Frank Uekötter What is a Coup?
Welcome to the first edition of CHI, the Contemporary History Intervention.
My name is Frank Uekotter, and this is a weekly broadcast that I plan to do
throughout the Spring term, or at least as long as the virus does not stop me.
The Contemporary History Espresso is brief, argumentative, and open to challenge – which
means, in other words, that it is how contemporary history should be. I am recording these videos as
the convener of the contemporary history MA at the University of Birmingham, so if you want to
see this as an advertisement for contemporary history made in Birmingham – feel free to do so.
For this inaugural edition, my goal is to answer a simple question: what is a coup?
And I guess I do not need to explain how I came to this topic. On January 6, a right-wing mob stormed
the Capitol Building in Washington DC, and as so often over the four years of Trump’s presidency,
a bewildered world was watching and thinking: what was that again? Was this a protest
gone out of hand? Was this an insurrection, as the articles of impeachment against Trump state?
Or was this a coup? And as so often, assessments mirror political allegiances.
If you are against Trump, you are inclined to say that, yes, this was a failed coup.
And if you are a Trump fan, you will say – well, something else, or maybe nothing at all. So
this is a good opportunity for contemporary history to intervene and do what academic
history should do: insert that drop of academic cooling fluid, establish some historic background
and context, and thus help us a bit as we try to come to terms with what happened.
Contemporary history does not claim to be non-partisan – but it does claim that
when we talk about the recent past, we can talk about more than a political football.
At the start of such an effort, it is helpful to note that our understanding of coups is intimately
connected to the modern notion of statehood. In order to get into power, it is no longer enough to
defeat a monarch in battle, or to just kill whoever is in charge and take that person’s
place. The modern state has a certain level of complexity, and seizing control of that apparatus
takes tremendous force, a semblance of legality, or a combination thereof. In other words,
staging a coup is not something for dummies, and that surely holds true for something as complex
as the federal government of the United States of America. Richard Evans followed this line
of thinking in a recent article in the New Statesman where he declared (and I quote):
“6 January was not an attempted coup.” In his opinion (and I quote again), “Trump is too chaotic
and undisciplined to prepare and execute any kind of organised assault on democracy.“ (unquote)
Evans is a historian of Germany who published extensively on the Nazi era,
and that shapes his view on the matter, and that of many other people, too: when
it comes to assessing Trump’s authoritarianism, fascism has always been the defining template.
Evans was skeptical about the link; his article is entitled “Why Trump isn’t a fascist” – and I
am inclined to agree on this point: last November, I published a video on YouTube
that pointed to the numerous differences between the rule of the Fascists and the rule of Trump.
If you look at the determination of fascists in the interwar years, and the paramilitary units
full of World War One veterans that they had at their disposal, you can’t help but think that
Trump and his mob were really small change. There was something farcical about the events of January
6: it is hard to look at the morons who aimlessly roamed the halls of the Capitol building without a
sense of disbelief – can people like that really jeopardize the peaceful change of government
in the most powerful nation on earth? After a few hours of lawlessness,
most rioters left the building without much ado. At the end of the day, five people were dead,
but as far as we know, only two died as a direct result of violent force. Compare that
to Hitler’s beer hall putsch of 1923, which left twenty people dead.
But as I pointed out in my lecture in November, the link between Trump and the fascists is not
just about the actual events and the historic context. It is also about collective memory;
about our imagination of the past and the ideas and concepts that guide our thinking.
And when you bring that in, things look a bit different. If we are reluctant to call
January 6 a coup, maybe that is because we are still in thrall with American exceptionalism:
the idea that the U.S. is somehow different, a place where certain things just can’t happen,
and where our common political vocabulary does not apply. Well,
I think it is time to acknowledge that the world of democracy is flat, too,
and that no country is, or will ever be, immune to authoritarian inclinations.
As forms of government go, democracy is one of the more complicated ones, and
thus inherently fragile. So coups can happen anywhere – including in the United States.
But having said that, there is no way to deny that, as coups go,
this was a particularly hapless one, and it followed on the heels of an equally
hapless attempt to reverse the outcome of the election. If there is anything that you can learn
from the history of coups, it is that you need to plan ahead – and if there was an element of
planning in Trump’s shenanigans over the last weeks, he was certainly hiding it pretty well.
So maybe this coup was just the latest in a long string of blunders that marked Trump’s presidency,
in line with his failure to bring back coal or his push to reform health care
with a plan that never saw the light of day. Incompetence, your name is Trump.
Now we will never know what Hitler or Mussolini would have done on a day like this,
but I am pretty sure they would not have taken the limo back to the White House and watched
it all on tv. They would have gone in, perhaps at the head of the column like Hitler in 1923,
or with a backroom deal like the one that put Mussolini into power with the March on Rome in
1922. And if we look closely, there was a path to power with a semblance of legality
that Trump could have chosen on January 6. What if Trump had marched on the Capitol,
seized or destroyed the electoral college votes, and urged the House of Representatives to vote?
According to the constitution, the House of Representative decides in case of electoral
deadlock, and it decides with one vote for each state delegation – and as a matter of fact,
the Republicans had a narrow majority in the House when you count by
state delegation. Now I will be glad to admit that there are a lot of “ifs” and “buts” here, but that
is what coups are all about: they are a gamble. You can’t stage a coup by applied mathematics.
Well, Trump did not gamble. He did not join the march on Capitol Hill and did not intervene
when Congress certified the electoral college votes later in the evening. So was this the
coup of a coward? I think it is something else: it was the coup of a person who had something
to lose – which was the complete opposite to the all-or-nothing approach of the fascists.
When Hitler launched his beer hall coup, he knew that everything was on the line:
he would end up in power or in prison or dead. Trump famously bragged that he could shoot someone
in the middle of Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue and get away with it, but here is the thing:
he never actually shot someone. Trump was always wary not to cross any red lines
because he knew that if he did, there would not be any way back to his golf courses
or Mar-A-Lago. Trump had something to lose if he went all in, and that is why his coup fizzled out.
Now I do not wish to say that it is good to have a
man in the White House who is filthy rich. But maybe that is what saved the republic.