A Coup by Any Other Name: Reflections on Democracy, Defense, and White Supremacy

1:40 PM CST. I am writing this on January 6, 2021, the day of the Electoral College vote certification, while watching ABC News through Hulu after receiving an urgent text message from my mother. Pundits are clamoring in frantic tones, trying to make sense of what Mitt Romney on Twitter has called an “insurrection”: a throng of pro-Trump protestors have breached the U.S. Capitol building and are now, according to a pool reporter, going door to door on the third floor of the Senate. “Where the fuck are they?” they are shouting, the question directed to congressmembers who have either been escorted out of the building or are sheltering in place in their offices. Some are calling on Mike Pence to “show himself.” ABC puts up a photograph: a protestor who managed to transgress the empty Senate Chamber, uncannily lounging in the presiding officer’s chair. It was allegedly taken moments after he had yelled, “Trump won this election!”

The discourse of white supremacy is incompatible with what Masha Gessen has called the “standard language of American politics,” the language of liberal democracy which uncritically asserts unity across difference, valorizes compromise in lieu of disagreement, frames progressive transformation as partisan overreach, and incessantly upholds abstract notions of freedom and equality that in reality exist for the privileged few. The language is and always has been one of an ideal that, by design, obscures the nature of political unrest, reframing each as an aberration to “what America really is,” as if each were a departure from business as usual rather than a product thereof. “But if we use the wrong language,” Gessen warns in the introduction to Surviving Autocracy, “we cannot describe what we are seeing.”

French philosopher Michel Foucault saw discourse as the vehicle not only of knowledge, but of power itself, a means of legitimating certain arrangements of force that operate both institutionally (in the form of, say, legislative bodies and electoral processes) as well as through social practices, cultural artifacts, and political actors (history textbooks, workplace rules, advertisements). What would we gain by interrogating our insistence on the discourse of democracy—not in order to disparage its value as a social, political, and economic ideal, but in order to unmask the strategies and aims of powerthat this discourse obscures and enables, that prevents us from actualizing its promises?

1:58 PM. Now, a video: protestors, shoulder to shoulder, are banging on the doors to the Capitol building from outside, the sounds thunderous, drowning out the cacophony of enraged yelling. The anchor: “That is not Ukraine, that is not Belarus, that is the United States Capitol.” Another anchor: “These are not protestors, these are anarchists.” Representative Adam Kinzinger: “In any other country this was happening, we would call it a coup.”

As did scholars and journalists trying to make sense of the political chaos of the post-Soviet Eastern bloc, Gessen observes that our attempts to “make sense” of Trump’s rise to power in 2016 were burdened by “the language of political disagreement, judicial procedure, or partisan discussion to describe something that was crushing the system that such terminology was invented to describe.” The limits of this language are more acute now than they were even then.

In a series of lectures titled Security, Territory, Population which he delivered at the Collège de France between 1977 and 1978, Foucault characterizes the coup d’État in the political thinking of the seventeenth century as “the self-manifestation of the state itself,” a reinforcement of governmental reason which located the legitimacy of the state not in the “rule of law,” but in whatever was necessary for its own self-preservation. This new governmental reason, raison d’État did not uphold the primacy of the rule of law, which has dominated liberal legal morality since the Age of Reason, but takes its object the security of the state as such.Law, for the governmental state, is respected only insofar as it remains “necessary or useful,” and can dispel with law when an “pressing and urgent event must of necessity free itself from them.” The coup d’État was raison d’État, the reason of state, expressed through violence, a defense of the state in the strongest terms, seemingly defying the rule of law while at the same time relying on its technocratic erosion for its own success. To “win support,” Foucault says, “and so that the suspension of laws with which it is necessarily linked do not count against it, the coup d’État must break out in broad daylight and in so doing reveal on the very stage where it takes place the raison d’État that brings it about.” The coup d’État is the culmination of the discourses of exclusion and everyday workings of government that come before it, and to which they point for their own legitimacy. One can participate in the coup d’État without being part of the spectacle. Many such enablers have walked the halls of Congress for years.

