One year after January 6, Republican fondness for military coups grows

[Nevilledog]

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Christopher Ingraham
@_cingraham
I have been informed by many Very Serious People that this is *fine*, it's all *hypothetical*, it's not like there have been any *actual coup attempts* in recent memory https://thewhyaxis.substack.com/p/one-year-after-january-6-republican…
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10:12 AM · Jan 7, 2022

https://thewhyaxis.substack.com/p/one-year-after-january-6-republican

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Back in 2018, some political scientists noted a troubling finding: somewhere around one quarter of Americans said they could support a military coup if there were a lot of corruption in government. It was the middle of the Trump administration and alarm over rising authoritarian tendencies on the Right was already growing.

Still, there were reasons for optimism. There was little difference between Republicans and Democrats on the question, with just two percentage points separating them. Overall support was trending downward from when the question was first asked in 2010. And that level of support was lower than in most other countries in the Americas, even mild-mannered Canada.

That survey — Vanderbilt University’s AmericasBarometer study — was recently updated with data from July of 2021, 6 months after the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol. The new data shows no change in Democrats’ support for a hypothetical coup. But among Republicans, well… take a look.

More than half of Republicans now say a military coup would be justified when there is a lot of corruption. This is kind of alarming — in today’s partisan environment, lawmakers toss around words like “corruption” all the time. If an unscrupulous demagogue were to get a critical mass of Republicans convinced that the Biden administration is fundamentally corrupt — say, by getting 62 percent of them to believe the lie that there was widespread fraud in 2020, and that Biden is therefore not the legitimate president — he probably wouldn’t have much trouble convincing them that anything up to and including a full-blown military coup would be a justifiable response.

*snip*

[C_U_L8R]

1. If the military had overthrown the corrupt Trump regime

those magats would be crying a different tune.