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Comment by kryogen1c | Hacker News Reader

> coup attempt

it was neither a coup nor a coup attempt. i have a hard time fathoming the combination of ignorance and privilege that would lead a serious, thinking person to make this claim. at least the politicians grandstanding on the verge of tears are playing an angle.

what do you think would have happened if the rioters captured every single congressperson? what if they were all killed? if you think the answer to either of those questions is "the rioters assume control of any part of the federal government" then im not sure we have anything to discuss. killing congress doesnt, like, make you the new congress.

if you are calling it a coup because they WANTED to control the government (noting how ineffectual their attempt was), then you are making the word coup meaningless. you might as well call any whitehouse trespasser a coup.

context matters. they were political rioters, not a replacement government.

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> what do you think would have happened if the rioters captured every single congressperson?

Well, what indeed? Suppose that they killed the ones who were opposed to them politically. Suppose the vote went on, with a different result.

The person who won would surely not repudiate those results. The Supreme Court might consider it, but I honestly don't know what they'd say. The Constitution doesn't have any provision for it, and the majority of the Supreme Court might well decide that the "original intent" was that the vote was the vote.

These were, indeed, just political rioters rather than an organized coup. They didn't have any idea what they were doing, and even if it fell out the way I suggested it wouldn't really have been because they plotted it out that way.

Still... it doesn't seem impossible. And if they achieved their aims, by violence, it seems like splitting hairs not to call that a "coup".

> what do you think would have happened if the rioters captured every single congressperson? what if they were all killed? if you think the answer to either of those questions is "the rioters assume control of any part of the federal government" then im not sure we have anything to discuss. killing congress doesnt, like, make you the new congress.

The question isn't what we think, it's what the rioters thought. Considering their chants, preparations and convictions, it's not entirely unreasonable to say they were hoping to make it so the guy they want remains in charge, regardless of election results. Whether or not that is legally possible or how it works isn't relevant to their goals, which is the main thing that matters to determine if it was a coup attempt or not. They thought it was, and that's that.

PS: i'm not American, I don't have a horse in this race

> it was neither a coup nor a coup attempt. > ...context matters. they were political rioters, not a replacement government.

That doesn't dismiss the severity of what happened. I agree that those events were precipitated by a large number of imbeciles and a smaller number of nuts with a half-baked plan.

But the scary thing is that they proved to themselves, the politicians who pander to them, and an unknown number of even worse people that flexing the threat of violence is on the table of possibility in the USA. It's one step forward on a slippery slope that sane people don't want to go down.

EVEN NOW, Rep. Liz Cheney faces being ousted by her own party for daring to speak truth about the Stable Genius. Coups, insurrections and revolutions don't "just happen", they're in the works for a LONG time. We might be seeing the early stages of one now.

Your position is very tenuous, based on a reasonable reading of the definitions of "coup" and "attempt"; but even if GP changed their wording to suit you (e.g. "We just easily stopped a political riot") it seems to me that their point (that the powerful people who planned it escaped punishment in that case, and therefore will in this case) would stand unaltered.

Also, when introducing a hot-button political topic (especially in a thread about a different hot-button political topic), it would be nice to do it in a friendly way, i.e. without orating upon the sheer quantity of ignorance it takes to disagree with you.

That is not how coups work. Legislators are seized in order to provide the coup with a veneer of legitimacy, at gunpoint if necessary (but it often isn't). Many coups involve no bloodshed at all, and are the product of bluff and intimidation.

> i have a hard time fathoming the combination of ignorance and privilege that would lead a serious, thinking person to make this claim.

I think of myself as a serious person and what went down surrounding the 2020 election absolutely looked like a coup to me. The sitting President and his associates tried to prevent people from voting; once votes were cast they tried to prevent them from being fully counted; once the votes were counted they tried to get the votes thrown out; once the votes were included, they tried, by force, to prevent the election from being certified.

The sitting President and his associates actively stoked a riot and prevented additional support from police and national guard from being provided to secure the Capitol.

Taken in totality, that was a fucking coup attempt. A politician attempted to take power by force.

Jan 6 was just one battlefield in a larger war. It was a last-ditch desperate attempt, where the actual "war" of Trump trying to invalidate the legitimate vote had already been lost.

That this entire war had a very slim chance of actually succeeding is an entirely different matter altogether.

In the past there was at least a broad general consensus that no matter how much we disagree or dislike each other's policies, we respect the democratic institutions. There were hickups, sure, but never on this scale. Over 100 members of the house voted against the certification of the election results.

Who knows what the future will bring; it may sizzle out, or it may grow in to something ugly. Either way, dismissing it as merely "politicians grandstanding" doesn't strike me as doing justice to the severity of this.

> what do you think would have happened if the rioters captured every single congressperson? what if they were all killed?

Then Congress would have been unable to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election, at least until the states appointed replacements. Meanwhile Trump would have been shouting "I really won". That still doesn't add up to anything close to a successful coup, unless the newly-appointed Congress people change their votes based on fear for their lives.

What it would have been, though, is potentially the start of a civil war. It would depend on how determined (or deluded) Trump was, to carry on the claim that he won, and how many people in the population believed it.

>> coup attempt > it was neither a coup nor a coup attempt. i have a hard time fathoming the combination of ignorance and privilege that would lead a serious, thinking person to make this claim.

I would take the opposite approach here. Trump replaced SecDef after the election. He was working on scuttling the post office and proper vote counting before the election. They tried to rig the election. When their efforts didn't give the results they wanted, they tried to overturn the results with violence. He incited the violence, helped direct it, refused to stop it, and cheered it on, as his own VP was asking for help.

I'm not sure what combination of ignorance and privilege would label this "trespassing" rather than an attempted "coup".

> you might as well call any whitehouse trespasser a coup. > context matters. they were political rioters, not a replacement government.

The goal of the prior administration was to remain in power. The folks who stormed the capital weren't the replacement government, they were the brownshirts.

Well actually, the goals of the attempt was to prevent their guy Trump from being removed from office. So in that regard it was a coup attempt. They were attempting to illegally wrest control of 1/3 of the government with force.

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