After January 6, I wrote a post about the “state of the coup.” As I saw it then, the fury of the MAGA crowd had broken against the valiant defense by law enforcement at the Capitol, and the MAGA faction was in retreat. I linked to a video that explains how coups work: they require the support of “keys to power” in business, the military and the police, which Trump’s faction did not have. All the way back in 2021, he had been banned from Twitter, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff had issued a statement affirming their loyalty to the Constitution. Without allies among these key elements of society, Trump could not succeed in overthrowing constitutional democracy, and it looked to me like he and his movement were sidelined, hopefully to expire. I really thought we were going “blue zone!“

My, how things have changed.

Since 2021, Twitter has changed ownership and transformed into an alt-right platform. With the help of that platform and other right-wing media, MAGA has seized control of all branches of the United States Federal government. After the reelection of Donald J. Trump by a popular plurarity (probably), the country’s billionaire overclass was quick to bend the knee. They read the writing on the wall.

That’s one key down.

With the help of a partisan and willing Senate, the President has installed loyalists in top government posts in the military and law enforcement. His white Christian nationalist pick for Secretary of Defense has already purged the Joint Chiefs of Staff of its members who were not white men (“DEI hires” is the code word). The Director and Deputy Director at the F.B.I, as well as the Attorney General, are all Trump loyalists, and will likely weaponize their departments as tools of political enforcement.

There go the other keys.

The new regime is openly white supremacist, complete with Nazi salutes. It is also nakedly authoritarian, ignoring constitutional constraints. The President has granted the billionaire owner of Twitter, who possibly did the most to help him get elected, the privilege to loot government data and terrorize federal workers, all in the name of “efficiency.” It’s plainly a tit-for-tat favor to let him lock in government contracts for his businesses and end the multiple investigations against them. The MAGA base, obsessed with Culture Wars touchpoints and easily fooled, plays along. It would be positively Orwellian if it weren’t so blatantly fraudulent.

The Musk-DOGE takeover or “billionaire coup” is an attempt at state capture under the cover of eliminating waste, fraud and abuse. First, get rid of all officials actually preventing waste, fraud and abuse (Inspectors General). Then, weaken the agencies with demoralizing attacks and bullshit memes that the MAGA base laps up. Finally, steer all that taxpayer money into your own companies. Coup achieved!

If the courts try to stop you, that’s where you pull out your “unitary executive theory,” a.k.a. “Trump is King.” So now you have an authoritarian regime with a conservative agenda and total control of the government, in lockstep alliance with powerful business interests. This is just fascism, right?

I’ve been getting a lot of my info from substack lately, since it seems to be where all the intellectuals are hanging out these days. I was struck by a post from John Ganz, because of the insight it gave me into the coup event. The post looks into an academic book on the fascist movements of the early 20th century, which has as a thesis that (I quote Ganz) “fascism arose out of situations in Europe where there was dense civic association combined with a weak political class, unable to exercise hegemony – national political leadership.” To quote more from the post:

Fascism, a political project aiming to establish a new relationship between the nation and the state, can be expected to emerge where social elites fail to develop hegemonic political organizations in the context of rapid civil society development. The fascist political project arises as an attempt to redress this problem of hegemonic weakness by creating an authoritarian democracy: a regime that claims to represent the people or nation but rejects parliamentary institutional forms.

I’d say that describes the MAGA movement pretty well. I mean, millions of people voted for Trump to be King, it seems. Precisely because they wanted to redress the “hegemonic weakness” – that is, percieved ineffectiveness – of the existing political system. As a narrative it fits well with what is expected in a Fourth Turning or Crisis Era: changes in the social order outpaced the political order, which became unable to adapt, and is now being torn down and rebuilt.

It’s traumatic, to be sure, and it sucks that some real dipshit a*holes are going to be prime beneficiaries. It sucks that thousands will die needlessly from piss-poor social policies. That, sadly, is the price we pay for MAGA winning the 2024 election.

Last year, when it became clear during the primaries that Trump was rising up like some undead lich lord, seemingly immune to all the “lawfare” waged against him, and that the MAGA movement was alive and well, I warned about the red zone’s greater solidarity, and the need for the opposition to rally to counter them. We needed the same “group feeling” that MAGA has, but sadly we couldn’t match them.

The opposition now seems demoralized and leaderless. The resistance is much more muted than it was in 2017, with smaller numbers of protestors taking to the streets, and most blue zoners like me simply venting on social media. Does this mean the red zoners have won the Culture War, and are now going to consolidate their power?

I wouldn’t jump to that conclusion just yet. While MAGA loyalists will be willing to endure the pain of Trump 2.0 (that’s also part of the Fourth Turning dynamic), there will be plenty of seething discontent for the opposition to exploit. Sooner or later the Trump-Musk diumvirate will overplay its hand.

Meanwhile, we should continue to champion our righteous causes: women’s liberation, equal rights for LGBTQ, rights for immigrants, social welfare. We absolutely should be calling our representatives and letting them know what we stand for, and expecting them to answer to us. We still have our Constitution, threatened though it may be, and as citizens we should assert our rights within its framework. And go ahead and assert your consumer power as well, by boycotting where you can, or particpating in Economic Blackouts like the one on February 28. I know I will be.