It was no surprise that Tsargrad, the Russian television channel, called last week’s attempted takeover of the US Capitol by a pro-Trump mob of QAnon conspiracy theory aficionados and white supremacists an American Maidan.
“And It will be painfully similar to the ones in Ukraine, Belarus and even in Russia in the 1990s,” the channel declared.
Of course you would expect a truculent propaganda outlet funded by the sanctimonious pro-Vladimir Putin oligarch Konstantin Malofeyev, set up by a former Fox News producer and named after an old Russian moniker for Istanbul, to defile the memory of Ukraine’s Heavenly Hundred and denigrate peaceful mass protests in Belarus. But some Ukrainian news outlets were also quick to call an attack on American democracy an American Maidan.
On the surface perhaps the events in Washington could be construed if not as similar to the 2013-14 EuroMaidan, which ended Viktor Yanukovych’s presidency; or, at least to the 2004 Orange Revolution, when protests against a rigged presidential election triggered a rerun lost by Yanukovych to Viktor Yushchenko.
And in Belarus, too, widespread protests have been going on for four months, ever since Alexander Lukashenko declared himself a winner in the August 2020 presidential election, after jailing and intimidating his rivals and committing blatant voter fraud.
Could it be that, except for the violence, the hate speech and the invasion of Congress, we have here broadly the same thing: convinced that their candidate won and that the election was stolen from him, private citizens have come down into the street to protest? They may have overplayed their hand by invading, looting and vandalizing US Congress, but they had a similar goal in mind as their Ukrainian and Belarusian predecessors — to make their voices heard and to restore democracy.
This is, of course, false equivalence. What took place in Washington on Jan. 6 was very different from the Orange Revolution and the Belarus civil disobedience campaign. And not merely because of their different methods and reactions to them both inside their respective countries and abroad. In fact, the attack on the US Congress was unlike any other grassroots or popular attempt to change or influence the government, either democratic or tyrannical, by direct street action.
While there are plenty of instances when governments annul the elections when they don’t like the result — such as, for instance, the dissolution of the Russian Constituent Assembly by Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks in 1918 — but in this case, it was not that. What we saw was a street challenge by a sitting president to his own government — the legislative and judicial branches of the government and even to his own vice president.
It was the function of America’s limited government, federal system and separation of powers enshrined in the Constitution that Donald Trump had to resort to street thuggery when he wanted to cancel the results of an officially accepted election, abolish democracy and illegally declare himself president.
Without government-owned news outlets, he had to spread his fake news gospel of “landslide victory” and “stolen election” through fringe right-wing channels and social media. As a result, most Americans remained sane and didn’t accept the claim that the election had been massively rigged with the participation of so many people located across the geographic and ideological spectrum. Even Trump’s attempts to delegitimize the election process failed, as evidenced by a record turnout for this election, despite the coronavirus pandemic.
Unlike other dictators, Trump could not rely on the military: even though many enlisted men and women and some in the officer corps are receptive to his message, the top brass is steadfast in the armed forces’ traditional commitment to stay out of politics. And, even though America has a mind-boggling number of police and security agencies, the lines of command are decentralized. Few are controlled by the executive branch.
The coup failed because America’s traditional norms prevailed and political institutions held. States insisted on their prerogatives under America’s federal system, courts did their job impartially and even the Republicans, who had been Trump’s enablers for the past four years, did the right thing when push came to shove.
But it would be a mistake to celebrate prematurely. Ironically, a similar coup, either led by Trump himself or by his successor, may prove more successful not from the pinnacle of executive power, but more conventionally, from the opposition. Despite Trump declaring himself the best president in history, most Americans are neither deluded nor benighted. They see that he has botched the pandemic response and the rollout of vaccinations. They also know that he has undermined the effectiveness of the US government, opened a huge structural hole in the federal budget, and set back the fight against climate change by many years.
Joe Biden has an uphill battle ahead of him — to heal the country both literally and figuratively, to revive the economy and to deal with a damaging unemployment problem.
He’ll have to govern with no cooperation from the Republican Party, which will be opposed to his agenda as a matter of politics, not ideology.
There will be constant sniping from the Trump camp as well as a non-stop drumbeat about the stolen election. Biden will have a very narrow margin for error and, unless he’s very lucky or competent or both, he may be facing a massive public backlash by 2022. Then, the Trumpist fringe may try to seize power again by similar means — and that attempt may prove more successful.
