The call by Gen. Michael Flynn (Ret.) for a “Myanmar-style coup” in the U.S. at a QAnon meeting in Texas this week is only the latest evidence of the active coup efforts orchestrated by Russia’s Putin against the U.S. He was exposed by someone recording his remarks, and his denying it doesn’t erase that recordings.

Recall that Flynn was present at the meeting with Putin in Moscow ahead of the 2016 election of Trump that the Steele Dossier reported. Others included the presidential candidate of the U.S. Green Party and a representative of the Lyndon LaRouche organization.

Flynn is flat-out an agent of a hostile foreign power, Russia, just as James Clapper, the former director of U.S. National Intelligence, said the same of Trump, himself, in December 2017 in remarks on CNN (see my column, “Clapper Calls Trump a Russian Asset,” FCNP, Dec. 21, 2017).

Flynn’s pro-military-coup rallying cry before the QAnon meeting this week also confirms that the QAnon-led Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol was a straight-forward Putin-directed operation.

It was in April 2017 that U.S. Rep. Don Beyer told me how often Virginia’s U.S. Senator Mark Warner, then vice-chair (now chair) of the Senate Intelligence Committee said in his company that “the realities behind the alleged ties and collusion between Trump and the Russians are ‘far worse’ than anyone not privy to classified information realizes.” (see my column, “When the Russians Moved Far Right,” FCNP, Apr. 26, 2017).

So, with the help of a desperate and shrinking Republican Party, flailing under the strong-arm control of Russian agent and criminal Mafia boss Trump, Putin’s coup is still on. Recall that it took Hitler a decade from the time of his failed Beer Hall Putsch in 1923 until his full takeover as genocidal dictator in Germany. A courageous rising up of Americans to oust Trump in the November 2020 election threw the fascist coup of America off track, but it is now regrouping.

The real test for democracy in the U.S. is yet to come. Neither Russia nor China think that democracy can succeed in the U.S. and they are contending for control when the day of its demise comes. In their minds, the world then comes down to a two-way global competition between them. (Even the tiny LaRouche organizational residue is reportedly split now, following the death of its founder in 2019, between pro-Russian and pro-Chinese factions. But both, naturally, are pro-authoritarian, anti-democratic and anti-American.)

America’s role cannot be to choose sides between those two or to try playing one against the other. The only way American can succeed through this trying period is to reassert the merits of true democracy in the direction last year’s revival of popular passion for civil rights and justice has begun pointing.

The young experiment in Constitutional democracy won its Revolutionary War, but its British adversaries did not give up seeking to retake control. The American revolution did not succeed until it won a terrible Civil War. But even then, sewers of division and hate remained unrelenting. The times have changed but the fight for democracy and justice-for-all has not.

In the 1970s, democracy’s enemies unleashed a massive cultural offensive called “postmodernism.” Its fascist influencers were the likes of Michel Foucault. The “postmodernist” mantra has been that love and equality are fictions and only power and pleasure define human social reality.

The great Princeton scholar of the Enlightenment and its American democratic experiment, Jonathan Israel, wrote that Foucault, in particular, proposed a philosophical system in which democracy, or the American experiment, was impossible.

It was with like-minded postmodernists that the “post-truth era” was introduced in the 1970s, and with it the rise of the irrational cults like QAnon that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6.

America’s survival and prosperity need a massive reawakening, a popular revival of how and why democracy remains humanity’s best option. The great ideas of the Enlightenment — the primacy of science, reason, the radical claim that all persons are created equal, the formation of democratic institutions and a fierce passion to defend all these — have now to breathe new life into our republic.

(To be continued)

Nicholas Benton may be emailed at nfbenton@fcnp.com.