Thomas Sowell Yearns for Apartheid, or Something Like It

Thomas Sowell is a long-time conservative African-American commentator who might be described as the ultimate in Uncle Toms if there weren't so many other black conservatives vying for the title. I remember Sowell and Walter Williams (another black conservative) deriding contemporary black public figures like Jesse Jackson before justifying slave-owners like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson as "products of the times."

In about as morally reprehensible position as he could take, Sowell seemed to think that the sins of slave-owners were much easier to forgive than the sins of black liberals.

Yesterday, in a National Review Online (NRO) column (via Matthew Yglesias), Sowell wonders if the "degeneracy" of American society doesn't call for a military coup.

Here's the degeneracy:

Our education system, our media, and our intelligentsia have all been unrelentingly undermining the values, the traditions, and the unity of this country for generations and, at the same time, portraying as “understandable” all kinds of deviance, from prostitution to drugs to riots.

And here's the yearning for the coup:

When I see the worsening degeneracy in our politicians, our media, our educators, and our intelligentsia, I can’t help wondering if the day may yet come when the only thing that can save this country is a military coup.

But thinking about the possibility of a right-wing military coup (the only kind in which Sowell is interested) in any kind of precise way leads to the conclusion that a kind of coup would have to be accompanied by an apartheid-like regime.

A military coup in the United States would be almost impossible. That's not for any sentimental reasons like the traditional subordination of the military to civilian rule. It's perfectly possible that a right-wing civilian president could someday order the American military to occupy the capital, arrest opposition leaders, and declare martial law in the same way that it's happened in other countries. Conservative thinkers like Harvey Mansfield, Newt Gingrich, and John Yoo have no problem justifying presidential authority that ignores the law, overturns the First Amendment, or engages in torture. Justifying or advocating a presidential coup would be the next logical step. In the case of a presidential military, the military still would be subordinate to civilian leadership. It would just be dictatorial rather than democratic civilian leadership.

Of course, Sowell might be thinking of a military coup to overthrow a Hillary or Obama administration instead.

The problem for a military coup is that there are only 2.8 million men and women in the combined active and reserve forces of the American military. Even if local, county, and state police forces (another 243,000) are thrown in. that makes an armed force of barely 3 million to control a country of 300 million with enormous urban areas that would be hostile to a right-wing military dictatorship. Even assuming that the whole American military would be devoted to the occupation of the United States, that's a 100-1 ratio where the Petraeus counter-insurgency doctrine holds that there should be 25 troops for every 1000 citizens, or a 40-1 citizen/troop ratio.

The military couldn't control the American population alone. Indeed, it might prove even more difficult for the American military to hold the United States than it already is to occupy Iraq.

For Sowell's dream of a military coup (the right-wing version of the American dream) to bear fruition, the military would need a form of mass assistance like a fascist movement, the racial "occupation" regimes of the segregation South, or apartheid South Africa. We can eliminate fascism because that's "so European." We can also eliminate the segregation South. Where the white South was a majority maintaining an occupation regime over a significant black minority, a Sowell style coup would require a right-wing minority of the population to control a large majority.

That's why the S0uth African apartheid regime does seem to fit the bill. In South Africa, a 20% white minority exercised brutal control over the vast black majority. That's what would have to happen in the U. S. for a right-wing coup to work. Evangelicals, neo-conservatives, economic conservatives, and hard-right talk show audiences--altogether about 20% of the population-- would have to mobilize to maintain dictatorial control over the rest of the population for a coup to succeed. Like Augosto Pinochet in Chile, they would have to engage in mass executions and disappearances during the first stages of a coup and maintain an enormous police/intelligence/ spy apparatus to sniff out dissent as the coup stabilized. Even more though, carrying out a right-wing coup would require the kind of large-scale control of residences, occupations, and mobility that characterized South African apartheid. Extremely intensive mechanisms of control are the only way that a 20% minority can control a majority of 160,000,000.

For that to happen, the right-wing would have to have a fratricidal fury like that of the Hutus in Rwanda or the Serbs in Bosnia.

As bad as the American right is, I don't see them as engaging in a fratricidal dictatorship.

At least not yet.

But then again. Neither Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama has been elected president either.