-class people to blame the changes that have come to America when our factories left, and our housing market collapsed on “freeloaders” from minority groups in America. They preach white supremacy and skew the tax laws in America to line the pockets of the wealthiest citizens.
The Republicans elect a man who should never have sat in our Oval Office and then they help him lay claim to winning an election that he lost, an election to continue as the President of the United States. One day, January 6, 2021, we turn on our televisions to see a bizarre army climbing the walls, ascending the stairs at the Capitol Building in Washington, DC. There are no forces there to fend them off except a few beleaguered Capitol police. If the insurrectionists were more numerous, might they have accomplished their purpose? Half the nation pretends to believe the election was stolen from the incumbent. The other half knows that America held a free and fair election.
The Republican Party undeterred by having to learn that there were gas masks under their Senate seats, undeterred by guilt, continue to obstruct. They no longer bluster and tease about it. They keep a grim silence and let the coup unfold. America is closer than ever to one-party rule and that one party is racist and misogynistic and would like to have the same power over workers that authoritarian societies exercise. Can they be stopped? Right now they could still be stopped by something as simple as a vote.