The Coup Before the Coup

Dispatches From The J6 Hearings

Prefer to listen? Check out the podcast version.

I am trying, very hard, to care about the January 6th committee.

Part of the problem is the name. The events of January 6th themselves were not a serious insurrection but an embarrassing clusterfuck of costumed street-brawling dorks. These LARPing patriots worked themselves into a froth over four exhausting years, exchanged enormous sacks of money for paramilitary accessories and Trump merch, shouted a billion overwrought William Wallace speeches about FREEDOM into every camera that came within 20 feet of them, then violently forced their way past a pathetically small contingent of police. And then, after all that time and effort and money, these clowns failed to lay hands on a single powerful person or stop the so-called steal. They rifled through some paperwork, took some selfies, wandered around aimlessly, then went home to post to Instagram and wait tamely for the FBI to knock on their door.

At no point on January 6th were these clowns ever going to take the reins of power in America. By the standards of street violence and public disorder it was extreme. For an insurrection, it was a joke. An empty spectacle. A third-rate shitshow and an embarrassment. 

The footage makes for good TV, though, and the J6 commission is taking full advantage of that fact. Whenever possible, they intersperse witness testimony with images of unhinged maniacs as they scream and threaten and beat people to a pulp. The chaos clashes beautifully with the hearings themselves, which resemble nothing so much as a live-action version of The West Wing complete with carefully-scripted speeches, flashback footage, and characters who may disagree on policy but want what’s best for America.

Despite the name and the window dressing, the committee hearings have almost nothing to do with the events of January 6th. Instead, they focus on Trump’s actual coup attempt–the one where the former President and his loyal soldiers made a serious, coordinated and multi-pronged effort to overturn the 2020 election from within the system itself.

Backroom dealings do not make for good TV. How do you make a phone call between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger–the one where Trump demanded the Secretary of State shit out 11,780 votes–visually compelling? How do you get audiences edge-of-their-seat-pumped for DOJ office politics wherein Jeffrey Clark went over his boss’ head to meet with Trump privately and then maneuvered behind Jeffrey Rosen’s back to get the President to fire Rosen and make Clark the acting Attorney General instead so that Clark could work to overturn the election: a plan that might have actually worked had Rosen not called a bunch of state AGs who all threatened to resign if Trump made this move, leading to an explosive Oval Office showdown and blah blah blah blah blah.

The dangerous thing about the real 2020 coup attempt is that it looks nothing like wolves raiding the campsite after dark and so does not set off one’s amygdala in the way it really ought to. The Clark/Rosen incident, in which Trump attempted to seize control of the Department of Justice and use it to crush his opponents, is terrifying, especially combined with his efforts to put his boy Kash Patel in charge of the CIA for reasons I assume are obvious.

Wherever there were reins of power, Trump did his best to seize them. He leaned on party loyalists at the state level to find votes and declare elections compromised based on completely debunked evidence. He tried to get those states to send alternate slates of electors that would give Mike Pence an excuse to reject the actual electors and declare victory for Trump, then mounted a pressure campaign against Pence that culminated in the VP’s refusal to get into a secret service car as J6 erupted aboveground. 

With a few different people in key positions, those plans might have worked. Trump and those who would take his place have learned from their mistakes and are already working to fix them. The former President’s endorsement of loyalists and opposition to so-called RINOs in midterm primaries aren’t just an ego trip. They’re an effort to replace party hacks with loyal soldiers–people who owe their entire careers to him and will do what he tells them.

The things that Trump attempted in the leadup to January 6th were, for the most part, dreadfully illegal, but what is our legal code but reams of paper in filing cabinets and ones and zeroes online? At their core, they are nothing but detailed rules for a game we made up; a Dungeons and Dragons manual for American politics.

Made-up rules can carry a lot of weight. To the extent that people follow them, these rules are made of iron. Belief leads to enforcement, enforcement leads to constraint. This is not the Matrix: one person cannot simply will their way into a space where laws do not apply no matter what the Sovereign Citizens say. 

If enough people decide the rules aren’t real, however, all bets are off.

In recent years America has become a battleground for two incompatible worldviews that operate on wildly different sets of rules. Inside the January 6th Committee hearings, the West Wing narrative is ascendent. In this America, Trump and his rabid adherents actively attempted to destroy our country, but they are outliers and freaks and very stupid and not at all American. Real America consists of two parties who compete for the people’s votes. Though they disagree on policy minutiae, each party recognizes the other’s commitment to moving the country forward. The system works and it grinds slowly towards justice and sanity. America is strong and good, despite its flaws: with a couple tweaks and a few compromises we can achieve incremental change that will maintain our status as the best country on earth.

