Timothy Snyder published a list of warning signs on his Facebook page which also appeared as 20 Lessons from the 20th Century on How to Survive in Trump’s America In These Times 11/21/2016. These are bullet-points specific to the threat that Trump presented at the time of his election, not a scholarly elaboration with a lot of historical nuances noted. These are points 17 and 18:
17. Watch out for the paramilitaries. When the men with guns who have always claimed to be against the system start wearing uniforms and marching around with torches and pictures of a Leader, the end is nigh. When the pro-Leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the game is over.I assume he wasn't meaning to be fatalistic by saying, "When the pro-Leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the game is over." Because we're seeing that happen to some extent right now.
18. Be reflective if you must be armed. If you carry a weapon in public service, God bless you and keep you. But know that evils of the past involved policemen and soldiers finding themselves, one day, doing irregular things. Be ready to say no. (If you do not know what this means, contact the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and ask about training in professional ethics.) [my emphasis]
But the November 3 election and the almost-certain controversy immediately afterwards in which Trump and the Republicans try to steal the election in a political-judicial coup is still an important moment that can and should lead to a reprieve from Trumpism in government. I'm not sure how many decades it will take to remove Trumpism from the Republican Party, or if that's even possible for the party as it currently exists.
Americans and Europeans are quick to assume our general superiority to "Third World" countries, mainly because it feels good to declare superiority over someone else. But the US has a lot to learn from countries like Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Honduras, and Bolivia, all of whom have relevant experience with coups and overcoming their legacies. Tom Phillips reports for The Guardian on Sunday's election in Bolivia, Bolivia election: exit polls suggest thumping win for Evo Morales' party 10/19/2020. Bolivia suffered a stereotypical kind of coup a year ago in which the military seized power and installed a far-right extremist as President.
One thing that's important to keep in mind is that American stereotypical examples of successful coups and "regime change" operations - Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Chile in 1973, Argentina in 1976 - tend to be remembered as military operations where troops roll tanks into the streets and seize the seat of government. [Update: Indonesia reference removed]
It can happen that way. But the image can also be misleading. Chile 1973 looks like a pure military-seizes-the-Presidential-palace kind of action. But in reality, it was very much a political-military coup prepared over months with active collaboration from conservative in the Chilean Congress. Regime-change operations in the last decade in Paraguay (2912) and Brazil (2016)can legitimately be called coups without the rolling-the-tanks ritual. The student quarterly Brown Political Review describes the Brazil case, which involved the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff (Alex Burdo, The Coup that Overthrew Dilma 05/10/2017):
Undemocratic coups come in many forms. Not all of them are violent, seemingly disorganized uprisings – the ‘standard’ coup, so to speak. Many (especially in recent times) are engineered from abroad. Still others are carried out through legal means. Legal structures are often twisted and abused to attain political ends. They are often used to justify removal of a democratic government, as they were haphazardly in Honduras in 2009, when the army overthrew the democratically elected president Manuel Zelaya.The point here is that a politically and morally illegitimate regime change can take place within existing legal structures, even in systems founded on the rule of law and democratic constitutional assumptions. The ultimate example may be Germany's Weimar Constitution, which the Nazi government never bothered to formally abolish. It was still theoretically still in effect when Germany surrended to the allies in 1945. Hitler did use violent actions by the paramilitary SA (Brownshirts) in his rise to power. But he became Chancellor in January 1933 under the legal structure, appointed by President Paul von Hindenburg, who had defeated Hitler in the Presidential election of 1930.
Things that may be legal may not be democratic, which is the case with the overthrow of Brazilian President, Dilma Rousseff, last year. Rousseff’s government was on the verge of launching an investigation into a number of corrupt government figures, when, fearing for their power, they turned on her and led impeachment proceedings to remove her, supposedly because of corruption. It’s ironic that Rousseff is one of the few figures in Brazil’s government not proven to be corrupt, despite claims to the contrary in impeachment proceedings. On August 31, Rousseff was impeached, and yet, even today, the attitude online and throughout most of the Western world is that the move was a standard and democratic use of legal process. That is not the case. The undemocratic removal of Dilma Rousseff stands as Brazil’s second right-wing coup d’état in little over fifty years. Ignoring the truth about Dilma’s overthrow is dangerous when it comes to fighting undemocratic efforts in the future. International silence lends legitimacy to the coup government and motivates groups considering similar moves elsewhere. [my emphasis]
The Republicans' electoral strategy for after November 3 may rely primarily on a partisan Supreme Court including The Handmaid Amy Coney Barrett handing the victory to Trump despite losing the popular vote in the election. (The latter, of course, hasn't happened yet!) But he is also encouraging his own Brownshirts.
