The Left Is Setting The Stage For A Coup If Trump Wins, by John Davidson.
It’s been hard to miss the steady drumbeat of articles and think-pieces over the past few months about Election Day war games and post-election planning underway on the left, rooted in obsessive fears that President Trump will refuse to accept an electoral loss, triggering a constitutional crisis and maybe even widespread civic unrest, all in a desperate attempt to cling to power. …
The news hook for most of these articles is a series of elaborate election war games hosted in June by a newly formed organization called the Transition Integrity Project … [which is staffed by] a cross-section of our elite ruling class. …
In one of the simulations, a scenario similar to 2016 was gamed out, with Trump losing the popular vote but winning the right combination of states for an Electoral College victory. John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign chairman and a top adviser to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, played the role of Biden. … Podesta-as-Biden refused to concede, saying his party wouldn’t let him and instead alleged voter suppression, persuading the governors of Wisconsin and Michigan to send Biden electors to the Electoral College.
Something like this happened before. It led to the US Civil War:
The South: If this guy is elected we’ll walk
Whether they realize it or not, Podesta and Frum and the others are acting out a present-day version of the election of 1860, only they’re playing the role of the secessionist South. Indeed, well before Abraham Lincoln won the election, even moderate “unionist” southern leaders warned that their states would secede if the vote didn’t go their way. It amounted to mass political blackmail, and after Lincoln’s decisive victory the South followed through on its threat. For slave states, the Union was conditional, not perpetual, and Lincoln’s election violated their conditions.
The “central idea” of the Union, said Lincoln, “is the necessity of proving that popular government is not an absurdity. We must settle this question now, whether in a free government the minority have the right to break up the government whenever they choose.”
We now seem to be on the cusp of relitigating the question, only instead of slaveholding southerners blackmailing the country with secession, it’s anti-Trump Democrats and left-wing radicals threatening to tear the country apart if Trump wins in November. For them, the Union is conditional, and Trump’s reelection will violate their conditions.
The left: If this guy is elected we’ll riot, cheat, and reject the result, and thereby risk ending the republic
The left is planning mass violence for after Trump wins the initial vote count on November 3:
What do they have in mind? Not exactly an 1860-style secession, state-by-state, but something more immediately disruptive. Depending on the circumstances the day after the election, they might contest the results and trigger lengthy litigations and ballot recounts, working in the meantime to come up with enough absentee ballots to put Biden over the edge. In that case, while the lawsuits and recounts are underway, the left plans to do what it’s been doing for months now: take to the streets.
Last week, an initiative called the Fight Back Table, a coalition of more than 50 left-wing groups that got together after the 2016 election, met to formulate a plan of action in case no clear winner emerges after Election Day. Of course, “no clear winner” is something for which the left has been rhetorically preparing the country under the guise of ensuring all the mail-in ballots are properly counted. …
One person familiar with the discussion said the goal was to figure out how to “occupy shit, hold space, and shut things down, not just on Election Day but for weeks.” …
Perhaps more disturbing than the possibility of organized mass riots and looting is the open fantasizing among Democrats, including Biden himself, about the role the military might play in a contested election. Biden has felt free to ruminate, more than once, on the possibility of soldiers dragging Trump out of the White House if he tries to “steal the election.” …
This isn’t normal campaign rhetoric, and it belies a feverish mindset on the left going into November that any outcome except a Biden win — by any means necessary — won’t be legitimate. That’s why Hillary Clinton has publicly urged Biden not to concede “under any circumstances.”
Indeed, paranoia and an assumption that any action by the Trump administration to ensure the integrity of the election is tantamount to stealing it pervades our elite class. …
The left simply cannot imagine an election in which Trump doesn’t win by cheating, hence they’ve decided they will accept only one outcome. …
What should be obvious by now is that a broad coalition of left-wing groups is laying the groundwork to reject the results of the November election if Trump wins and claim victory, no matter what. The same left-wing groups that have been fomenting riots and street violence for months will again mobilize, only this time they won’t be calling for the abolishment of the police but the effective abolishment of popular government — an end to our constitutional system, and with it, an end to the republic.
Alas, this kind of electoral hostage-taking isn’t new. In the months before the 1860 election, southern leaders and newspapers warned in explicit terms that electing Lincoln would mean disunion, perhaps even war. “Let the consequences be what they may — whether the Potomac is crimsoned in human gore, and Pennsylvania Avenue is paved ten fathoms deep with mangled bodies,” declared one Georgia newspaper. “The South will never submit to such humiliation and degradation as the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln.”
Most northerners thought this was just bluster, that Lincoln’s election would never lead to actual war and bloodshed. They badly underestimated how lightly the South regarded the Union, and what southerners would do to the country to be rid of it. They should have taken the South at its word.
Elections are mock civil wars. Instead of actually fighting, just count up to see who has the most supporters. It’s crude, but when coupled with the reality of peaceful transitions of power and the likelihood that your side will get into power later even if you lose this one, it keeps the peace and society flourishes.
But what happens when the count is not believed? Then we regress to more violent methods of deciding which politicians are in charge. The Democrats are preparing for that.
UPDATE from leftyville:
Sure. Our way or the highway.
Why is that lefties are so quick to coerce, so slow to persuade?