The discourse of democracy, with its commitment to respect for the dignity of all peoples, is particularly ill-suited to make sense of such manifestations of violence. Max Weber famously defined the modern state as the human community with a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence, including over and against residents of its own territory. (The way in which this use of force is legitimated, however, is relative to the context of its deployment.) Weber carefully attributes the monopoly on violence, not to the government, but to the Gemeinschaft, the human community united in affective solidarity. A state exists when the Gemeinschaft has such a monopoly, but the state is comprised of human communities beyond the Gemeinschaft. Frederick Jameson, building on Weber’s thought, distinguishes between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, the latter constituting the “impersonal modern society” that, in an increasingly globalizing and multiethnic world, undermines the “‘organic’ forms” of affective solidarity felt by those particular human communities that have, until now, sat comfortably at the top of the social hierarchy.

The coup described by Foucault is necessitated when the Gemeinschaft is under threat, a Gemeinschaft which sees itself, rather than institutions of law and order or the citizenry, as the true vanguard of the state. The coup d’État is a defensive measure of an extreme sort, “a particular way for the sovereign to demonstrate in the most striking way possible the irruption of raison d’État and its prevalence over legitimacy.” The sovereign: no longer the monarch, but the human community with the monopoly on violence.Through the coup d’État, the state exhibits to all that existence of the Gemeinschaft is inevitable.

“In any other country, we would call this a coup.” Whatever we choose to call it,Donald Trump called those who instigated it patriots.

2:07 PM. Secret Service is on their way to the Capitol, with the FBI allegedly not far behind, and reporters are wondering, aloud, whether the National Guard will be called in to assist Capitol Hill police. The more interesting question, posed by Pierre Thomas, is how they “allowed this many people to get that close to the Capitol with such a contentious procedure under way” in the first place. Not long after, I receive a text message from a good friend, making the point much more bluntly: “imagine the massacre if BLM protestors stormed the building.”

The days following the Capitol breach saw pundits and journalists wondering “how” D.C. law enforcement was not “better prepared” for the pro-Trump insurrection. Around the time of the presidential election, several media outlets had begun publishing articles speculating about what a Trump coup might look like, should he make good on his promise not to leave the White House. For weeks beforehand, Trump supporters had publicly organized white nationalist events through Facebook and, more recently, Parler, the unregulated new social media app populated by right-wing extremists and white nationalists (and some prominent conservatives) who were fed up with having their free speech “policed.” Trump’s unhinged refusals to concede defeat once the Associated Press confirmed Biden’s victory inflamed his base (and some prominent conservatives) to reject the results of the electoral process. In the days leading up to the insurrection, users on Parler encouraged Trump supporters to “burn D.C. to the ground” and, the day afterward, pro-Trump lawyer Lin Wood even went so far as to call for Mike Pence’s execution by firing squad before CEO John Matze had the post taken down.

The lack of preparedness in spite of these clear warning signs was to many, myself included, disappointingly unsurprising. “Police brutality against Black Americans and police inaction toward white Americans” is, according to Kellie Carter Jackson, par for the course, and the storming of the Capitol was just the most recent example of the racial double standard in policing that drove protestors out in the tens of millions during the summer. But there are sinister undertones that suggest there is more to the story than racial bias alone; there is at the same time passivity, complicity, in some cases active support. Photos taken of the mob throughout the day were speckled with flags bearing the thin blue line. Some speculated, rightly, that off-duty police officers and service members were among those rioting, and others wondered whether there were officers within the Cap-police who were aware of or helped facilitate the Capitol breach in solidarity with the Trump supporters. As Melissa Segura of BuzzFeed News wrote in response to USCP’s “mishandling” of the riots, “American policing has never seen white people as a threat.” It is, as theorists of race have long-argued, precisely how law enforcement in this country has been designed to work from its inception.

 2:38 PM. Reporters are asserting, almost defensively, that most of these (pro-Trump) protestors are “peaceful”—a characterization that was rarely awarded to protesters in the midst of demonstrations for racial justice earlier this year. The ones launching the assault on the Capitol building are exceptions, extremists, anti-American. Our adversaries who hate democracy, the pundits lament, are “high-fiving.”

