The coup plans seem to be already going into action

It looks like the Trump coup plan is already being put into motion:

Kate McGee et al, Biden camp cancels multiple Texas events after a "Trump Train" surrounded a campaign bus Texas Tribune 10/31/2020

Lois Beckett and Alexandra Villarreal, Biden campaign says Trump supporters tried to force bus off highway 11/01/2020

Matt Mathers, Biden event in Texas cancelled as 'armed' Trump supporters threaten campaign bus Independent 10/31/2020

Apparently, this action was popular in some quarters:

From the Texas Tribune coverage:

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is looking into a Friday incident in which a group of Trump supporters, driving trucks and waving Trump flags, surrounded and followed a Biden campaign bus as it drove up I-35 in Hays County, a law enforcement official confirmed to The Texas Tribune Saturday.

The confrontation, captured on video, featured at least one minor collision and led to Texas Democrats canceling three scheduled campaign events on Friday. The campaign officials cited “safety concerns” for the cancellations.

There's also this:

Texas Republicans have asked a federal judge to throw out 100,000 ballots in Harris County cast through curbside voting. They drew Judge Andrew Hanen, one of the most notoriously partisan Republican judges in the entire federal judiciary. This is alarming. https://t.co/VODOZrCoUF

— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) October 31, 2020

Wow: One of the Republicans asking a federal judge to throw out more than 117,000 valid ballots in Harris County is a COVID and QAnon conspiracy theorist. Great reporting from @ehananoki. https://t.co/roTEm4vMIM pic.twitter.com/8KGNQvGAow

— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) October 31, 2020

Stern in his Slate article linked in his tweet (Texas Republicans Ask Federal Judge to Throw Out 117,000 Legally Cast Ballots 10/31/2020) explains in more detail what a crassly partisan-political move it is and how flimsy the legal claims behind it are.

The Confederate symbolism would have been more completed if the Klan-style attempted vehicular homicide and the frivolous lawsuit relying on a corrupted judiciary had taken place in South Carolina rather than Texas.

But one of the Carolinas also got into the act, as Julia Craven describes (North Carolina’s Police Attack on Election Marchers Had a Long History Behind It Slate 10/31/2020):

On Saturday, Alamance County sheriff’s deputies and city police pepper sprayed a crowd of about 200 people who were peacefully marching to the polls in Graham, North Carolina without warning and on slim reasoning. Graham police claimed that protesters didn’t have the adequate permits to close off the road, while the Alamance County sheriff’s office said that the march was shut down out of “concerns for the safety of all.”

If it is at all difficult to understand how a police department could act so heinously—particularly when children and elderly community members are present within the crowd— then it’s important for one to grasp the context that the law enforcement operates within. ...

Voter intimidation is an omnipresent concern in North Carolina, a state that has tried to prevent Black and brown voters from casting ballots with “surgical precision” since Reconstruction. During the late 1800s, a high-level white supremacist campaign in North Carolina went to extreme acts of violence - including massacring Black residents in Wilmington - in order to regain political power within the state. Less outwardly violent voter suppression tactics have cropped up in the state following the Supreme Court’s weakening of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby v. Holder, such as North Carolina’s infamous voter I.D. law and gerrymandering so precise that every district in the state had to be redrawn. [my emphasis]

The chances of a Republican coup to keep Trump in office even if he loses the votes depends in significant part on how big the margin for Biden is. It should not be that way. But that's how badly wounded American democracy already is.

The Democratic Party side of the asymmetric partisan polarization in the US

As a Sanders voter who is actively engaged for electing the Biden-Harris ticket, because of course even half-competent government would be a distinct improvement from the Bunker Boy fiasco, I'm not part of the main target audience for the current Democratic National Convention's daily infomercial blitz that counts as a convention this year.

But it's hard not to fear that the Democratic Party leadership isn't stuck in the same corporate-friendly, Woke approach to campaigning style of 2016: lots of talk about harmony and diversity ("Stronger Together"), take the actual voter base for granted, and assume that Donald Trump is such an obvious incompetent and such a narcissistic mess that he has to lose.

Political campaigns always have something of a sports event about them. And longtime Democrats are sorely tempted to focus the idea that as long as Democrats hold the White House, everything will basically be all right. That's especially true of relatively well-off Democratic voters over 60 or so. I suspect that part of it is that the closer one gets to the higher end of the average life span, people with some actual feelings of responsibility for society as a whole would find it nice to think that we're leaving behind a better world than the one we were born into. And for anyone with a broadly liberal outlook, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris come much closer to offering that assurance than the Trump-Pence ticket does.

