Subject: Re: A New Trend
A solid essay on that very topic by :

Part 1: "Lost an election or facing impeachment, but don’t want to leave office due to greed, hubris, or fear of prosecution? As coups have made a comeback in the 21st century, so has the “self-coup” (autogolpe) proliferated around the world as a solution for authoritarian-minded leaders in these situations. The Jan. 6, 2021 coup attempt in the United States is part of a pattern of reactions by authoritarian leaders whose power is challenged by elections, impeachment processes, and other democratic checks on the executive.

The ways political and other elites and societies respond to such power grabs is a measure of the strength of democracy in that country. A comparative view of the outcome of Jan. 6 shows just how far democratic backsliding has advanced in the United States.

Consistent with their agenda of transforming America into an autocracy, Republican elites in and out of government treated the period from Donald Trump’s defeat in Nov. 2020 to Jan. 6 as a laboratory of solutions to the “problem” of free and fair elections that don’t go your way. When the violent insurrection failed to stop Joe Biden from taking office, those elites and their media allies did not abandon Trump, nor throw their lot in with their democratic colleagues.

Rather, electrified by the breaking of taboos, they rewarded the instigator of that insurrection with increased support. They declared Biden’s presidency to be illegitimate and circulated lies hundreds of thousands of times to cement the rewriting of the assault on the Capitol as a patriotic and morally righteous response to a “stolen” election.

This gave Trump support at the highest levels of government and among his base to mount a successful bid for re-election. This shocking situation is the clearest sign of the GOP’s exit from democracy—democracy being understood as a political system in which election results are respected, transfers of power uncontested, and violence refuted as a means of solving political problems.
We need only look to Venezuela in 2024 to see what happens when an authoritarian incumbent has had years to capture a party and corrupt institutions, making his self-coup far more likely to succeed. Despite a landslide victory by the opposition, President Nicholás Maduro, who had been chosen by dictator Hugo Chavez to continue his legacy, refused to vacate the presidency.

Buy-offs of the military and the use of civilian gangs (colectivos) as enforcers allowed him to use violence against protesters and force the rightful winner of the election, Edmundo González, into exile in Spain. González has been on an international tour to secure support for his plan to return home and be inaugurated on Jan. 20 —the U.S. and other countries recognized him as the winner of the 2024 election—but Maduro has threatened to arrest him if he enters Venezuela.

But when political, military, and other elites of a country are still committed to democracy, self-coups often fail. That happened in South Korea in 2024, Brazil in 2023, and Peru in 2022. In these countries, the memory of the toll of past dictatorships (South Korea’s ended in 1987, Peru’s most recent one in 2000, and Brazil’s in 1985) was likely a factor in spurring legislators, the judiciary, and others to act on behalf of democracy when it was most threatened.