2021: The Year of the Coup

2021 was the Year of the Coup, its aftermath, aftershocks, and recurrent antecedents. Even before the year began, Random Lengths News warned that Donald Trump’s denialist reaction to his 2020 election loss was both a grift — raising hundreds of millions of dollars with zero accountability and only the vaguest semblance of rationale — and a coup, noting at the time: “While many observers have resisted such talk, it’s important to realize that a failed coup is a coup nonetheless, even a comically inept one. What’s more, even a comically inept coup can sometimes succeed.”

We also went on to note that, “however anomalous, atypical and quixotic Trump’s attack on our democracy might be, it is echoed by a framework of constitutional structures that are inherently hostile to the one-person/one-vote spirit of democracy we nowadays take to be fundamental to our democracy. What’s more, between these two extremes — the atypical Trump and the foundational constitutional structures — there lies an extensive middle ground in which democracy must battle for its very life.”

After the coup attempt came to a head on Jan. 6, we warned, “It was dangerous not just because it left five people dead — and could have left many more — but because it may well be only the beginning.”

This message was highlighted again in August, in response to congressional hearings and new revelations in books. “There was an attack carried out on Jan. 6, and a hitman sent them,” Officer Harry Dunn said in the first House hearing on the insurrection. “I want you to get to the bottom of that.” But, we noted, “The guardrails of democracy that held this last time have already been severely eroded in the past six months,” citing voter suppression laws, escalating attacks on election administration, and opposition to even hearing from Dunn. “The illusion that the insurrection is behind us could be even more dangerous than the illusion that the COVID pandemic is behind us as well.”

While many more details have emerged since then, with the promise of extensive public hearings next year, Republican support for subverting future elections has only grown stronger since then.

Meanwhile Democrats tried to make democracy work. On March 11, President Joe Biden signed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, which we called “the most consequential and most popular rescue package since the New Deal.” Although no Republicans in Congress voted for it, it was so popular that even a majority of Republican voters supported it. “It could be the harbinger of a new era — like the New Deal — in which Americans see government playing a crucial role in bettering their lives, thus restoring faith in our democracy,” and there were already a string of bills passed by the House to do just that. But, “that faith could be strangled, rather than restored,” we warned, “if Republicans have their way — relying on the Senate filibuster and a wave of over 250 voter-suppression bills in 43 states. … We could be headed the way of India or Brazil.” Unfortunately, that has been the dominant direction in Washington this past year.

Biden’s more long-term “Build Back Better” agenda was split into two bills. The bipartisan infrastructure bill, eventually signed in November, and the still-delayed “human infrastructure” bill that “makes major investments in childcare, education, healthcare and housing just to bring America in line with its international competitors,” as we described in October, adding, “Its climate agenda and broader environmental agenda will benefit families far beyond the 10-year time-frame.” Failure to pass it this year is perhaps the biggest missing story of the year — other than preventing the next coup.

Just before Christmas,  West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin reversed months of public promises and declared he would not support the bill — despite enormous benefits to his home state.

But Washington wasn’t the only place where nationally-important events unfolded this year. Two kinds of nationally significant events that occurred nationwide reverberated specifically in California and the Southland as well: extreme weather events, reflecting the climate crisis, calling out for action, and more localized pro- and anti-democratic struggles, catalyzed by various hopes and fears.

In mid-February a winter storm enveloped most of the continental U.S., but hit Texas especially hard. “The state’s climate denialism, free market deregulation, and lack of infrastructure investment all contributed significantly to the singular catastrophe that struck Texas,” we noted, while California “is seen as a beacon of climate enlightenment.” But that was highly misleading, we reported, “according to the just-released ‘Environmental Scorecard’ from the California League of Conservation Voters” (which changed its name this year to California Environmental Voters), which gave the state a score of 74%, a barely-passing grade. And our local ports vividly illustrated the problems. “Neither climate policy (involving CO2 and methane, primarily) nor air quality policy (ozone, NOX, SOX and VOCs) are comprehensively addressed, much less is there an integrated plan dealing with both,” we reported.

This year — as drought conditions covered 95% of the western states, and Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a drought state of emergency in 50 of California’s 58 counties, while calling Californians to cut water usage by 15% — activists and lawmakers advanced a much more ambitious and comprehensive agenda. Again, it was often stymied by fossil-fuel interests. But the sheer volume of legislation and supporting activism resulted in significantly more progress this year, with some measures incorporated into the budget process, an additional $15 billion plus invested in the California Comeback Plan’s climate package, and an executive order by Gov. Newsom directing the California Air Resources Board (CARB) to evaluate achieving carbon neutrality by 2035, a full decade faster than current state policy requires.

