American History of Authoritarian Coups: Ending the Cycle

Resisting Our Third Attempted Authoritarian Coup

Authoritarian ideology is destructive and abusive.  Authoritarians, who currently control both our economic and political systems, have and are again threatning our democratic republic with another authoritarian coup attempt.  Voters have again pushed back on this attack in 2020, but not strongly enough.  The “blue wave” lacked adequate concern from those running for office.  The candidates refused to address the abuses and injustices plaguing most voters.  In parallel, the authoritarian oligarchs poured unfathomable billions into dividing the voters to minimize our democratic response – the “blue wave” got no further than the White House.

This is the third attempted coup by our ever-present right-wing authoritarian oligarchs since our founding.  As of this writting, this attempt is still in work.   Ending it will take significant systemic changes in our near future.

Authoritarian coup Led by Southern Oligarchs:

Our first attempted coup started in the early 19th century and grew under the leadership of wealthy slave holders of the South.  They dreaded the loss of their enriching low-cost slave labor.   Fortunately for the slaves, the South lost the struggle on the battlefield.  Unfortunately, the authoritarian ideology, which justified the slave owner’s excessive wealth, their need to control and which drove them to war, survived.  This authoritarian ideology spread as the nation expanded westward.  Idolizing the Western cowboy made promotion of the authoritarian ideology easy.  It infected mostly whites, especially white excessively wealthy industrialists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  

Another Authoritarian coup attempt by Industrial Oligarchs:

After statehood was extended throughout the cowboy dominated West and the unfettered economy enriched the oligarchs across the nation, America suffered another authoritarian-driven monumental setback: the Great Depression. The oligarchs used our authoritarian economic system to crash this system while trying to maximize their wealth.  Citizens rose up and demanded restrictions on their abusers and wanted direct aid to help them survive the economic disaster.  

FDR heard them and addressed their abuses with massive people over profit legislation.  Unfortunately, white citizens were the primary beneficiaries.  But this was still too much for the authoritarian oligarchs of the time who would lose more wealth as the New Deal progressed.  These oligarchs finally resorted to an attempted coup using disgruntled WWI veterans led by a retired Marine General Smedley Butler.  Congress investigated this coup, but no one paid a price for this treason, just as the Southern oligarchs never really paid for their treason.

The liberal consensus pushback on authoritarian domination continued into the 1960s with Republicans Eisenhower and Nixon helping.  Nixon, however, also helped turn back the tide for rising democracy by appointing Lewis Powell to SCOTUS.  In 1976 and 1978, Powell helped define money as speech for both corporations and oligarchs.

Division and Unity Impact the Authoritarian Coup Cycle:

Another element of the first two attempted authoritarian coups was our national psyche during WAR.  

The Civil War was internal and divided the citizenry over slavery.  Those promoting increased equality and liberty, the liberal consensus, won the war, but the ideology of the authoritarian losers persisted.   Nurturing and expanding it westward laid the foundation for our second authoritarian coup attempt of FDR.

WWII was external and unity of the citizenry was a major factor for winning.  This unity started with the shared suffering from the Great Depression and was maximized with two key government war policies: anti-racist propaganda while fighting the Nazi racists and large scale replacement of capitalism with rationing to avoid corporate exploitation/division of the citizenry.  The intent of rationing was to promote a market, with limited supplies, based on need instead of greed.  The long term impact of the New Deal and citizen unity were a major factors that kept the liberal consensus strong and suppressed our deeply embedded authoritarian ideology until the 1960s. 

Third Time – The Cycle Repeats:

Our third, or on-going, coup attempt, uses the same authoritarian ideology of Southern slave owners and Western cowboys.  What is new in this cycle is the ideological language of the “Movement Conservative” that reframed the authoritarian ideology. In the mid 60s, movement conservative pushed the nomination of Barry Goldwater as their ideal Western cowboy hero.  Goldwater lost the election but the authoritarian Republican ideology staying-power won over some southern Democratic states for the first time.  

