Thirty years ago today, tanks filed past our window at the American consulate in Oran, Algeria's second city. We'd put the kids to bed, said good night to our dinner guests, when I noticed that there was unusual traffic noise just below. It was surreal: a tank was maneuvering to make a U-turn just in front of our venerable building. Up and down the boulevard, a line of tanks and APCs. Algeria's coup ousting its president, overturning an election, and jailing the winners was underway... triggering a bloody civil war that lasted a decade. January 11, 1992: see LA Times report.
The January 6 anniversary of the Trump attempt to overturn the U.S. presidential election is barely over, but articles and interviews with scholars of authoritarianism, of democracy-ending regimes, and of civil wars continue to remind us that the danger has not passed.
Barbara Walter, a University of California San Diego political scientist who was part of a study commissioned by the CIA to identify precursors to political violence in other countries, has started to see some of the main signs in her own country. Her podcast in the New Yorker makes sober listening.
I am not suggesting that the actual coup by the Algerian military, leading to a decade-long civil war that killed hundreds of thousands is akin to the attempted "constitutional" coup by defeated president Trump and his supporters culminating in the violence of January 6, 2021. That embarrassing fiasco is being dealt with by the January 6 House Select Committee and by the Justice Department. But Professors Walters' principal points - that civil wars are preceded by demonization of the opposing side and that the breakdown of democracy is a precursor to violence - make me very concerned about the Algerian "model" and its relevance to the US.
Contrary to the US, Algeria had no long history of democracy, and prior to the brief window of free elections in 1990 and 1991, it was always a foregone conclusion that the governing FLN party would win. Until it didn't - twice losing to the Islamist party FIS in the country's first fair elections. And it was the fear on the part of the privileged elite -- the army and oligarchs who'd been benefiting from Algeria's oil and gas riches -- that democracy would end their decades-long kleptocracy, which precipitated the coup. After the ensuing bloodshed, they tried to rewrite history and made noises about the threat of "democratic terrorism" to justify their action.
In the US, we have a political party, the Republicans, which works to stoke fears of the end of privilege by a white, rural population on its way to becoming a demographic minority. In state after state, laws are being put in place to cement minority rule through elections that will be tilted in their favor. And political demonization has gotten literal, with Congressional and other prominent Republicans mouthing Q-Anon crazy talk about Democratic politicians. Death threats against elected officials are in their thousands, and we've already seen in 2020 armed militias threaten state capitols.
"It could never happen here" is something that fewer Americans say with any certainty. That's what I'm thinking about today, the anniversary of when I witnessed a "successful" coup.