A putsch here, a putsch there, and soon civilization topples
The last few years have shaken with headlines that as a student of history, I never wanted to read in my lifetime. The emergence in late 2019 of a novel coronavirus that threatened to cause a pandemic the equivalent of the 1918 influenza epidemic and the warning in March of this year that backup diesel generators had been turned on at the Chernobyl nuclear site, thanks to the plant having been taken off the electrical grid due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, were the sort of announcement that reminds us all of the fragility of our current global order. It is pleasant to believe that if things are good enough for now, they will continue to be so in the foreseeable future, but the evidence of the past does not sustain this wish.
Another such headline came on Wednesday this week when German police officers arrested multiple conspirators of a plot to overthrow the German government and replace it with a monarchy under a hereditary prince, Heinrich XIII, and a crew of the prince’s Russian girlfriend, a chef, and several German politicians and members of the military and law enforcement. This particular plot is at least ideologically related to the Reichsbürger movement, something akin to the self-proclaimed sovereign citizens in the United States and elsewhere who employ bizarre legal notions that lead them to reject the legitimacy of whatever government is requiring them to pay taxes or the like. At least some of the members of these movements, including adherents in Germany, want to see an authoritarian government replace the present democratically elected leadership, often including racist beliefs about who will be a citizen or otherwise in the new political entity.
The arrest of a kook who would be some kind of king in a twenty-first century European democratic republic would be risible were it not for a particular German word that is being associated with the incident: putsch. Yes, Heinrich XIII, whose family apparently feels the need to name all their sons Heinrich SomeNumber, is a hopelessly comedic character with silly dreams of a world long gone. But then, so was a certain Austrian immigrant who served as a corporal in the German army during World War I and attempted to overthrow the government of Bavaria ninety-nine years ago this last November.
And we all know how that turned out.
In terms of any realistic expectation of success, this latest conspiracy is similar to Donald Trump’s incoherent effort at retaining power on the 6th of January 2021. And to a number of putsche against the Weimar Republic, at least until the would-be revolutionaries decided that elections could be used to better result. Unlike those attempts to overthrow a duly elected government, the German police this time caught the conspirators before they were able to engage in violence.
This latest mess of a conspiracy fits in with a general rise of reactionary movements globally with outbreaks in the Philippines, in Russia, in Brazil, in Hungary and Italy and the United Kingdom, and, of course, in the United States. Brazil has for the moment pulled back from the harm brought on by Bolsonaro, and American voters chose mediocrity over fascism in 2020, but British voters have yet to repent of Brexit, Trump is plotting a comeback, and the far right remains a menacing force in many countries, leaving the question open as to what good people are supposed to do to preserve democratic governments and free societies.
The reality, contrary to the pleasant wish that I mentioned above, is that for many people, things in this world are not good enough, not even close to good enough, and they have not been so for a long time. For many, indeed, they never have been conditions that anyone ought to accept, rich or poor, in power or out.
From the 1930s through the 60s in the United States, we operated in an economic and political philosophy of progressivism that saved the country from either a communist or a fascist revolution, but in the 60s, our intervention in Vietnam sapped funds from social growth here, and the abortive regressionary presidency of Nixon, followed soon after by Reagan’s march backward has landed us into Karl Marx’s prediction that capitalism would flatten out the class system into bourgeoisie and proletariat with no alternatives and nothing in between. This calls to mind John F. Kennedy’s remark to the Alliance for Progress that “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”
As an American gun owner who cares as much about preventing violence as about being prepared for it, I do not want to see my country fall into civil war, and I would like to see other nations make progress toward liberal, social democracy. This model of society works so long as genuine progress is being made for everyone. We may be moving forward slowly, but if we are indeed moving forward, that can be sufficient—if we are continually moving forward for all.
But America is at best stagnating, while for many we are in full retrogression. The Republicans gave up any thought of helping those in need long ago, and for thirty years, the Democrats have wrung their hands over how hard any progress is. If we want to preserve the gains that humanity has made so far and to add to them in the future, we have to face the question of how many more attempted assaults on democratic government can be absorbed before the global consensus collapses. If we refuse to act for the betterment of each of us and especially for those in crushing need, the forces of extremism—today concentrated in the right wing—have everything they need to win.