‘There’s a word for the President of a country being pushed out by the military. It’s called a coup.” That’s from a tweet by Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota about Evo Morales, far-left Bolivian demagogue who had his country’s constitution changed to allow him to continue to rule past the pre-existing term limit. And then, according to international monitors, he shut down the election he should never have rightfully been able to stand in when it looked like the voting wouldn’t break his way.
So, is it, as Omar says, the very definition of a coup? The Organization of American States doesn’t think so. But Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez concurs with Omar’s designation: “What’s happening right now in Bolivia isn’t democracy, it’s a coup.” The two of them recently endorsed the 2020 presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders, who went with an only slightly more equivocal version of the same word choice: “I am very concerned about what appears to be a coup in Bolivia, where the military, after weeks of political unrest, intervened to remove President Evo Morales.”
One wonders, by the Omar-AOC-Sanders definition laid out above, whether it would be a coup for government officials to drag an obstinate Donald Trump out of the White House if he lost the upcoming election but refused to vacate the seat of executive power. Something tells me the accepted definition would shift rather quickly. But we need not merely speculate about how “coup” applies to Trump. “Coup” is being abused on the right as well, with Trump’s defenders characterizing House fact-finding hearings to determine how to draft articles of impeachment as a “coup,” including in ten tweets from Trump himself.
“Coup” is short for “coup d’etat,” which near-literally translated is a “strike on the state.” There are other words for the use of force to overthrow governments and seize power, such as “putsch” or, for “the [leader] of a country being pushed out,” an “ouster.” But somehow “coup” is having a bit of a moment. Clearly the people using it sense that if they can designate something a coup, people will be sure it’s bad. That’s why it’s easier for politicians to have the pseudo-technical argument over whether this freighted word applies in some case, like Morales’s or Trump’s, than to get into the substantive stuff. It’s also why the moment they start doing so is the moment the word belongs in the junkyard of our collective vocabulary — using it becomes distracting and pointless rather than communicative.
Was there a “coup” in Bolivia? And is one ongoing in Washington? By the time we’re running to check the dictionary to settle major political disagreements, we’ve gotten stuck on the merely verbal. Check the facts instead.
—By Nicholas Clairmont