If democracy is an obstacle for those who seek to “make America great again,” then it is because democracy has always been a barrier to the preservation of white hegemony in the United States. Even outside of the South, Blacks and other minorities have been disproportionately harmed by America’s defeats as well as its successes. FDR’s New Deal, the progressive program that sedimented the Democratic Party as the party of liberal social values, ensured that the Democrats would control the White House for over thirty years. Despite its commitment to welfarism, the redlining that was made possible by the National Housing Act exacerbated racial segregation, and Roosevelt choose not to advance civil rights legislation, including a federal anti-lynching law, for fear of losing white voters in the South. It was thanks to Southern Democrats—and especially the Dixiecrats—that segregation was tolerated for so long over much of this country’s history: they were a voting bloc that the Democratic Party needed in order to win federal elections, and it was a bloc that the Democratic Party knew would abandon them if they enfranchised nonwhites. In the South, these tactics of disenfranchisement were codified in the form of poll taxes, voter ID laws, and the like: Raison d’État, Foucault reminds us, “must command, not by ‘sticking to the laws,’ but, if necessary, it must command ‘the laws themselves, which must adapt to the present state of the republic.’” The mass political exodus of Southern Democrats to the Republican Party was foreseeable President Lyndon Johnson who, after signing the Civil Rights Act into law in 1964, allegedly told an aide, morose, that the Democrats “ha[d] lost the South for a generation.”

Facing an increasingly diverse nation—the Census projects that the U.S. will become “minority white” by 2045—the Republican Party knows its hold on power is precarious. After Barack Obama was elected the country’s first Black president in 2008, Mitch McConnell and other vanguards of post-Cold War American neoliberalism decided that the Republican Party, the party of white America, would dedicate itself to the obstruction of both Democrats’ and democratic politics. In a speech delivered at the Heritage Foundation after the 2010 midterm elections, McConnell defiantly doubled down on his “indelicate” suggestion that the GOP’s “top political priority over the next two years should be to deny President Obama a second term in office.” His reasoning was explicit: the Democratic president stood in the way of “shrink[ing] the size and scope of government”—gutting the healthcare bill and cutting spending on social services, the consequences of which would disproportionately devastate communities of color. In October of 2020, Republican Senator Mike Lee tweeted that “democracy isn’t the objective” but that “liberty, peace, and prospefity [sic] are.” In advance of the 2020 election, Republicans demanded that polling places in Black communities be shut down, that mail-in ballots be discounted during the year of a global pandemic, and that the Census be undercounted to exclude districts with large minority populations. The Republican refrain, which has been taken up with great success by its ever-shrinking constituency, has been that tyranny of the (multiethnic) majority will erode (white) human flourishing.

In the national security establishment, a similar refrain has been enjoyed bipartisan agreement as a means of preserving white supremacy—in the form of U.S. hegemony—on the global stage. It is perhaps not a coincidence that Foucault was grappling with questions of security and population, of defense and Gemeinschaft (though he himself never used this term), while the United States was refashioning the coup d’État as an avenue for undermining democratic elections abroad if doing so would advance the project of American neoliberalism and entrench our country’s role as the global policeman to the exploitable, non-Western world. These were various efforts to install U.S.-backed leaders either by means of covert influence in the form of funding and advising its preferred candidates, recruiting military leaders as well as convicted fascist criminals, or—most famously in Chile and Iran—by sponsoring coups. More often than not, these coups were orchestrated as anti-communist tactics that aimed primarily to promote U.S. economic interests against countries whose democratically-elected leaders sought to nationalize industry, to devastating economic, social, and political effect. The reason was not that these nations had operated undemocratically, but that they were not the right kinds of democracies; they didn’t accept a U.S. hegemony that operated, to a large extent, through the economic domination and oppression of nonwhites. Today we are reaping the consequences of what we have sown, and use them as a means of ramping up our national security establishment both at home and abroad, close our borders to non-white migrants or murder them with impunity.

