The Mob at the Capitol Should Remind You of 1920s Germany
And lots of other countries where the leader and his followers have stormed the gates
In the late 1980s, a band of unhappy Philippine military officers who felt they, not Corazon Aquino, the elected president, should be running the government staged seven uprisings to press their point. They were egged on by a populist colonel named Gringo Honasan, their charismatic leader who had only recently helped to overthrow the former president, Ferdinand Marcos. None of the uprisings succeeded. But the image both abroad and in Manila, where I was posted at the time as a correspondent, was rightly of a place somewhere between a new democracy and a Hobbesian dystopia, with every person for themselves.
Washington, D.C. on Wednesday looked and felt a lot like Manila and a number of other places to which most Americans would reject or resent comparison: Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan; Tbilisi, Georgia; Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan. Places where the notion of “election” is highly fungible, and where I lived and visited in later foreign postings. Places where, to nearly everyone’s mind, the outcome is never settled and always subject to debate. Where, two or so years later, the military or any armed group can and does step in and decides, well, we’ll be ruling from now on.