Alberto Luperon reports in Professor Calls Out GOP After Fmr Trump Official Blames President for Inspiring Political Violence Law & Crime 11/18/2020. The professor in the title is Marty Lederman:
The criticism follows after Elizabeth Neumann, a former Assistant Secretary for Threat Prevention and Security Policy in the Trump administration, blamed the president for inspiring political violence amid an alleged kidnapping plot against Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and the alleged discussion of a possible plot against Virginia Governor Ralph Northam, both Democrats.John Cassiy provides various examples of Trump's verbal agitation in Donald Trump’s Incitements to Violence Have Crossed an Alarming Threshold New Yorker 09/01/2020. And that's from the first of September, almost seven weeks ago, a very long stretch of time in the bizarre year of 2020. It includes this appalling example:
Not content with fanning the flames in Portland, Trump retweeted a message that was supportive of Kyle Rittenhouse, the seventeen-year-old Illinois teen-ager who shot three protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, last week, killing two of them. Then, at a press conference on Monday, Trump defended Rittenhouse, suggesting that he had acted in self-defense.Cassily also cites another classic example of how far-right takeovers don't always take the tanks-rolling-in-the-street model:
“I find it, frankly, terrifying,” [Steven] Levitsky told me on Monday, when I called to ask him about Trump’s latest rhetorical escalations. Although the language that the President has adopted over the past few days is entirely consistent with his 2016 campaign, the inflammatory statements he issued at rallies then were “on a micro scale” compared with what he is doing now on a national stage, Levitsky said. And the political environment, following months of protests against police racism and brutality, is even more incendiary. “We now have the potential in towns and cities across the country for pretty significant violence, with a large number of deaths,” he said. “Trump is either unaware of this or he doesn’t care. I don’t normally like to make these comparisons, but this sort of encouragement of violence for political purposes is worryingly similar to what the Fascist movement did in Europe during the nineteen-twenties and nineteen-thirties.” [my emphasis]
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian at New York University, is the author of a forthcoming book on authoritarian leaders, “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present.” In a telephone conversation, she reminded me that the Fascist Italian dictator [Benito Mussolini], before he ascended to power, in October, 1922, exploited violent clashes between groups of his armed supporters, known as the Blackshirts, and their left-wing opponents. “He used the violence to destabilize Italian society, so he could position himself as the person to stop this violence,” Ben-Ghiat said. That’s what Trump is doing now, she added.Mussolini took power through the established legal structure through alliance with conservative and the economic elite in 1922. His Blackshirt March on Rome in October 28 was a Trump-style reality-show pageant coordinated with the authorities with whom he was at least partially cooperating, not a physical seizure of power or some kind of actual popular uprising.
To be sure, the historical parallels aren’t exact. After King Victor Emmanuel III appointed Mussolini as Italy’s Prime Minister, Mussolini quickly obtained dictatorial powers and seized control of the state, converting the Blackshirts into a state-sanctioned official militia. Trump has already been President for nearly four years. He’s said and done some terrible things, but, when checked by the courts or by other institutions of state, he has generally backed down, at least for a while. During the protests for racial justice in Washington, earlier this year, for example, Pentagon chiefs successfully resisted Trump’s calls to send in federal troops. [my emphasis]
But it is important to avoid oversimplifying these events. The Italian Fascists staged the March on Rome to demonstrate a threat of physical violence. And the turnover of governmental power to Mussolini did coincide with the March on Rome. It wasn't entirely a charade. But it was also not a military or paramilitary action that the government would have been unable to resist.
An example of the latter case would be Salvador Allende's overthrow in 1973 in Chile. Once the tanks were literally rolling in the streets, he had no practical immediate option to resist by force via loyal military units or trained partisan paramilitaries. Juan Perón made a similar judgment call in Argentina in 1955 when faced with a rightwing military coup that style itself as the Revolución Libertadora. Here is Wolfgang Schieder's description of the March on Rome from Benito Musolini (2014). My translation from German:
In Naples, tens of thousands of Fascists from all over Italy gathered [under Mussolini’s behind-the-scenes direction] for a mass assembly on 10/24/1922 to express their determination to take possession of Rome by force.The threat of Fascist violence was real. But it was primarily a bluff. And the government decided not to call the bluff, largely because the head of state King Victor Emanuel III was not committed to having a democratic government and he and a significant portion of the military leadership had some degree of actual sympathy with Mussolini and his Fascist Party.
Mussolini's goal, however, was not a political upheaval, but rather a demonstration that he was capable of one. In a risky double game, he had the fascist cohorts march in order to be legally commissioned by the king to form a government. He therefore did not directly call for a "march on Rome", but merely threatened one: "Either we are given the power of government or we will take it," he proclaimed in Naples. His demand for five ministries and an additional aviation commissioner's office to be given in the forthcoming formation of the government also did not indicate a coup d'état, but rather his willingness to form a political coalition.
On October 16, at Mussolini's instigation, the military leadership of the March was entrusted to a so-called "quadrumvirat" by military leaders so that he could keep himself in the background. This opened its headquarters in Perugia and prepared for a coup. The fascist marching columns approached from three sides of the capital and took up waiting positions at the gates of Rome until 28 October. They did not have a direct connection with the further events, but the threatening backdrop they formed had a massive influence on the change of government that was about to take place. First, Prime Minister Facta, who had until then been helpless in the face of fascist violence, unexpectedly sought to seize the law of action. After a parley with King Victor Emanuel III on the evening of October 27, he called for a cabinet decision that would lead to the declaration of a state of emergency. However, when he wanted to present it to the king for signing on the morning of October 28, the king would no longer receive him. The king had chosen Mussolini.
In the absence of direct sources, the causes of this dramatic turnaround cannot be clearly clarified. In all probability, it was a set of reasons that led the indecisive "little king" to take such a far-reaching step. So his concern was that his fascism-friendly cousin, the Duke of Aosta, might challenge him for the royal throne, certainly played a role. More importantly, he was deliberately misinformed by the military leadership. The military strength of the approximately 14 000 badly armed fascist fighters was presented to him in a very exaggerated way, so that he had to fear a civil war. The decisive factor, which is usually less taken into account in research, was that his already low confidence in the parliamentary system of government had all but disappeared. Victor Emanuel III ultimately considered an authoritarian government under Mussolini to be less worrisome than democratic minority governments following each other at an ever-faster pace. [my emphasis]
