The End of Democracy (it's a cookbook)
How he'd do it
Inspired by Curtis Yarvin’s excellent appearance on The Frame Podcast, I thought I’d write about how a theoretical right wing villain president could actually take control of the American state and end modern American democracy. This would, of course, be a tragedy for those of us who enjoy modern American democracy and want to go where it’s taking us, and I’m only writing about it as a thought experiment, in much the same way as Edward Luttwak wrote his Coup d'État: A Practical Handbook, which I’m using as a rough framework.
We had to destroy the village in order to save it
Why would anybody want to end American democracy in the first place? Obviously, out of pure evil and personal dedication to racism, sexism, trans- and homophobia. Perhaps due to being a Russian agent. But I suspect that if you were to ask our theoretical democracy ender about their motivations, they’d say something like this: “the system is broken, is making itself more broken and can’t be fixed from the inside. The Left is insane. Like the rest of us, leftists suffer from the effects of insane Leftist policies and crave order and sanity; subconsciously, they understand that order and sanity can only be imposed by a father figure, the Daddy they have been trained to hate and fear. Like teenagers, they try to provoke Daddy to discipline them by acting out through progressively more insane Leftist ideologies, which turn into progressively more insane Leftist policies. The oppression of which the Left falsely accuses the Right is exactly what it secretly craves.”
“Unfortunately, in the modern democratic system,” our villain would say, “Daddy does not exist. The right is a sham, pro wrestling kayfabe. The system really runs itself, and is inherently leftist. The state doesn’t have to obey the president unless it wants to; it just has to pretend to obey. Outrageous Leftist demands for more misrule (which are actually veiled demands for order to be imposed) are taken at face value. More misrule results, which leads to even more outrageous demands for misrule. All of this leads to a Bizarro World where the US government is paying to fly hundreds of thousands of cat-eating Haitians and so on into flyover country.”
“A right wing president can only roll back some small percentage of the changes imposed by the leftist system, winning battles at great cost while losing the war. The only way to fix this is to scrap the whole thing. This must be done sooner rather than later, because pretty soon the mass import of new voters from the Third World will ensure that nobody to the right of Kamala will ever be able to get elected again. American democracy will take its final form: politicians appointed by an oligarchy and bureaucracy which are accountable to nobody, in a single-party state where elections are decided by third world masses which it imports continuously from the worst places possible; a middle class reduced to the status of livestock to be milked, shorn and slaughtered to keep the whole thing going. A giant California, with nowhere to run. In short, to save American democracy, we must end it.”
Of course, that’s a terrible thing to suggest-maybe even illegal. But how would our villain do it, if he were to do it? What would a successful American regime change look like?
He can end it now. He can end it for all time.
First, what is the desired end state? It is one where the different parts of the federal government all do whatever it is you tell them to do, where you are actually driving the car instead of pretending to drive it. People obey orders consistently when the implied alternatives are firing or jail. The latter implies that you need a Justice Department and judiciary which also answer to you. And this itself implies control of the military, manifested in the ability to command troops.
Parenthetically, while the regime change would be led by a right wing president against a left wing state, it would not be a right wing phenomenon. Its end state would be neither rightist nor leftist but absolutist: an integrated state with high efficiency and cohesion, implementing policies driven by a clear and common goal and vision; an end to the constant low-grade civil war between the right and left and their proxies. Imagine an America whose government works as efficiently as that of Singapore.
What is the process by which one would achieve this end state? You could try just telling the people who nominally work for you what to do and see if they’ll listen. That didn’t work last time, and it won’t work this time. To take power, our villain needs to launch an autocoup.
The trigger
To destroy democracy, our villain must also save it. The State of Emergency must be declared to preempt a terrible crime-a coup attempt from the Left, an assassination plot. In this, he can take a page from the establishment’s playbook: at any given moment, there are hundreds or thousands of insane people, terrorists and criminals of various ideological and religious bends plotting such crimes. The bread and butter of security services is to identify them and shepherd them along to be arrested at the last minute, or not, as the situation may require. It should be trivial for our villain’s loyal security men to do the same. Perhaps terror is not even required; would anyone be surprised at the discovery of a wide ranging modern day Business Plot, designed by deep state swamp creatures and their wealthy backers? Saving democracy in the nick of time requires some extreme-but temporary!-measures.
The shape of regime change
It would not look like a Color Revolution. In a Color Revolution, you have all the important people and institutions on your side: Harvard, the international press, the banks, the State Department and the CIA. Our antihero’s revolution is AGAINST democracy, human rights, freedom, all of that good stuff. All of the important people and institutions are against him, by default.
It would also not look like the French Algiers Putsch of 1961, in which the hardest, baddest mofos of the French army-guys who’d parachuted into Nazi-occupied France, fought the Vietnamese Communists, survived captivity after Dien Bien Phu, defeated the Algerian insurgency-tried to take over France and failed completely. They captured Algiers using their battle hardened paratroopers and then…just sat there. De Gaulle, who had maintained freedom of movement and communications in Paris, went on the air and called upon the French soldiers and civilians to disobey the Putschists, who then raced to turn themselves in. Our villain doesn’t want that, and therefore he will not rely on generals.
