What Is A Coup?
Also Known As: It's Not What You Think It Is. Also, Liz Cheney Is A Liar.
You want to know what the difference between those pictures are? You’ve heard of one this week. This, despite the fact that the Mali coup actually succeeded, and now, months later, the situation in Mali has gotten so bad that West Africa has cut Mali off. Now, Americans, and to some extent, the West, could be forgiven for paying more attention to what is being called an coup in America and memory hole a transfer of power in a relatively backwater country in central Africa… But two things; One, now that I’ve pointed it out, the differences between a military coup and whatever the hell the rioters did on 1/6 seems kind of stark, and two, that’s probably very racist of you and you should feel bad.
I’ve been listening to Bari Weiss’ podcast, and I can’t recommend it enough. Bari has some very different opinions than I do, but she arrives at them honestly and treats people who disagree with her like real people with real opinions, as opposed to the strawman characters progressives seem to enjoy knocking down. There was a really good quote from one of her guests a couple weeks back, on a replay of a discussion surrounding the abortion debate:
One of the many reasons that the abortion debate is pitched in screams is because both sides know that if they calmed down and listened, they would have to admit the other side, the best argument of the other side, is a pretty good argument.
This is true, obviously true. Brilliantly stated. It’s so simple, and yet, I’d never heard it put quite this way. It’s always been obvious to me that there were two very different narratives, that both of them had a point, and that they were talking past each other. I don’t think I’d ever considered the idea that they were doing it purposefully (or at least subconsciously) so as to avoid the portions of the argument that they knew they’d struggle with… And yet, what else could it be? I have to assume that abortion activists know, deep down, whether they admit it or not, that the pro-life movement isn’t merely about controlling women’s bodies, even if the pro-life movement won’t admit, out loud, that in practice that’s what it would amount to.
Which is why the most recent installment of her podcast disappointed me. It’s not too deep, she tried to keep it real, but her guest was Liz Cheney, and Liz was… Much less honest than Bari’s usual fare. This shouldn’t surprise, I suppose… Liz is a politician, after all, and her mouth was moving. There were two answers to questions Bari asked Liz that were so dishonest that they drove me up a wall.
Question 1: What is a Coup?
The first was in response to a question about what Liz would say to people who believe that January 6th was awful, but ultimately unimportant, or that January 6th was a false flag operation, or that…. (there were more differentiators, but you get the idea, and I’m working from memory). Liz’s immediate answer was actually very good; Those are very different statements, and you have to treat them differently. She then went on to answer none of them, and pivoted to what she wanted to talk about. What was so frustrating about this is that she said the words out loud… You have to treat very different things as different…. And two very different, if tangentially connected… Things happened on January 6th. There was a coup attempt. And there was a riot.
“But Jeff! The coup was the riot.” I hear you say. No no. There was a coup, and there was a riot. The coup was political, not military, Trump obviously wouldn’t have thought of his actions in these terms, and you can tell by the public discourse that most people don’t think of these actions specifically when you say “coup”, but I think it’s fair to note that the pressure that Donald Trump was trying to exert on state government officials, congressmen, senators and Mike Pence, to do various flavors of decertify, stall or otherwise steal the election could probably fairly be called a coup. It wasn’t effective, you had too many principled people in place for it to succeed, but it’s fairly obvious that it was at least probed for interest. Donald Trump, yet again, misunderstood the differences between business and government, and patriotism and loyalty. The riot was all the shit happening outside. I don’t believe for a minute that the administration actually planned or encouraged the riots in anything but the most incidental and accidental or terms… It pays to note that the riots actually got in the way of their coup, and several Trump lawyers have said on record, stupidly, that the riots derailed various parts of their plans.
Which is why the connections between the two is so frustrating to me, particularly when coming from someone like Cheney. She’s on the committee, she has better access to information than everyone except the people actually involved, she knows this. She said as much but almost immediately glossed over it when Bari asked if the committee actually found any connections between the administration and the rioters.
And make no mistake… This is purely political. Part of the reason that Hillary Clinton’s Emails didn’t penetrate very deep into the public consciousness was because the issues couldn’t be easily digested or understood; You talk to an average Joe about classification standards, or processes, or the nuances of FOIA and their eyes start to glaze over, both because the average person has average intelligence, and because they don’t want to know more, because they have this inkling that if they knew more they might have to admit that their opponents had a point. The reason, I think, that Cheney (and Democrats) are trying to tie the administration to the riots is because people understand riots. There’s a huge cognitive dissonance bias in play that they want to, and to some extent, have taken advantage of.
