A Handy Guide to resisting a coup
How and when will we know if America is really being hit with the c-word? And what do we do about it?
Photography by Misan Harriman
This story was previous published here on November 3, 2020. We thought it was an apt time to bring it back up to the top.
File that under a headline I never thought I would write. Yet, here we are. It’s Election Day in America, but the outcomes we are anxiously waiting for go well beyond what the final vote counts will be. For the first time in history, a sitting president is refusing to commit to a peaceful transfer of power should he lose. To many, especially those who have lived their entire lives on American soil, the word “coup” might seem alarmist or extreme. But to so many others who have spent time in countries that have been through it in recent memory (think Turkey, Sri Lanka, Libya, Thailand, Egypt, Sudan, Venezuela, Zimbabw, and dozens more—there have been at least 40 coups or coup attempts since 2000) it is clearly a concept that America is intensely flirting with. In June 2020, a group called the Transition Integrity Project (TIP) gathered a bipartisan group of experts to explore scenarios that could play out between election day and inauguration day. Their conclusions serve as a stark reminder of why we need to prepare now to mobilize on November 4th and beyond: “We assess with a high degree of likelihood that November’s elections will be marked by a chaotic legal and political landscape. We also assess that… President Trump is likely to contest the result by both legal and extra-legal means in an attempt to hold onto power.”
So, time to get cozy with the term, and then quickly understand what we as a population might need to do to resist one. As Judith Shulevitz pointed out in her article for The Atlantic this week, protesting won’t be enough to stop an attempted coup. And it even took a minute for the author herself to wrap her head around the c-word. When she attended a webinar called “How to Beat an Election-Related Power Grab” being offered by a then-obscure group named Choose Democracy, she noted “Coup sounded tendentious, but I figured I could log off if the tutorial was nutty. It wasn’t. Instead, the instructor, George Lakey, a white-haired longtime activist with a genial, professorial manner, forced me to rethink my knee-jerk assumptions about mass marches. If you want to prevent a power grab, he explained, you don’t just take to the streets. That’s one tactic among many, and not always the best one.”
Here are some basics to understand as we move through the next few days and weeks.
Firstly, how will people know that a coup is being attempted and it is time to take action? SURJ SF is part of a national task force working together to create responses to a coup-or-coup-like scenario that might emerge over the next weeks. National groups, including Protect the Results and similar organizations, have identified three “red lines” for which they call for massive responses.
Trump declares himself the winner while the results remain unclear.
Election officials find unexplained irregularities or signs of tampering.
Trump loses but won’t leave office.
For her article in the Atlantic, Shulevitz spoke at length with George Lakey, who is now 82 and was a longtime professor, most recently at Swarthmore College, and has been teaching the principles of civil resistance since 1964, when he trained students going south to register Mississippi voters during Freedom Summer. Shulevitz distilled the insights of Lakey and the other experts and activists she spoke with into three principles of successful coup prevention. They are:
Practice Nonviolence
The first imperative of civil resistance is nonviolence—that is, maintaining the discipline not to strike out or strike back. In Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict, the political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan analyzed data from 323 violent and nonviolent prodemocracy movements. They concluded that nonviolent protests were twice as likely to succeed as violent ones—53 percent of the nonviolent demonstrations achieved their goal, as opposed to 26 percent of violent ones.
Practicing nonviolence doesn’t come naturally. It’s “a hard lesson” that every generation has to learn anew, Lakey says, so that when the time comes to march or hold a sit-in or undertake some other (ideally imaginative) action, peace is kept. Preferably, it’s reinforced by a corps of designated monitors and marshals who can identify and neutralize hot-headed protesters and maybe even agents provocateurs. Complicating the work of de-escalation are two anomalies of present-day America: its uniquely large and soaring number of guns per capita and nonviolence’s fall from favor among some members of the left. At one point during Lakey’s webinar, the chat sidebar erupted into a heated debate about whether it’s fair to condemn the destruction of property when the other side is destroying bodies, a topic much discussed during this summer’s Black Lives Matter protests.