A coup is “a process of infiltration and subversion in which a small but critical part of the security forces are totally subverted, while much of the rest is temporarily neutralized.” The objective is to “paralyze and control the technological power points of the modern state: the rail and road centers, the telecommunication networks, the power stations and the factories.” A coup works by taking over the bureaucratic machinery of the state. Luttwak warns that in sufficiently sophisticated bureaucracies, the machine can exercise discretion as to which orders are proper and which are not, and this makes a coup difficult; this is the case in the US, but imperial decay, general bureaucratic demoralization and personal degeneracy may paradoxically make a coup either; in a case where capacity, initiative and dynamicism are concentrated in small parts of the machine, you only need those parts on your side. The rest merely need to be neutralized.
The basic problem with using modern senior military leaders for a coup is that they’re company men. They got to where they are by never really pissing off anyone above them. In a couple of years, they can retire and get cushy jobs in the military-industrial complex, earning seven figure salaries. They and their families are insulated against the social dysfunction created by Leftist policies. What are you are offering a company man who spent decades enduring discipline, danger and privation and now has a reasonable expectation of lifelong prestige, comfort, wealth and security? The opportunity to spend the rest of his life in federal prison. Not a great proposition, and you’d be hard pressed to find takers.
Fortunately, you need neither the support of neither the conventional military nor senior leaders in order to seize power. You only need SOF and the NSA.
SOF maneuver units are regiment-sized, commanded by colonels and lieutenant colonels. They are the most capable combat units of the US military by far: highly aggressive and maneuverable, in large part self-supporting with their own logistics, transport, intelligence, communications and dedicated aviation elements. No other units in the US armed forces are as capable of securing key terrain and infrastructure, conducting precision decapitation missions and in general functioning in the swift, dynamic fashion required to ensure the autocoup’s success. In addition, SOF personnel tend to right wing political views (often to the extreme,) and would be more receptive to the need for drastic political change than their conventional counterparts.
The NSA’s political culture, by contrast, is more akin to that found in academia, but its participation is essential for the reasons described below. Key NSA leaders and personnel who would be willing to lead the effort need to be identified and recruited. There are precedents which suggest that amenable personnel exist, some in high ranking positions within the institution.
The majority of the NSA would need to be neutralized for the duration of the operation. Setting up a few roadblocks and turning off their key cards and parking passes would probably be mostly sufficient; similarly for most other relevant government agencies in the DC area.
Levels of neutralization
Most immediately, every modern organization requires coordination and a unity of mission to function. This requires key leadership to be able to communicate. This, in turn, requires access to telecommunications: cell phones and internet (both green and classified networks.) The NSA has the necessary access to cut these off granularly.
Beyond denial attacks, with modern AI, spoofing phone calls at scale is easy; a corps commander in North Carolina may get a call from someone who sounds just like his commander in DC telling him to stay put, followed by written orders on his SIPRNet email. He, his staff and subordinates may also get calls and emails warning them of spoofing, causing them to mistrust all incoming digital communications, right before their phone and email accounts stop working.
If desired, a communications blackout could be imposed across the board after the initial phase of spoofing has destroyed cohesion and paralyzed the targets. The only communications networks which should continue to function should be those which are completely controlled by the villain and his allies (for instance, Starlink, if Elon is onboard) and those which are essential to the continued functioning of civilian infrastructure (financial and otherwise).
In the bigger picture, delegitimization of the incumbent political framework ensures any opposing organizations which have not yet been neutralized in terms of ability to communicate and function can not successfully appeal to legitimacy. Given the obvious politicization of the federal intelligence and law enforcement leadership over the last decade and a half, their opposition would be viewed as motivated by strictly political considerations rather than by the desire to defend America, the Constitution or any other ideals. In this sense, they’ve already self-neutralized.
Further, our villain would announce his intention to amnesty all opponents who do not actively oppose him. This frames a dilemma for potential opposition leaders: oppose the coup and risk personal punishment, or find excuses to stay passive, “wait for clarification” and cover their bases. At worst, should the coup fail, they’ll be able to use the spoofing and communication attacks described above as convincing excuses for their lack of action. Given that by nature they rose to their positions by playing it safe and avoiding taking unnecessary risks, it’s unlikely that senior bureaucrats will pick this moment to begin acting heroically and taking initiative in the absence of orders and the opportunity for coordination with their peers.
Geography
The coup would have to deal with two centers of gravity; the East Coast megalopolis and the West Coast, the latter split into Southern California and the greater Seattle area. Both are ethnically fractured, and both suffer from dysfunctional local governments. Both have large military forces permanently stationed there; the majority of these must be neutralized, as described above, and a minority subverted as described below. The East Coast is much more important, due not so much to its larger military concentrations as to the fact that it holds the centers of federal governance, intelligence and law enforcement agencies, as well as America’s financial center. The forces on the West Coast should be neutralized in a holding action, and the East Coast prioritized. Key transportation nodes for movement of forces from one coast to another need to be monitored and neutralized, if needed.
