Reply #9: Depends what you mean... [View All]

My problem with calling it a coup is that the term tends to be loaded with all kinds of false implications. When people think "coup" they usual think of something like Chile 1973 (or Hati 2003), not just a failure to let people who won an election take office, but an overthrow of the whole system of elective government in favor of a dictatorship. That's just not what happened. Florida 2000 was a blatantly, absurdly transperantly stolen election. And I think that it is profoundly racist for some people to say that every one needs to "get over it," particularly if the person advocating that people "get over it" is white--considering that the main device by which the election was stolen was the systematic disenfrachisement of tens of thousands of minority voters.

BUT we should also keep in mind that it wasn't exactly the first stolen election in American history...and, sadly, it probably won't be the last. There have been several cases of stolen elections in the past that I doubt most DUers would wish to refer to as "coups"--for example, the 1960 Presidential election.

The rhetoric of the "2000 coup" is often casually linked to such things as the appointment of Ashcroft, the passage of the USA-PATRIOT Act and all the other attacks on civil liberties that have gone with it. Scary shit, granted, but not the kind of dramatic change indicated by the pre-2000 and post-2000 as indicated by the "coup" rhetoric. Rather, especially given the unprecedented opportunity and public acceptance after 9/11 (which Clinton wasn't "lucky" enough to have fall in his lap), the Patriot Act, etc., was simply a logical continuation of a proccess of eroding civil liberties that was already well underway in the Clinton era. Remember the "Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996"? That was Clinton's baby (not a Republican initiative that Clinton "sold out" to, but a Clinton initiative, exploiting Oklahoma City just as Bush would exploit 9/11 for the Patriot Act), and it was also some very scary shit, the first step along that road, and today a favorite tool of the Bush/Ashcroft Justice Department.

I think that the stolen election in 2000 was a symptom, not a cause, of the continuing proccess of declining democracy in America.