Democracy, across American history, has consistently been less important than defending white America, for democracy has always been the biggest threat, at home and abroad, to white supremacy.

3:12 PM. Footage shows officers in riot gear—the National Guard, presumably—finally lining up on the upper steps of the Capitol, a wall of masked faces trained on the protestors, stoic and unmoving. All I can see is how few of them there are, a starkly obvious contrast against the menacing rows of National Guardsmen standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial at the beginning of the summer.

The National Guard, in its original manifestation, was founded in the Massachusetts Bay Colony on December 13, 1636 as a colonial militia composed of white men tasked with protecting colonial settlements against the “aggression of the Pequot nation” and other indigenous tribes. The Guard and other such militias are considered the precursors to the U.S. military. In the eighteenth century, white civilian militias supplemented the slave patrols, an institution that was tasked with supporting and maintaining white supremacist hegemony in the southern slave states. As historians and scholars of race have argued, the slave patrols provided the scaffolding for what, in the mid-19^th century, would come to be called the police.

The period of America’s founding, during which its racialized defense apparatus was coming to fruition, was a concentrated mirror of what was happening in the rest of the Western world. Postcolonial theorists and scholars of race have long written of the centrality of race and racism to the project of modernity, tying the development of the “state” to always-emergent and ever-malleable categories of belonging and unbelonging, with the contours of the Gemeinschaft shifting as needed in order to preserve its core constituency. Integral thereto is consciousness about who is excluded just as much as it is about who is included. In his extraordinarily influential Orientalism,Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said argued that the romanticized concept of the “Orient”—a term describing the non-European “Others” of Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East—was crucial not only for justifying these colonial and imperialist projects, but critical in the construction of a civilized, modern, and progressive Western identity. If the West was enlightened, it was only because the rest of the world was barbaric and sinful, occupied by wild creatures who not only could, but needed to be domesticated or eradicated for the sake of humanity itself. Often what was crucial to such discursive strategies was imbuing Otherness—nonwhiteness and solidarity with nonwhiteness—with threat and in turn legitimizing defense as a preemptive justification for the use of force, within state borders or outside of them. That which is threatening is whatever might prevent our nation—the ideals that we construct and those to whom we apply them—from flourishing. What has become more and more clear is that at least 70 million voters believe that the American nation is meant to be white, and several thousand of them see it as their responsibility to make it so.

In response to Kyle Rittenhouse’s murderous shooting of three protesters (two of which died) in Kenosha this summer, Republican Senator Ron Johnson reframed white vigilantism as “citizens [taking] matters into their own hands.” The way you “stop the violence,” he continued, “the way you stop the rioting, is you surge manpower and resources, citizen soldiers, National Guard, and you overwhelm the number of rioters.” In November, Rittenhouse was released after posting $2 million cash bail, funds which were raised by an organization called Fight Back that was itself founded by one of Rittenhouse’s attorneys. The day before the insurrection, Rittenhouse was spotted drinking at a bar with members of the Proud Boys, flashing white supremacist hand signs, wearing a t-shirt sporting the words “Free As Fuck.”

3:12 PM. Footage shows officers in riot gear—the National Guard, presumably—finally lining up on upper steps of the Capitol, a wall of masked faces trained on the protestor, stoic, and unmoving. All I can see, though, is how few of them there are, nothing at all like the menacing rows of National Guard members standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during the George Floyd protests at the beginning of the summer.

This summer saw the “most widespread domestic use of tear gas against demonstrators” since the 1970s, the era of widespread antiwar protests. The tear gas which law enforcement officers use against protesters was first developed by the U.S. Army in 1919 for the first World War, and its use in warfare has been prohibited since the Geneva Convention categorized it as “chemical weapon” in 1925. (This does not mean that research into and development of tear gas ceased; much of the tear gas utilized today is a chemical compound, CS, that was discovered by two American scientists in 1928.) The rapid militarization of law enforcement over the last 50 or so years maps on to the broader attitudinal shift regarding democracy as a privilege of the white to the conviction of the equality and freedom of all, when Martin Luther King Jr. declared racism, economic exploitation, and war the “triple evils” that constitute “the dilemma of our nation and the world.”

