One year after January 6, Republican fondness for military coups grows
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Back in 2018, some political scientists noted a troubling finding: somewhere around one quarter of Americans said they could support a military coup if there were a lot of corruption in government. It was the middle of the Trump administration and alarm over rising authoritarian tendencies on the Right was already growing.
Still, there were reasons for optimism. There was little difference between Republicans and Democrats on the question, with just two percentage points separating them. Overall support was trending downward from when the question was first asked in 2010. And that level of support was lower than in most other countries in the Americas, even mild-mannered Canada.
That survey — Vanderbilt University’s AmericasBarometer study — was recently updated with data from July of 2021, 6 months after the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol. The new data shows no change in Democrats’ support for a hypothetical coup. But among Republicans, well… take a look.
More than half of Republicans now say a military coup would be justified when there is a lot of corruption. This is kind of alarming — in today’s partisan environment, lawmakers toss around words like “corruption” all the time. If an unscrupulous demagogue were to get a critical mass of Republicans convinced that the Biden administration is fundamentally corrupt — say, by getting 62 percent of them to believe the lie that there was widespread fraud in 2020, and that Biden is therefore not the legitimate president — he probably wouldn’t have much trouble convincing them that anything up to and including a full-blown military coup would be a justifiable response.
“Compared to other countries we study, the U.S. now ranks near the middle on this measure, just higher than Brazil and Mexico — countries with relatively recent histories of authoritarian rule,” the researchers write over at the Washington Post’s MonkeyCage blog. In terms of our dedication to democratic rule, the U.S. is becoming less exceptional by the day.
As always with findings like this, there’s the question of the gap between what people will tell a pollster and what they would actually do in a real-world situation. But I’m not so sure how big that gap might be in this case. Back in 2017, the researchers ran some different batteries of coup questions to make sure that American respondents knew what they were agreeing with. Unequivocally they did: when researchers specified a military coup targeting the U.S. government to remove the U.S. president by force, there was no difference in peoples’ response. When an American tells you they would support a coup within their own borders, believe them.
Second, other recent studies have asked Republicans to contemplate more specific uses of political violence. More than 1-in-10 of them, for instance, say that they would back the use of force “to restore Donald Trump to the presidency,” literally right now. Among the most committed partisans that number jumped up closer to 1-in-5.
Third, it’s been a fully year since Trump incited a mob of his most fervent supporters to storm the Capitol and disrupt vote-counting, an event, which has been categorized as “an attempted coup” by the people who literally study coups for a living. We are well past the realm of hypotheticals at this point. Faced with an actual real-world coup attempt by members of their own party, one quarter of Republicans say they approve of the actions of the January 6 rioters, and more than half say they were simply “defending freedom.”
There’s an urge right now among many Very Serious People in media and politics to minimize findings like these, to wave them all away as affective polarization and say everything will be fine, the institutions will hold, democracy is not under threat, it can’t happen here. But the past year has shown us that not only can it happen here, it already is. The next coup attempt — and there will be another — will be much better organized, building on the Republican party’s ongoing effort to rewrite the rules of elections to make it harder for Democrats to win. Will we be ready for it?