The Neverending Coup

We noted with pleasure the other day that there are now enough certified state elections to give Joe Biden 270 electoral votes.

We will probably make the same observation when members of the Electoral College cast their votes on December 14.

And again when their votes are counted by Congress on January 6.

We have been voting in presidential elections for forty years. Never before did the steps between election day and inauguration matter to us, or anyone, really. They were just part of the paperwork.

Except this time, when each step, each ridiculous case thrown out of court, confirms that the attempted coup against the United States of America has failed.

And in that, in celebrating the victory of democracy over tyranny, we’re not just acknowledging how fucking close it came, we’re pretending that it’s over.

It’s not.

We’re more than a month past the election, when the losers should be licking their wounds while the victors prepare for power. But the losers won’t admit defeat, won’t admit that a majority of voters disagreed with them. The very thought is inconceivable to them, millions of them, not just the petulant crybaby at the top. They refuse to accept the reality of it, just as they refuse to accept the reality of a virus that has killed 288,878 Americans, or the reality that the very world they live in is melting from the poles down.

Millions of them. Millions and millions. Millions and millions and millions.

Donald Trump won’t be exiting their stage at noon on January 20.

Nor will the cynics who draft on his influence. Nor will the powerful fools who actually buy into it. There’s an industry now behind it, a Coup Industry, well-funded, dedicated to keeping the flame lit. You can laugh at the charlatans and marks that comprise that economy, but you can’t dismiss them, and you really shouldn’t ignore them, not the millions of them out there, nursing grudges that will never be satisfied. They are our lot now, and their resentment will create problems for years to come, problems we can’t even imagine until we see them.

This isn’t to say we need to understand them. They’re idiots. Racist selfish idiots, just like their leader.

What we do need to understand is that because of them, we won’t be getting beyond this moment any time soon. We have entered national stasis, a stasis caused by a governmental structure that preserves their power well beyond their numbers, in the Electoral College, the Senate, House districts — and all federal courts, not just the one at the top.

Democracy won — this time — but the structural tyranny endures, and the millions and millions and millions of people who benefit from that tyranny won’t be going quietly.

Their coup hasn’t ended. It’s just getting started.