Question 2: A politically legal distinction.
The other question was one of legality, coupled with a question about impeachment. The questions were separated by a fair amount of time, but when you put the answers together it’s kind of telling.
The first question in this series was Bari asking what, exactly, President Trump had done that was illegal. The point was made that Trump was a boor, that he was of low moral fiber, that he was rude, and loud, but while all of these things were bad, that none of them was actually a crime. Liz demurred, saying that that was up to the justice department, which is cute and all… But Liz is in fact a lawyer, she is in fact a congresswoman, and she is in fact on the January 6th committee. She could opine as a lawyer on where she thought possible criminality was. And really… Can anyone explain to me why she wouldn’t? The second question in this series, the one that really drove this home to me, had to do with the impeachment vote, of which Liz Cheney was one of the 10 Republicans that voted in favor of. Wait a minute…. Is Impeachment a political procedure or a legal one? Doesn’t impeachment require a high crime or misdemeanor? If Liz Cheney can’t enunciate a crime that Donald Trump committed, then what the actual fuck was she doing voting in favor of his impeachment?
Liz Cheney Doesn’t Deserve a Redemption Tour.
The theme of the talk was how hard done by Liz Cheney was, and how unfair it was for her to have faced the kinds of consequences that she has. This fails the reality test. You could tell that Bari was trying to prod some truth out of her every now and again, but Liz was having none of it. The fact of the matter is that there are all kinds of Republicans who opposed Trump, called the election legitimate, and maintained their standing. Ted Cruz in the Senate, Dan Crenshaw in the House, Ben Shapiro was livid with Trump following Jan 6th and spared no punches. He’s doing fine. No, Liz is special because she was the GOP conference chair at a time when Republicans were fighting for control of the Senate with two very winnable runoff elections in Georgia and instead of supporting the Republicans during an election season, she spent every night of every week on left leaning media complaining about her party. I’m not saying that she was wrong (well… Yes I am, but merely having a bad take on this issue wasn’t enough to sewer someone’s career), I’m saying that it was literally her job to support her party and instead she cut the legs out from under it. I’m not saying that Republicans would have won those Senate seats if they were able to present a more united front, but they could have, and the idea that she doesn’t understand why Republicans are cross with her beggars belief. She is not that stupid, but she is that dishonest.
Motivation.
I also want to talk a minute about motivation. Liz Cheney voted in lock step with Donald Trump’s agenda more than almost anyone else. I think it was a dead heat between her and Rand Paul, if I remember. I think we’ve crossed out “principles” from possible motivations, because really… If you’re taking a principled stance in favor of something, you shouldn’t need to lie about it. We’ve also crossed out “future career” because no one was confused about Liz committing professional suicide during her MSNBC studios tour. So why is she doing it? I don’t know. I suppose I might have crossed out principles too early, and she’s Frankensteined together a set of principles that just doesn’t include honesty. But I also want to consider another motivation: Fear.
The difference between the January 6th 2021 riot, The January 2017 riot, and the 2020 Summer of love wasn’t the fear, it wasn’t the violence, it wasn’t the motivation, it wasn’t in the acts. Sure, you can squabble on the margins and try to explain which atrocity was worse, but buildings still burned, people still died, it was political violence, the cops seemed very ineffective in stopping it, and the parallels continue. There were two material differences 1) Who was committing the crimes. and 2) Who the victims were.
And that second one, that’s why I think Liz (and others) are doing this. This was supposed to be happening far away, to the poors, it wasn’t supposed to happen in the suburbs, or in places of fine dining, or in the capitol building…. Don’t the rioters know they’re only supposed to terrorize shopkeepers? Does Capitol Hill look like a car lot to you!?! For the first time in their lives, some of these congresspeople felt the fear that is the direct result of their actions and inactions…. And they Did. Not. Like. It. And instead of looking inward to how something like this may have happened, they needed someone to blame. “The riots would not have happened if not for Donald Trump” proclaims Cheney. Sure. Indirectly, but sure. And are you sure that nothing you did contributed?
Look, I’m not saying that it was good that the riots happened. It was bad. It was ugly. It shouldn’t have happened. The rioters should be charged. I don’t particularly care for their mewling of poor treatment except in a couple of more egregious cases… But I am saying that as a silver lining to the awfulness that was the January 6th riots, it would be really nice if people, everyone, took a step back and thought about the implications of the riots, and maybe brainstormed a positive way forward.
I won’t hold my breath. I like living.