Think of it this way. SCOTUS has removed criminal liability for committing coups generally, so (generously) if your coup fails, you cannot be prosecuted.
What is a coup for? What is the benefit of it? In particular, what is the benefit for a party running on restoration of liberal institutionalism?
And then in another few years there's a coup and the constitution is rewritten again. Nevermind trying to *enforce* it. You see the problem? The only way to win is not to play. Once you get to that stage, it's not a contest of ideas, it's survival.
In war you want to engage your enemy when all the factors are in your favor. Every single one. Weather, terrain, supplies, even optics. Have we checked all those boxes? Will we win the battle?
Again, I don't need to have the dynamics of coups explained to me like I'm a child. *If* Biden can get the military and prominent Dems on board, it may legitimately be the least bad option.
No, it all but ensures a civil war before the election. Which in turn ensures a military dictatorship, which in turn ensures a reprisal against the dictatorship, and the populations that support it.
The confidence with which you state that suggests you don't really understand coups. They are, uh, high variance in terms of outcomes.
Anyway, I feel like I'm having flashbacks to 2017 or whatever when I was arguing in favor of killing the filibuster and court packing.
I mean, respectfully, there’s a pretty big difference between killing the filibuster and court packing on one side and establishing a li’l military dictatorship on the other.
Yeah, uh huh. Look, I'm really hoping it's not the case, but there's a decent chance in a few years you'll be like "damn, that John Brown stan guy was right, and all he did was look down the game tree!"
Half of my Twitter (and now Bluesky) career has been liberals telling me that we can't do X because it's Just Too Radical and then it becoming the CW that we should (or should have while we had the chance)
And legit all I'm doing here is thinking "if this happens, we will want to do this and they will want to do that and we will want to do this..." and working backwards from the best outcome.
Let's just all hope Biden wins and it doesn't matter.
If Biden wins his best move will ironically be something like mass preemptive pardons or wiping federal investigative databases so the lunatics who take over have to start from scratch.
If Trump wins, I don't really have many recommendations for Democrats anymore. It's going to be up to us at that point, and it will almost certainly involve a lot of violence
I don't know where you're getting the first part of that sentence from, but a Biden coup may involve violence, but it will be violence in which we are far better positioned than if Trump wins
If Trump is going to win, then there is no outcome that doesn't involve either a long-term authoritarianism or violence. I'm asking -- begging -- people to understand this, and recognize that we start from a weak position or a stronger one
The problem with totalitarian coups is that once you do that, you have now established “Totalitarian Government by Coup”
And what happens next is your rivals stage a counter-coup, because that’s how it works now.
So you coup back.
And then this goes on for generations and lots of people just die.
Here, and there are good reasons (not having the votes) that courts didn't get packed. You seem to be jumping from "we need to win the election" to "we need to do a coup and impose a new constitution" and there are at least a few "???" steps in there, all of which involve violence.
The confidence with which you state that suggests you don't really understand coups. They are, uh, high variance in terms of outcomes.
Anyway, I feel like I'm having flashbacks to 2017 or whatever when I was arguing in favor of killing the filibuster and court packing.
This coup nonsense is dumb. There's no mechanism for it, and there's no indication the military would go along with it, and even if they did, there's no way to impose it on the states even if he did (by some miracle) do the first two.
The mechanism is the same as any other coup, which is obviously extra legal. And the mechanism for imposing it on red states is it violence. That's how coups work.
I don't mention packing the court in that post.
I am saying that if Trump is very likely to win, a Dem/Bidrn coup is preferable to letting Trump take office again. I am not making any claims about the feasibility of such a coup.
And yes, if Trump wants the election there's going to be violence and/or there is going to be dictatorship. The question is whether or not we set ourselves up for success in the coming violence.
My concern is violence is becoming more likely regardless of what Biden does and at some point extrajudicial court packing is leading to better places than project 2025 happening
I think most people probably wanted to see him prosecuted very quickly. Dem electeds were too cowardly to do it, almost certainly because they suffer from the same institutionalist childhood fantasies that you guys all do.
Now if Trump loses, it's not even clear he will go to prison at all without Democratic electeds showing some spine. I have relatively little confidence that they will. They couldn't even do it after January 6th
Actual criminal investigations take time. They involve subpoenas, court battles that we never see, weeks of deposition. This is one thing where the armchair critics are wrong. Garland brought two solid cases and SCOTUS nuked them. The outcome wouldn't have been any different now than last summer.
There is substantial evidence that Garland wasted an entire year, but even absent that, you lean on the FBI to make it go fast. We literally watched everything you need to incriminate him on fucking national television
I know what you're going to say to this of course, which is that these prosecutions wouldn't have enough Legitimacy! You believe in our institutions the way children believe in the tooth fairy. We all watched what happened on TV, that's all anybody needs to get legitimacy.
There is no reason he could not have been prosecuted and put in prison within 6 months. It should have started immediately. He should have been arrested the moment he left the White House. That's how normal governments defend themselves from attempted overthrow.