The American oligarchs would find it very convenient if the election were seen by the public as really nothing more than a sports event. That way, the electoral part of politics could be reduced to a harmless reality show while the neoliberal principle of TINA (There Is No Alternative) held sway in in economic and social policy as well as foreign policy, economic elites could fight among themselves over who would get which piece of the pie. But they wouldn't have to suffer the annoyance of actual democratic rule in which a majority of the people might prefer policies like public education for all or pensions and health care for everyone that don't directly benefit the wealthiest 1% in an immediate, direct way.

Jacobin writer Branko Marcetic makes his case that the Democrats are stuck in their own past in The Democratic Convention Put the Party’s Contradictions Front and Center 08/18/2020, dated the day after the first day of the current DNC:

The first night of the 2020 DNC was a fitting event for a party that prefers defeat to change. After a humiliating and close to delegitimizing election loss in 2016, Democratic leadership refused to take stock of their own failings, and blamed an assortment of outside forces: Russia, Facebook, Jill Stein, James Comey, to name a few. With Biden at the helm — a candidate with all the same weaknesses as the one who lost four years ago, but even worse — they decided to rerun the exact same campaign as last time, from the all-consuming focus on Trump’s failings right down to the attempt to bring prominent and rank-and-file Republicans into the party fold.

Yet at the same time, the party understands the precarious position it’s in. Between Trump’s outright stated intent to cheat his way to victory, the yawning enthusiasm gap between his and Biden’s supporters, and a raging pandemic that will keep people physically away from the polls, the party elite are well aware low turnout from unenthusiastic sections of the base — voters who are either deeply suspicious or totally indifferent to its candidate — could sink their chances. But any alternative approach that might be more promising would likely involve policies alienating the two constituencies they truly prize: conservative voters and corporate donors. [my emphasis in bold]

One could easily make the same judgment is somewhat less categorical terms. The reason that Biden-Harris have a strong chance is the same reason Hillary Clinton did in 2016: that Trump is a malicious character who is obviously unfit for such a responsible job that can affect the lives of so many people in the world.

But Biden-Harris also face the same risk that previously active Democratic voters don't turn out to vote. With the added risk this time that aggressive voter-suppression efforts by the Republican are significantly more intensive than in 2016, which COVID-19 in play as a wild card with hard-to-predict effects on turnout. I'm concerned that the pandemic may limit the traditional kind of get-out-the-vote operations the Democrats need.

In an interview with Jon Wiener in 2018, Michael Moore talked about the Michigan turnout problem in 2016 (Michael Moore: How Democrats Paved the Way to Trump The Nation 09/21/2018):

We all know that more people vote in a general election than in a primary. But the Democratic primary in Flint in 2016 had a turnout much larger than the general a few months later. Nobody has bothered to look at that or ask why. I do, in this film [Fahrenheit 11/9]. And the reason isn’t because people in Flint decided there was no difference between Trump and Hillary. Nobody took that position. It was because the Democrats actively depressed the vote. First, in the primary debate in Flint between Hillary and Bernie, the DNC gave Hillary the questions in advance. When that was revealed a month or two later, the people of Flint, the mothers of the kids poisoned by lead in the water, the people who had stood at the microphone to ask a question that they thought that she was hearing for the first time, when they found out that it was rigged, many people in Flint, and certainly the people that were there at the debate, felt used as props by the Hillary campaign and by the Democratic Party.

Then one month after the debate, President Obama comes to Flint and drinks the water and says the water’s fine. But it wasn’t fine, and everybody knew it was still poisoned, and nobody could understand why he would do this. That was like a knife in the heart to the people of Flint. So on Election Day, the turnout was much lower than it had been in the primary. And Trump carried Michigan—by 10,000 votes. And it’s not just Flint. All over this country people felt that the party of the people has let them down. [my emphasis]

Michael Moore's Rumble talk of today (08/19/2020) on the election, Ep. 110: The Moment of Truth Is Here. But he expresses a partisan intensity that I'm afraid we many not hear from Biden and Harris.

Marcetic recalls a disappointing moment during the Obama Administration:

Unfortunately, the strategy of taking the party’s disaffected sections for granted and courting conservatives didn’t work out in 2016, while the party hectoring its own voters is often a precursor to its electoral defeat. Just look at Biden on the eve of Obama’s 2010 mid-term “shellacking,” admonishing “our base constituency to stop whining and get out there and look at the alternatives.” Two months later, the GOP took the House with the biggest win in seven decades and the Democrats lost their Senate supermajority, closing the door on whatever transformational aspirations Obama might have had for the rest of his eight years. [my emphasis]

And he reminds us, "The GOP takes care of its base; the Democratic elite dislikes theirs." (This is a variation on The One True Thing David Frum Ever Said: "while Republican politicians fear their base, Democratic pols hate theirs"; Gibbs on the Left FrumForum 08/10/2010) And Marcetic concludes, "And for all their hopes to the contrary this year, that might still make a difference."