It should come as little surprise, then, that at the same time that domestic law enforcement departments have known connections to white supremacist and far-right militant groups, more than one-third of all active-duty troops in the last year have seen evidence of “white nationalism or ideologically-driven racism” in the military—intensified undoubtedly in the wake of protests against police brutality. The targets of U.S. armed forces today are disproportionately Black and brown subjects, not incidentally like the targets of police violence, despite the Department of Homeland Security’s finding that “white supremacist extremists (WSEs)” are “the most persistent and lethal threat in the Homeland.” Many of the members of resurgent white nationalist militias that have spent the last several years preparing for a national race war are current or former police officers, soldiers, and veterans. And though the military has long history of racial discrimination and anti-LGBT policies—and most recently the Trump administration sought to once again ban transgender people from openly serving—membership in a neo-Nazi group is not immediate cause for military discharge.

It has been much easier to focus on MLK’s utopian dream for America’s multiethnic, democratic future, than it has been to contend with his condemnation of America’s past and present.

3:23 PM. A friend texts me with a link to Trump’s Twitter account, where he has uploaded a pre-recorded, minute-long video, less than ten minutes after Joe Biden’s predictable though necessary live appearance: “We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election, and everyone knows it, especially the other side. But you have to go home now, we have to have peace. This was a fraudulent election, but we can’t play into the hands of these people. You see what happens; you see the way others are treated, that are so bad and so evil, I know how you feel. We love you, and it’s time to go home.” Trump’s face is grotesquely unashamed.

The modern National Guard, a product of the 1903 Militia Act, is not a federalized unit (each state, as well as D.C. and three U.S. territories, has its own National Guard) but is partnered with the Active Army and the Reserve Army. According to its mission statement, the National Guard is “available for prompt mobilization” for war or national emergency—including, it seems, to dispel protestors who would have been protected under the First Amendment had they been white. Days after demonstrations against the murder of George Floyd began, Trump invited states to augment the D.C. National Guard by sending guardsmen across state borders—made possible in the wake of 9/11 in order to assist with counterterrorism missions—to help control crowds of protestors in the nation’s capital. About 4,000 National Guard troops from 11 states obliged Trump’s request. Later in the summer, Trump repeatedly came under fire for calling on state governors to deploy the National Guard to restore “law and order” to cities ravaged by Antifa and left-wing extremists. On January 6, Trump rebuffed calls, again and again, to deploy the D.C. National Guard to manage the violent storming of the Capitol building. The authorization came, instead, from Mike Pence.

In a vivid anecdote from the ground, The Nation’s Andrew McCormick reported seeing a woman crying to a group of people, after riot police finally began to push back the pro-Trump mob before the 6pm curfew: “This is not America. They’re shooting at us. They’re supposed to shoot BLM, but they’re shooting the patriots.”

3:46 PM. The anchor asks Raddatz to describe the atmosphere, noting that she has reported from warzones all over the world: “I’ve been in a lot of very dangerous situations, but it is so horrible to know that we are in America, where this is happening. This is not Baghdad, this is not Kabul, I’m not in a dangerous situation overseas. This is America.” I think of my mother, remember her watching the Twin Towers in flames, knowing that things would never be the same after. I wonder whether, after today, anything at all will change.

In 1947, two years after the formation of the United Nations, the U.S. National Security Act “rebranded” the U.S. War Department as the Department of Defense, laying the groundwork for what would become an immense national security establishment and ensuring that U.S. involvement in armed conflict would be preemptively legitimized. Congress has only formally declared war eleven times, the last time in 1942 against Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania. All of the “wars” in which we have since been engaged are the product of executive fiat, and thus not beholden to international laws of war. None of them are against countries, and all purport to be “defending” democracy whether at home or abroad, inside or outside of active warzones. Our adversaries are communism, drugs, crime, terrorism—none of which are localized, all of which are potentially everywhere. These wars are forever wars, for we can always move the goalposts of what count as crime and terror—and what measures constitute “countertactics” against them—and those who commit these crimes against democracy can exist anywhere, even here, so long as they aren’t white.

