July 5th, 2012
A couple weeks ago, before the Roberts Court proved to be a source of wisdom and justice, James Fallows was worried that the U.S. Supreme Court, which he claimed was indistinguishable from the courts in communist China, was carrying out a “coup.”
Fallows took a lot of heat for this. Rightly so.
But a reader just reminded me that there’s an even deeper level of silliness involved here. Because back in 1991, Fallows was wishing for a coup in the United States.
I can’t find a link to the full article on The Atlantic’s site. Here’s some lengthy quotation from a paper on the subject of coups:
Fallows wrote: “I am beginning to think that the only way the national government can do anything worthwhile is to invent a security threat and turn the job over to the military.”
Then Fallows went on:
According to our economic and political theories, most agencies of the government have no special standing to speak about the general national welfare. Each represents a certain constituency; the interest groups fight it out. The military, strangely, is the one government institution that has been assigned legitimacy to act on its notion of the collective good. “National defense” can make us do things—train engineers, build highways—that long-term good of the nation or common sense cannot.
To be fair to Fallows, maybe the distinction he’s trying to make is that military coups have salutary effects for the body politic while judicial coups are the bad ones.
Update: Galley Reader F.R. sends along a pdf of the piece: James Fallows, “Military Efficiency.”
Jay Goode July 5, 2012 at 12:51 pm
Coups are not new. Lincoln did that.