A failed coup is a rehearsal for the next coup. This political truism circulates in the United States since January 6 of last year, when the invasion of the Capitol did not consummate a coup d’état — the objective, however, became increasingly clear with the facts discovered in recent months.
If that attack was a rehearsal, the political moves of 2021 suggest that the next attempt will dispense with such figures as the spear jesters seen in the Congressional invasion. Violence is not ruled out, but it will have been preceded by the methodical subversion of American electoral democracy.
After January 6, the Republican Party wasted little time examining the role of its more radical members in the riots, and began to campaign for new laws, administrative rule changes and measures to suppress the right to vote. State by state, the idea is to ensure that Donald Trump’s failure to reverse his defeat in key states in 2020 does not repeat itself.
This year’s so-called midterms (midterm elections), in which Republicans are expected to regain control of the House and even achieve a tight majority in the Senate, could have a decisive weight in the next presidential election in 2024.
When the Capitol Invasion was underway and the world witnessed in amazement the violence aimed at preventing the confirmation in Congress of Joe Biden’s victory — the last constitutional procedure necessary for the inauguration — in New York a spectator watched the scenes with different filters.
“I watched cable channels on my TV and streaming media from the ultra-right on the phone,” he reports to leaf Anne Nelson, historian and political scientist at Columbia University. His most recent book, “Shadow Network – Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right”, published in the US in late October 2019, won a new chapter months after the attack on Capitol Hill.
The “ghost network” of the title is the little-known Council for National Policy, founded in 1981. Nelson considers January 6 the culmination of 40 years of a methodical NPC strategy to ensure that a conservative religious minority control electoral mechanisms to capture power.
Leaving aside the picturesque figure of the “QAnon shaman” and the trumpist who threw a fire extinguisher at police officers —both convicted—, the congressional incursion would then have been less an organic outburst of violence than the more advanced stage of a plan that started before the election.
The CNP is not a movement, explains the author in “Shadow Network”, but a network of influence operating in secret since it was created, after forming an alliance with then-Republican candidate Ronald Reagan. The same deal was struck with Trump in 2016: the businessman would have the money and infrastructure to campaign for the CNP and, in return, would open the doors of the White House to evangelicals, including appointing federal judges previously approved by the religious leadership.
The Council emerged from the meeting of two groups of people discontented with the direction of politics and the demographic transformations that, in the 1970s, began to make the USA a more diverse country and progressively more liberal in customs. The period after the end of racial segregation in American schools, starting in the mid-1960s, provoked a backlash among Southerners that evoked the resentments of slavers defeated in the Civil War a century earlier.
Conservative evangelicals then began to enrich themselves by opening private schools dubbed “segregation academies.” But the federal government blocked tax breaks for institutions that violated the new civil rights legislation, frustrating millionaire pastors.
At the same time, the fossil fuel industry saw its profits threatened under the newly created EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) as control initiatives such as toxic dumping enforcement increased.
Entrepreneurs linked to religion and fuels banded together to fight the power of the federal government, attracting allies and enlisting political strategists and marketers. The greatest power of the CNP, explains Anne Nelson, is in surrounding an entire ecosystem with conservative media and mobilizing a network of large donors for organizations that promote its agenda.
She says that the secret list of members was only discovered in the past decade, and it included names like former Trump advisers Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway. Since its founding, knowing that its political agenda would be progressively defeated at the polls, the group drew up a long-term action plan.
The political scientist recalls that many Americans feel that their democracy rests on the popular vote, but that the system is an “obsolete patchwork”. No wonder the CNP emerged from the shadows in the final year of Trump’s presidency, when it became clear that its staunch ally could be defeated in both the popular vote and the Electoral College — an 18th-century institution that needs to certify the presidential election.
While these concerns were emerging, the Covid-19 pandemic broke out, and the far-right group only saw a chance to reelect Trump at the end of 2020 with an intense calendar of rallies, which would serve to gather data and keep the base mobilized.
Nelson says that, in a phone call to the direction of the republican campaign, the CNP would have proposed interfering in the fight against the health crisis, undermining the authority of the federal government’s wing in charge of public health. He enlisted doctors with dubious ethics to sell false treatments —such as hydroxychloroquine and the dangerous ivermectin, which caused countless deaths—, he advertised against social isolation and mandatory vaccines.
“The 2020 election was strategic for them,” says the author. Among the plans the Council considered to keep Trump in power, the most radical was carried out shortly after the election: a member founded the group Stop the Steal (Stop the Steal) to reinforce the false thesis that Democrats were stealing votes.
“The idea was to cause a disruption and ask for recounts, like what happened in Georgia. And, in the end, to make the vote certification process chaotic.” Nelson recalls that the conspiracy called for the then Vice President, Mike Pence, who was head of the Congressional session, to use a supposed power — obscure under the Constitution — not to confirm Biden’s victory.
“That plan failed,” he recalls, “and our democracy narrowly escaped.” Nelson says there were prominent members of the CNP at the Jan. 6 rally that preceded the attack, including Dr. Simone Gold, a propagandist for fake treatments for Covid who entered Capitol Hill with the invaders.
The author also claims that the Democratic Party has never had an organization with the tentacles of the Council for National Policy and has reached this moment relying more on the aspirations of the majority it represents than on detailed work on the complex electoral machinery.
“American democracy depends on norms of good behavior, and trumpist conservatives no longer abide by those norms.”
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