Lakey is less interested in what’s fair than in what works. If property destruction is perceived as violence, it’s functionally violence. Nonviolence is effective for two reasons: The obvious one is that vandalism or fighting attributed to protesters, rightly or wrongly, will serve as an excuse for a crackdown. The less obvious but probably more important reason is that the ensuing chaos is sure to alienate the silent members of the public not yet sure which side to join.
Aim for the Center
In that sense, nonviolence undergirds the second rule of a winning protest strategy: It must pull in the mainstream. A robust movement will be “diverse and multigenerational,” Erica Chenoweth told me, with children and grandparents, civil servants and judges as well as radicals. She cited the 2000 Serbian uprising against the murderous dictator Slobodan Milošević, which triumphed by mobilizing people from nearly every age group, economic sector, and geographic region of the country.
A prodemocracy movement’s most important constituencies are the institutions that keep society running: banks, businesses, the military, schools, the media, government bureaucracies, police, the judiciary. Lakey calls these “the pillars of power.” An authoritarian head of state must command their loyalty, or at least their subservience. Should financiers, college presidents, distinguished members of opposition parties, and middle-school students start defecting to the other side, the political, physical, and even psychological costs of putting down an insurrection will become prohibitive. The Serbian uprising came to an end when police and army commanders refused to order the police guarding the parliament building in Belgrade to fire on the crush of protesters gathered before it, because, according to a reporter cited in a documentary about the rebellion, "they knew their own kids were in that crowd." The takeover of the building was the coup de grâce in the dictator’s downfall.
Hit Them Where It Hurts
As essential as the first two laws of grassroots regime change may be, the third one makes it stick: Whatever the movement looks like, it will have to cause economic pain. If worst comes to worst, victory will hinge on consumer boycotts and strikes, Hardy Merriman, the co-author of one of the growing movement’s key handbooks, “Hold the Line: A Guide to Defending Democracy,” told me. I was skeptical. Boycotts take months to have an impact, and coups happen fast. Plus, America isn’t France. We don’t do general strikes. Moreover, 21st-century American unions are not the force that 20th-century American unions were; overall membership is less than a third of what it was at its peak in the 1950s, and some union members voted for Trump. But strikes don’t have to be general, Merriman explained. Strikes can be rolling, moving from place to place, industry to industry. And if workers, unionized or not, can’t afford to go on strike, they can engage in a slowdown. Civil servants could slow-walk orders they disagree with (even more than Trump says they now do) by insisting, say, that they require legal review.
In any case, I was dead wrong about American unions. One after another, local chapters have been declaring themselves ready to strike. On October 8, the Rochester, New York, branch of the AFL-CIO—the nation’s biggest federation of unions—passed a resolution calling on its national leaders and “all other labor organizations in the United States of America” to prepare for a general strike, in the event of “any effort to subvert, distort, misrepresent or disregard” the outcome of the election. Labor councils associated with the AFL-CIO in Seattle and Western Massachusetts have done the same.
And while Shulevitz’s three points are insightful, especially for those of us just starting to wrap our heads around the possibility of an American coup, the depth of strategic information and planning around successfully resisting one is much broader. Here are some helpful guides to dig into if you personally plan to organize further, or want to support an organization already doing the work.
The Hold the Line Guide is an organizing guide around ensuring that democracy is upheld and there is a free and fair election. They also hold trainings. Sign up is on the same page.
The Protect the Results Toolkit is a similar organizing tool around preparing to mobilize in the event that our democracy is not upheld.
Stopping the Coup is a third similar guide.
Choose Democracy provides a brief overview, along with some case studies on stopping a coup.
Writes Shulevitz. “Coup, by the way, no longer seems too strong a word for a scenario in which a president retains power by running roughshod over the Constitution. And although I believed before those conversations, and still believe, that America is more divided and combustible and institutionally weakened than it has been in my lifetime, I’ve been amazed and encouraged to discover how quickly some Americans are gearing up for action, keeping these principles in mind.”