In March, Costa Mesa Mayor Katrina Foley became the first Democratic woman on the Orange County Board of Supervisors, and the first Democrat to hold the Second District seat since 1894. It was a local reflection of a nationwide phenomenon, seen most vividly last year with Democratic victories in Georgia’s two U.S. Senate races following Joe Biden’s victory in November. But such proactive reflections of democratic hope were relatively few compared to the barrage of fear-based anti-democratic attacks, the most prominent of which were decisively beaten back.

Newsom made national news as the target of a recall effort that was one facet of the GOP’s scorched-earth attack on democratically elected Democrats, following in the footsteps of Trump’s failed coup. We also reported on the failed attempt to recall Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón, as well — an attempt funded by two billionaires listed on the LA Business Journal’s list of “Wealthiest Angelenos,” one of them a $2 million Trump megadonor.

“The Gascón recall campaign is also an attempt to overturn the 2020 election, but in more local sense, revolving around race and criminal justice reform,” we reported. Gascón’s election was just one of several fronts in this fight locally: “County Measure J, dedicating funding to redress racial injustice — including alternatives to incarceration — passed by almost 15 points, and Proposition 17, restoring parolees voting rights, passed by 17 points, while Proposition 20, which would have rolled back several important criminal justice reforms, was defeated by 16 points.”

Exaggerated fear of rising crime is a perennial conservative weapon, wildly out of touch with a 27-year trend of declining rates of violent and property crime, but “social organizing, particularly the Movement for Black Lives, has profoundly unsettled the assumptions that masqueraded for so long as ‘commonsense’: that policing and prisons are the inevitable response to social harm,” historian Julilly Kohler-Hausmann explained. As conservatives worked to mount a backlash, we examined how this most recent wave of fear-fanning contrasts with reality. Other kinds of crimes are commonly ignored.

For example, domestic violence is almost as common as stranger violence, “Yet, for most of American history, domestic violence wasn’t even regarded as a crime, unless it reached the level of homicide, and parents hitting children is commonly seen as ‘discipline,’ not ‘violence,’” we noted. Wage theft via avoiding the minimum wage victimized 4.5 million people, according to one study, for an average of $3,300 per victim, “well above the threshold for felony theft in every state,” but wage theft isn’t even a crime (except in Colorado and Minnesota), it’s merely a tort, something you can sue for, but not call a cop. More broadly, “White-collar crime is thought to involve an annual economic loss of more than $700 billion annually from corporate fraud, professional fraud, employee theft, and tax evasion and an annual toll of at least 100,000 deaths,” according to the book, Social Problems: Continuity and Change. Both the cost and death tolls dwarf the figures from official crime statistics.

While the Gascón recall never got off the ground, the Newsom recall gained national attention, though he ended up winning handily, almost duplicating his near-record 2018 election victory. But our coverage shed light on two major problems: the need for significant reform of the recall process, and the deeply pernicious, neo-fascist politics of the GOP’s leading candidate, Larry Elder, who was both the mentor and career promoter of Trump’s chief immigration ideologue. Their shared underlying ideology is best expressed by the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, promoted on Fox News by Tucker Carlson. “You have one people, and in the space of a generation you have a different people,” its originator, French conspiracy theorist Renaud Camus explained, “thus equating immigration not just to invasion, but to genocide, and requiring genocidal violence in response,” we explained.

Shortly before Newsom’s victory, Proposition 22 — which stripped gig workers of almost all workers’ rights — was declared unconstitutional, a major victory for working people nationwide. Gig companies spent $220 million promoting Prop 22, utterly obscuring its anti-labor provisions, including its prohibition of the right to organize, which was “utterly unrelated to its stated common purpose,” the judge ruled, and thus violated the California constitution’s requirement that an initiate have a single common purpose. It also prohibited the legislature from enacting workers’ compensation protections, which was also found unconstitutional.

The deceptive way Prop 22 was originally passed echoed some of the problems with the initiative process exposed by the Newsom recall. A serious effort to reform one or both of them could be on the ballot next year.

The day after Newsom’s recall victory was the 20th anniversary of 9/11, which we marked by noting that after 9/11, a world-spanning Gallup poll of 34 countries found the vast majority wanted justice, not war in response, favoring extradition and trial by more than 5-to-1. The U.S. was one of just three exceptions, with a slight majority—54%—favoring military action, but that came with virtually no exposure to contrary views. “A study conducted by Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting found 44 op-eds in the New York Times and the Washington Post favoring war in the first three weeks after 9/11, compared to just two op-eds opposed,” we noted. Had we had a free, uncensored discussion in the press, a vast ongoing tragedy could have been completely avoided.