In 1964, Lyndon Johnson became our president and kept the oligarchs from taking control.  LBJ continued the liberal consensus of FDR and Eisenhower to expand equal protection and empowerment of African American citizens.   However, after the 1964 election loss, Movement Conservative found a new cowboy hero in Ronald Reagan who became the great white hope for the new post-depression oligarchs.  In 1980, Reagan, with Movement Conservative, won the south and the west with the authoritarian ideology that originated in the South and migrated to the West.  The war against the liberal consensus began anew.

Movement Conservative Takes Hold

With the help of William F. Buckley, Phyllis Schlafly, The John Birch Society, Pat Buchanan, Grover Norquist, ending the Fairness Doctrine, Doug Coe of The Family,  the Moral Majority, David Stockman, all the conservative Think Tanks born out of The Powell Memo, the Christian Coalition, Newt Gingrich, Roger Ailes, Roger Stone, Fox News, Hate Radio, pro-corporate and anti-voter rulings from SCOTUS, growing voter suppression accelerated by SCOTUS killing part of the Civil Rights Act, the Clinton Third Way, telecommunications monopolization, gerrymandering, dog whistles turned into blatant racism, billionaires like the Kochs and Mercers buying politicians, and authoritarian coup leaders blaming others, our third authoritarian coup has slowly advanced for four decades.  Trump is still trying to become our first dictator.

Relative to the previous coup attempts, the current coup is most like the slave owner authoritarian coup.  We are again deeply divided and susceptible to attack from a pandemic or opportunity-seeking foreign power.  At this point, the warring sides are only battling using the a variety of media tools.  The government-driven unity of WWII is no where in sight. Hundreds of thousands of Americans are dead and many are isolated from their families in over burdoned ICUs because we are too divided to defeat the pandemic, or anything else.

We need to break this repetitive authoritarian driven cycle and stop the current and any future authoritarian coup attempts. We must do more than a Green/Blue/Red/Black New Deal. We need more than improving Social Security. We need more than health care that puts health before profit. We must do more than FDR’s Second Bill of Rights. We need more than redirected funding of abusive authoritarian law enforcement.  We need more democracy in both our political and economic systems now.  We need more equal protection and empowerment of both voters and workers.

End the Authroitarian Coup Cycle: We Need a Grand New Deal

Voter registration must be automatic.  Voting must become a right without fear of limitation or loss.  Election day must be a national holiday.  Employees must have paid time-off for voting early.  All registered voters who want it must be able to vote by mail.  Delivery of mail-in ballots must never be delayed. The Electoral College must be nullified.

To protect and empower workers, we need to repeal the Taft-Hartley Act.  The National Labor Relations act needs modification to allow domestic and farm workers to unionize. We need to enforce anti-trust laws to disempower oligarchs and their destruction of our economy and government. Defeating COVID-19 or, for that matter any national threat, requires a level of national unity not seen since WWII. We must pass laws to promote employee-owned businesses and allow employees to take over abusive large corporations.  Employee-owned businesses won’t send their jobs to other countries.  Businesses owned by employees won’t pollute their communities.  Employee-owned businesses will manage work schedules to minimize unemployment.  But most importantly, employee-owned businesses won’t  create (empower and protect) oligarchs to buy our government.

Minimizing Corporate Abuse

To enable employee coops and end corporate abuse of employees, citizens, suppliers and customers, government must initiate action and pass supportive laws. This gvernment action action has considerable historical basis. The government should buy controlling interest in abusive corporations, like diirty energy profiteers, and alter corporate goals to reduce corporate/profit based abuse. After this corporate reorganization is completed, the government would turn over their controlling shares to the non-management employees of the re-born corporation.

We need to replace corporate personhood with nature personhood.  Congress needs to outlaw corporate rights sanctioned by SCOTUS rulings which enable abuse of citizens and nature.  Citizens and nature need new rights enacted to protect them from corporate/oligarch abuse.

We must attain a national unity by ending the media war with a new Fairness Doctrine.

What you can do to break the cycle?

Stay involved, keep the pressure on your elected officials, remain vigilant.  Replace politicians if they remain non-responsive to the abuses you are suffering.  Support efforts to equally protect and empower all citizens.  Learn to recognize the division of authoritarian ideology and reject its social hierarchy of inequality. Support unity through maximizing the liberal consensus that “all [people and nature] are created equal.”