Are Democrats serious about making the Postmaster General testify?

Nancy Pelosi and the House Democratic establishment are offering us another example of asymmetric partisan polarization.

On the Republican side, Bunker Boy and his cult have a illegal political coup underway and Republican elected officials are pretty much okay with it all. Although Maine Sen. Susan Collins has written to the Postmaster General urging him to "promptly address" the mail delays that he is deliberately and systematically causing to illegally assist the Republicans' voter-suppression. "I am concerned," she wrote.

This follows a proverbial sternly worded letter from Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats to him expressed the same concern.

Will Bunch has given us a picture of the Postal Service crisis in How we stop Trump from stealing 11/3 by mail Philadelphia Inquirer 08/11/2020 and Trump’s coup-by-mail is underway. America can’t wait until November to fight back 08/16/2020.

Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi decided that an impending coup was serious enough to bring the House back to Washington to do its job. But as Politico reports (Pelosi calls back House over Postal Service upheaval 08/16/2020), she doesn't want anyone to think she's been too harsh about something so minor the Republicans blatantly trying to sabotage a national election:

Pelosi and her leadership team held an emergency call Saturday to discuss several options to deal with the turmoil at the Postal Service as several rank-and-file Democrats from progressives to moderates publicly demanded action.

Some Democrats, including moderate Rep. Jim Cooper (Tenn.), said [Postmaster General Louis] DeJoy should be arrested if he ignores a congressional subpoena to testify. Democratic leaders would not pursue that option, but Cooper’s suggestion, which was echoed by other Democrats, signals how angry lawmakers are about what’s unfolding at the Postal Service.

So, even facing a coup and the visible demolition of the Postal Service, establishment Democrats are still pre-compromising before the fight starts.

But let me guess: they'll write DeJoy another "sternly worded letter"! And make it Bipartisan with Susan Collins announcing that she's "very troubled" over the whole thing. If Collins had been around in January 1933, I'm sure she would have been "very troubled" over President Hindenburg's appointment of a new Chancellor, too.

Back in the 1990s, I read an article about the success of McDonald's in Austria. The national manager for McDonald's Austria at the time was a German guy. He commented that one thing that was unique about Austria customers is they would often order at take-out window, then park their car in the parking lot and eat the meal there rather than go inside the restaurant. "I'll never understand why they do that." he said.

I know more than I want to about the asymmetric partisan polarization in the US. But even knowing the corporate, neoliberal, often conservative and timid bent of the Democratic establishment, even knowing about their deeply-ingrained duck-and-cover instincts when confronting the Republicans, even knowing how much in hock they are to corporate donors - when I see them put out a message like this, I still think, "I'll never understand why they do that."

In this case, the Republican President is exceeding his legitimate Executive power for a criminal purpose, interfering with legal elections. Since elections are held by the states, it probably also adds up to breaking state election laws in all 50 states. He is being actively and passively supported by essentially his entire political party, Sen. Collins' concern notwithstanding."

Meanwhile, the Democratic leadership that controls the House of Representatives have to be pushed by grassrooots outrage into treating this like the crisis it is and using their legitimate investigative powers to discover the details of what is going on and expose it was widely as possible to the public. And then when they do - assuming Politico transcribed their intended message correctly - they say, oh, sure, we're going to call the Postmaster General to account for what he's doing to sabotage the national election. But, hey, if your decide to just give us the finger and ignore our subpeona, it's not like we're donna do anything about it.

How do the Republicans - and everyone else, for that matter - not take this as a big banner-sized message saying WE'RE NOT SERIOUS ABOUT STOPPING YOU?

Because in my mind, the most elementary negotiating approach in this would be to say, we're going to subpeona the Postmaster General. If asked if they will arrest him if he refuses, they could just say, oh, look, it's an irrelevantquestion. He's obligated to honor a subpoena. We assume he'll obey his legal obligation.

Speaking of which, why are the Democrats only requesting that he move his appearance up from the mid-September date he gave already? I don't know the exact process, but why not emphasize the seriousness of it by hitting him with a subpoena right away?

But the point is, when the Republicans are playing dodgeball on something so serious, it's not the time for the Democrats to insist on playing badminton instead.