Human Resources
The details of identifying and recruiting active participants in the coup are beyond the scope of this article. In general terms, coups rely on recruiting members of groups alienated by the ruling regime. The ideology of the ruling regime since the Obama years, which has been colorfully described as “gay race Communism” has done a fine job at alienation, as have various other initiatives such as the coerced vaccination campaign and federal DEI initiatives. The extensive use of contractors by both SOF and the NSA provides a large pool of potential recruits who have extensive experience and insight and yet have either failed to climb the career ladder to the top or are not interested in climbing it.
Law enforcement in the US has massive resources and manpower but is highly fragmented and bureaucratic. Law enforcement in key areas of operation needs to at a minimum be neutralized for the duration of the operation, using means similar to those for the neutralization of conventional military forces described above. The cooperation of small law enforcement units, combat advised by SOF liaisons, can be very useful for securing key targets; their utility needs to be weighed against the security risks associated with gaining that cooperation. Liaisons with urban police departments should be established as soon as possible during the consolidation phase after the initial coup, to prevent mass disturbances and looting, and to forcibly re-establish the public order which has been steadily degraded over the last few decades, as manifested in, e.g., massive homeless tent encampments and open air drug markets.
Elected politicians and senior civil service employees should, generally speaking, be neutralized by control of their communications infrastructure and office spaces as discussed above. Any potentially militant or politically significant personnel should be detained through pinpoint raids. As the events of January 6th suggest, today’s elected politicians are not made of particularly stern stuff, and it’s unlikely any of them would drape themselves in the flag and head out to supervise the construction of barricades.
Local leadership, specifically at state and county level, can be coopted as appropriate to gain ad hoc access to National Guard and local law enforcement forces for force multiplication. Large parts of USSOF are experienced in combat advising local troops, acting, in effect, as a force multiplier. A six man team of special operators can provide leadership, intelligence and communications for a company’s worth of host nation conventional troops. As described below, this means that the coup’s maneuver units can effectively grow by 1-2 orders of magnitude very rapidly when necessary to achieve manpower-intensive tasks with a limited force.
Transportation
Key transportation nodes in the immediate area of operations should be seized or otherwise neutralized. These include airports, rail nodes and highway junctions. The aim here is to prevent any forces which mobilize in support of the incumbent regime from maneuvering in the area of operations, and to keep key personnel from fleeing before they can be detained. These are examples of manpower-intensive tasks which could benefit from small units acting as force multipliers to coopted National Guard and law enforcement forces as described above.
International aspects
A transfer of power in a country is always a time of vulnerability to external attacks. American geography mitigates against the possibility of a land or sea invasion by conventional forces. A land invasion by unconventional forces has been ongoing for some time as the result of conscious federal policy, and won’t be made worse by the autocoup. America’s state-level enemies may be tempted to take advantage of the situation, but due to its short duration and uncertainty, and due to the bureaucratic nature of their governments, it is unlikely they will be able to move fast enough to cause any major damage. The credible threat of retaliation after the transfer of power is complete should serve as a major deterrent to foreign opportunistic predation.
Consolidation
After the initial stage, the institutions of the United States need to be rapidly taken under control and vetted. Those which are essential need to be brought back online and have liaisons assigned to them for coordination purposes. Those which are not need to have their operations suspended until further notice, and all employees sent home with full pay. Normalcy must be restored. In general, the lives and rights of law-abiding Americans must be secured, insofar as they do not engage in insurrectionary activities.
Obviously, tricking well meaning but naive people by spreading or platforming disinformation narratives, or organizing any sort of extremist insurgent organization must be strictly forbidden at this stage, with immediate and severe consequences for those who insist on doing so. What did you think a restoration meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays?
Long term
The details of how to best reform the United States of America to eliminate its chronic and terminal governmental dysfunction and make it deliver a world-class standard of governance are outside the scope of this article. The recommendations of Curtis Yarvin at Unqualified Reservations and the Gray Mirror are a good starting point. From recent interviews, it appears that highly placed and competent people are clearly thinking in this direction.
“…in Minecraft.”
For anyone who’s gotten this far in my extended description of this terrible imaginary reality, where the very foundations of the global empire are overthrown and abolished, don’t worry. It’s just a thought experiment. In reality, the US government will probably go on doing what it does, and Trump will probably mostly play along, just like he did last time. The Left’s desperate begging for a ruthless tyrant, disguised as condemnations of Trump as a ruthless tyrant, will go unanswered, causing it to act even crazier the next time one of its own takes office in four or eight years. The crown will continue to lay in the dirt, waiting for someone to pick it up, with more and more dirt building up on it, until it can no longer even be seen. Unless…
But anyway, enough talking about a post-Bibi Israel...
I’m glad someone else noticed the Handmaids Tale is a cry for help. The only one I’d help is the one on the right, the others don’t look worth it.