We Are Watching A Slow-Motion Coup D’etat

James Downton:

It’s nearly incontrovertible that a slow-motion coup d’etat is now taking place. Since November 9, 2016, forces within the U.S. government, media, and partisan opposition have aligned to overthrow the Electoral College winner, Donald Trump.

To achieve this they have undermined the institutions of the Fourth Estate, the bureaucratic apparatus of the U.S. government, and the very nature of a contentious yet affable two-party political system. Unlike the coup d’etat that sees a military or popular figure lead a minority resistance or majority force into power over the legitimate government, this coup d’etat is leaderless and exposes some of the deepest fissures in our system of government. This coup d’etat represents not the rule of one man or even many, but by the multitude of our elites.

This article outlines the mechanisms, institutions, and nature of this coup d’etat; not in defense of President Donald Trump — who has proven himself bereft of the temperament of a successful president — but in defense of the institutions of our republic that are now not just threatened, but may very well be on the verge of collapse.

‘1984’ Is An Apt Comparison, But Not As the Left Thinks

Shortly after the inauguration of Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States, a sort of “meme” appeared among activists on the political left comparing the status of the United States to that of George Orwell’s “1984.” “Think pieces” from The New Yorker, CNN, The Atlantic, and Salon drew comparisons between President Trump and the brutally authoritarian future Orwell envisioned. In April of this year, screenings of the film version of Orwell’s dystopian novel were hosted around the world. “1984” surged up Amazon’s bestseller list. The tragedy of this exercise was that the comparison was very apt, but for different reasons.

The villain of “1984” isn’t a “man” but an entity — a bureaucracy with an authoritarian impulse. Big Brother isn’t so much a man or a leader but a symbol of the omnipotent reach of the bureaucratic state that dominated the dystopian future. The fear of an elected leader turning into a tyrant — as the political Left and some on the political Right feared in Trump — doesn’t play into the narrative of the novel. Rather, it is the fear of a nearly faceless administrative state; a state that has achieved a near totality in terms of tyranny.

This fear of the administrative state was a key feature among at least two individuals writing at the Claremont Review of Books, Publius Decius Mus and professor Angelo Codevilla. Decius’s “The Flight 93 Election” essay acted as a sort of rallying cry for some conservatives and small-“r” republican intellectuals against the very real fear that a Hillary Clinton victory would cement the totalizing power of the administrative state — that is career bureaucrats and administrators who view the virtues of the republic as something to be washed away and remade in their own “progressive” image. Decius writes:

If conservatives are right about the importance of virtue, morality, religious faith, stability, character and so on in the individual; if they are right about sexual morality or what came to be termed “family values”; if they are right about the importance of education to inculcate good character and to teach the fundamentals that have defined knowledge in the West for millennia; if they are right about societal norms and public order; if they are right about the centrality of initiative, enterprise, industry, and thrift to a sound economy and a healthy society; if they are right about the soul-sapping effects of paternalistic Big Government and its cannibalization of civil society and religious institutions; if they are right about the necessity of a strong defense and prudent statesmanship in the international sphere—if they are right about the importance of all this to national health and even survival, then they must believe—mustn’t they?—that we are headed off a cliff.

For Decius, Trump represents the final option to head off the transformation of the American republic into an administrative state where bureaucrats would wield an immutable regulatory dictatorship over the American citizenry.

Codevilla, prescient, went a step further and surmised that the republic was already dead; the Caesarism of an imperial presidency had already usurped it:

Electing either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump cannot change that trajectory. Because each candidate represents constituencies hostile to republicanism, each in its own way, these individuals are not what this election is about. This election is about whether the Democratic Party, the ruling class’s enforcer, will impose its tastes more strongly and arbitrarily than ever, or whether constituencies opposed to that rule will get some ill-defined chance to strike back. Regardless of the election’s outcome, the republic established by America’s Founders is probably gone. But since the Democratic Party’s constituencies differ radically from their opponents’, and since the character of imperial governance depends inherently on the emperor, the election’s result will make a big difference in our lives.

If asked at the time of authorship, one doubts either man could have predicted the swiftness in which the administrative state would be able to consolidate power and isolate the presidency. Yet that is what has exactly occurred. With the aid of the media and the Democratic Party, the institutions of the republic are crippled, the levers of power having been seized not by the elected but by the unelected bureaucratic state — from ideologues at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to the partisans and paranoid who inhabit our intelligence community.

The Administrative State Versus the American People

Arguably, what has been branded as “The Resistance” — but in actuality is the totalitarian might of the administrative state and their partisan allies — began with the Democratic Party’s scorched-earth campaign against the political nominations of the Trump White House. But beyond the partisan rancor of the legitimate and often frustrating nomination process, more sinister forces were at work.

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