.ruthbenghiat: Autocrats love states of emergency. No wonder Mark Meadows' PowerPoint listed one as a Jan. 6 option.
Monday night, Meadows is now one step closer to contempt charges.) The resulting crisis would not just lead to Vice President Mike Pence’s delaying the certification of Joe Biden's victory but also open a window for exceptional actions that would interrupt the transfer of power and keep Trump in the White House.
The Jan. 6 riot may have failed in its goals. But coups and the states of emergency that follow them have long driven authoritarian history. Coups have accounted forglobally from World War II to the year 2000, and it's instructive to see this coup attempt in that light. Just as Jan. 6 is billed by Republicans as a patriotic act against Democratic treachery , coups around the world have been justified as"saving the nation" from corruption and tyranny. Propaganda presents the repression that accompanies states of emergency, like arrests and killings of opposition politicians, as necessary to protect the people.
Since many people in the U.S. associate states of emergency with benign government actions, like boosting assistance to populations after natural disasters, a few examples of the uses autocrats make of them can help us grasp the gravity of the threat represented by Trump and his Republican co-conspirators.
Some states of emergency help authoritarians on the rise to consolidate their power. Italian fascist Benito Mussolini started a custom that continues today when he declared a state of emergency in 1925 topolitical ruin from an investigation into his corruption. The measures imposed by the Laws for the Defense of the State, which created the world's first right-wing dictatorship made him untouchable.Others help autocrats in power stay on top.
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