President Marjorie Taylor-Green

I follow The Handmaid’s Tale, the Hulu TV series, devotedly. Early in the series we learn that religious fanatics took over the U.S. by storming the U.S. Capitol and machine-gunning everybody. I think about that a lot because, especially now, the Capitol has become a soft target. There’s no telling how many Capitol police, Congressional staff, and Members of Congress themselves are not compromised and would facilitate such an operation. The new leadership of the House of Representatives will be throughly infiltrated by MAGA fanatics. Capitol security will be a dead letter.

In Handmaids, the basis of political support for this revolt is said to be a global crisis in fertility. It’s not clear how the new regime’s childbirth policies would fix that. The religion of the new regime is a weird take on Christian fundamentalism. It is also hard to see how such a doctrine could catch on. Jesus, for instance, is never mentioned in the show.

Getting back to the threat of a putsch, it’s easy to imagine a number of Republican governors hanging back from any response until “we can find out what the hell is going on.” As for Democratic governors, I submit the case of New York, where the Democrats cannot even protect their own safe seats. I think better of Illinois and the Left Coast.

So would the revolt be successful? I think not, but it would still do a lot of damage. Collateral violence would break out all over the country. Most of the January 6 defendants will get out sooner or later and be available. There’s a fascist outfit called the '“Three Percenters” who maintain that the American revolution was made by that proportion of the population. Right now I’d say the percentage favoring some kind of uprising is much higher than three percent. At any rate, these fellows are too dumb to realize their project would fail.

The Federal security services and military are rife with all manner of potential insurrectionists. A big difference is that a Democratic White House would summon all available forces to deal with any assault. Unlike 2021, there would be no ambiguity on that front. Between the D.C. Metropolitan Police and whoever is running Maryland, substantial help would be on the way. I wish I could say the same for our Virginia governor.

We are far from out of the woods.