In one sense, as thinkers were quick to point out after the Capitol breach, we should resist calling those who instigated the riots “terrorists,” as doing so would only give the U.S.a renewed opportunity for devising and implementing counterterrorist measures at home—measures that would almost certainly be used to disproportionately target nonwhites and set a precedent for surveilling and detaining so-called “left-wing” extremists. In another sense, the hesitance among pundits to call the breach of the U.S. Capitol an act of domestic terror speaks to the intimate association we have constructed, over the last two decades, between terrorism and nonwhiteness. White Americans seeking to defend the nation against an imminent multiethnic Gemeinschaft cannot be called terrorists, for this would disrupt the narrative of white racial progress that is central to the story of American democracy. Unlike Afghans and Iraqis, they are Americans.

The Bush administration justified the U.S. invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan on the grounds that it was promoting democracy abroad against terrorists who would rather see all of humanity oppressed under Sharia. In the 1980s, the same Islamists who would come to be America’s number one enemies in the 21^st century were called “freedom fighters,” many directly aided by the U.S. to defend democracy by helping impede the Soviet takeover of Afghanistan. The United States itself, some journalists would come to argue, was responsible for emboldening radical Islam, that Islamist terrorism was a threat of its own making. In January 2020, after the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, the Iranian Parliament approved a bill that designated the U.S. military and Pentagon terrorist organizations.

4:06 PM. Representative Markwayne Mullin (R-OK), is asked to comment on Trump’s speech. “Listen, I wake up every morning, George, and say love the people, love the call. And I understand what he is saying; I love ‘em too. I don’t hate ‘em, legitimately, I do love ‘em. But there’s a right way and a wrong way to do this. I still respect their ability and their rights—their Constitutional rights—to protest, but we don’t do it this way. And it is fortunate that a lot more civilians did not get shot, because Cap-police showed a great restraint by not doing so. That’s where professional law enforcement took place, that’s why we need police around us, all the time.” There is a video of protestors circling a pile of what seems to be media equipment, with a cable wound in the shape of a noose dangling above it. A white man with a baseball bat slams down upon the pile of equipment, over and over.

As scholars like Angela Davis, Nikole Hannah-Jones, and Jill Lepore have shown in recent years, just as much as democracy, white supremacy is our nation’s bread and butter. The two are not mutually exclusive, though for some reason we cannot but convince ourselves that they are—perhaps because we speak of democracy as though it is a state of being, one which already exists here and now, rather than as a practice that is constantly under threat and which often buckles under the pressure of those who see it as an obstacle to their anti-democratic ends. Nevertheless, thanks to the tireless work of activists and grassroots organizers, state and local officials, and scholars and educators, the historical and ongoing reality of racism in the United States increasingly permeates public consciousness. Now, more than ever before, the structures that have worked to maintain white hegemony are under scrutiny by Americans of all racial and ethnic backgrounds—a fight to actualize the promises of democracy we have been assuring ourselves already exist. But democracy cannot be practiced at home if our notion of defense uses this very language to undermine democracy and devastate the flourishing of nonwhites here and abroad.

What January 6^th proved beyond a reasonable doubt, is that white supremacy prospers underneath the discourse of democracy. Until we confront this reality, this Gemeinschaft that sees itself the protector of a white American democracy, we might as well stop using the language altogether.

4:22 PM. Another friend texts me with a link to a tweet, posted at 2:45 PM, with an embedded TikTok video depicting police officers opening the barricades to protestors. The context is vague; it is unclear whether this is what emboldened the protesters to storm the Capitol building, or whether this proves that, to some degree, protesters and USCP had conspired together. Less than forty minutes before curfew begins in Washington D.C., I think of Foucault. Only thirteen people have been arrested. I log out of Hulu, tired.