Outside those chambers, conservatives offer a very different narrative. In their world, “Leftists” (read: anyone to the left of Mitch McConnell) are engaged in a serious and well-coordinated effort to destroy America from the inside with the help of communist China and the global pedophilic elite. These monsters have already been wildly successful: we are a degenerate and decaying empire drifting farther and farther from an idyllic imagined past. With the help of 2000 mules and woke cancel culture these demons conspired to steal the 2020 election and will do it again in 2024 unless real Americans take action. 

Both worldviews agree: there are wide swaths of America that aren’t America any longer, and they are both correct. We no longer inhabit the same country. We do not share a common vision, and we certainly no longer agree on the rules. 

Without belief, the spirit of the law cannot hold. Without spirit, the letter of the law reverts to ink and paper that any lighter can easily destroy.

With every speech and every flashback and every halting piece of testimony, the January 6th commission strives to restore buy-in and revive that spirit. Their evidence is strong, their presentation compelling.The story they are telling, if enough people believed it, could heal the wound Trump tore in the fabric of our nation and restore the rule of law.

But it won’t work.

Trump cannot be destroyed with facts and logic. Over 40% of Americans believe Biden stole the election. Over 50% of Republicans believe leftists led the January 6th attack. The Republican worldview is ascendent. The major thing that has changed between January 6th and today is that Republicans now know the people will not punish them if they try and fail to subvert an election, and that many will support them if they succeed.

If the January 6th committee wants a prayer at stopping them, it must shatter that calculus. Reconfigure the risks and benefits of insurrection. The law must bear its teeth and prove it still has strength.

These proceedings must lead to legal action against Trump and the loyalists who attempted to help him; not censures or fines or show trials but treason charges and hard time. We must ruin their lives and their careers so that the next time a presidential candidate does the math on whether it’s worth it to attempt to subvert a free and fair election the risks clearly outweigh the benefits.

When I began writing this article, I believed that course of action might buy us significant time. I am no longer sure of this at all. The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case that could allow state legislatures to exercise sole power over elections. Such power would legally allow state officials to do what Trump begged them to do in 2020. If that happens, none of this will matter one way or another.

None of this is an accident. We did not land here. We were not dragged here. We drove here, and the architects of the worldview on display at the January 6th committee were at the wheel.

Anyone can look around and see that the Democratic worldview is full of shit. Nothing is OK. The system is crumbling before our eyes. Climate change is here and it seems we will not stop it. Our standard of living is falling across the board. Everything feels untenable, on the verge of collapse, and all the party of Biden can promise us is more of the same. There is no mechanism on offer to propel us forward, only to backslide more slowly. Even the insufficient incremental change they claim to offer seems out of reach. How many more poem readings can the human soul bear? No wonder people are either casting their eyes right or giving up in disgust.

The only people offering real solutions are the conservatives. They are bad solutions, toxic and hideous. Trans people are less safe every day. Soon gay people will not be safe. People who can get pregnant are certainly not safe. Your freedom of worship, freedom of speech, and freedom of movement are all at risk. 

It seems our society has made people so sick that they are willing to walk into hell for a change of scenery. Like it or not, there will be no more seasons of The West Wing. The show has run its course.

An alternative must rise on the left. A way forward that allows for actual improvement. Unions, universal healthcare, housing decoupled from speculative investment, wages high enough to live on for every single person. More abstractly, we need a world that offers fulfillment beyond a system that operates by creating a howling void of need inside of us, then sells us products that never quite fill us up and always keep us craving. Our misery turns the wheels of capitalism by creating the demand that makes lines on graphs go up.

I do not know how to get there. I do not know what it looks like. I am waiting for a sign.

A few years ago, I got into an argument with a friend about the French Revolution. I said the revolution failed. The Jacobins led the people not into a beautiful egalitarian future but into the Terror, and the only thing that stopped it was an imperialist dictatorship that bled Europe dry.

My friend disagreed. The French Revolution did not achieve its goals, he said, but it abolished feudalism throughout Europe. It made room for something new. And even if the revolutionaries could not possibly have envisioned what that new thing would be, their murder of the old world allowed a new one to be born.

We are hideous, wretched, beautiful creatures born to love each other, primed by thousands of years of evolution to create community. Our isolation and loneliness are unnatural. A collapse makes room for many things. 

Perhaps we will find each other in the ashes.