So….
That happened.
I hope this is an end to American exceptionalism. I hope it’s an end to the idea that we could never have a(n auto)coup attempt against the U.S. government take place, that we’re not built like that.
Numerous people around the world can tell first-hand about how things went when a coup or coup attempt took place, when the constitutional order was seized and abrogated, when the reset button was pressed, when the machine was unplugged because someone felt it was acting too buggy.
This is the first time that someone tried to abrogate the constitutional order of the United States, and it unfortunately was the fascist side which made this attempt. And it is pretty damn symbolic that only 24 hours earlier, Georgia voters played by the same damn rules which had been decried for giving Biden the win in November and gave a giant L to two Republican Senators. Yet, such an event as happened on Tuesday was not on the front pages of the struggling newspaper industry on Wednesday.
And now we see how buggy and limited in functionality the constitutional order is when it comes to responding to such an incident as what happened Wednesday, as well as our current chronic inability to fix the limitations of the 25th Amendment. We’re likely not going to see it invoked before January 20th.
But yet, we’re forced to live with the garbage structure of the 1787 Constitution, because we’re scared of how people who decided to flex their perceived privilege and assault police inside the Capitol building and are now in various levels of dispersion from scrutiny are more than willing to kill people and avoid consequences in the attempt to seize power.
I fear impunity. They may get away with it, Congress may do nothing, and we’ll be effectively living under a different set of rules than what applies to Trump and his shitty supporters, even after he leaves office.
And we also won’t be exceptional in that regard. After all, despite her family’s crimes in office (including her husband, “our man in Manila” who we effectively rescued from the consequences of his actions), Imelda Marcos was allowed to come back and serve in the Philippine Congress twice.
(Fun fact: Mom was living in Clark AFB, and still remembers the curfew enforced on the base the night that the Marcos family fled Malacañang Palace 83 km north to Clark AFB, where they spent two days and then flew to Guam, then to Hawaii. I was born in California almost a year after the People Power Revolution.)
