Remember January 6 (1929 ... and 2021): dictatorship by ‘auto-coup’

Kurt Gödel in Princeton, 1970 (image: CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

On January 6, 1929, Yugoslavia went from a sort-of democracy – a constitutional monarchy, like Britain, but with less history – to a dictatorship. We know from anecdotes and academic-legal musing, that the famed mathematician and logician Kurt Gödel claimed to have proved – logically – that something similar could happen in America, within the terms of the constitutional. He didn’t get the chance to say how it might happen (an interesting story on its own, which we’ll come to). Nor did he publish his proof.

A bit like Fermat’s “last theorem” did in mathematics, this puzzle circles among students of law and logic (Gopnik, 2021; Rockmore, 2018), and more widely during US presidential elections, especially after the events of January 6, 2021.

It’s circling again right now. On Monday, January 6, 2025, a new Congress of the United States will convene. A new presidential term starts two weeks later. Some expect that to herald a new era for the Constitution.

Article V of the US Constitution allows for amendments, of course, but it’s written with barriers that make amending it tortuously difficult. The fix it creates is widely thought to be one of the beauties of the Constitution, an elegant solution guaranteeing continuity in change. Amendments require super-majorities of both the House of Representatives and the Senate, and then an even-more-super majority of state legislatures must agree. The constitution is, therefore, a living document, one that can evolve, but only in ways that hold together layers of democratic representation, itself a concept of paradox (Pitkin, 2023; Runciman, 2007).

Gödel’s claim is thus of considerable theoretical importance. But especially this year, we’re concerned with its importance in practice.

Hard-right political parties are making gains in many part of the world, including for the European Parliament, a development that won praise from Russia and led President Macron of France to call a snap parliamentary election, a risky attempt to reassert the legitimacy of a centrist approach. There are, of course, US elections coming in November, where talk is widespread of how the second presidency for Donald Trump could create what the Trumpian policy director at the Republican National Committee has called a “post constitutional moment”.

How can we learn from the Yugoslav experience?

A decade ago, a Florida legal scholar Enrique Guerra-Pujol (2013) documented the discussion of “Gödel’s loophole”, before anyone imagined a real possibility of a first Trump White House, let alone a January 6 insurrection.

An interview Guerra-Pujol gave around that time tells us that Gödel made that claim to a judge overseeing the 1947 hearing to grant Gödel US citizenship. Albert Einstein and the founder of game theory, Oskar Morgenstern, were his character witnesses. All three scholars took refuge from Hitler’s German Reich in at Princeton University’s Institute for Advanced Studies.

Ever the scholar, Gödel studied the Constitution in detail in preparation for meeting the judge. But the judge didn’t have time to hear the detail of the proof, and Gödel never told Einstein or Morgenstern what he had found.

Recently, a second essay Guerra-Pujol wrote a decade ago started making the rounds again. That paper (Guerra-Pujol, 2014) examines in detail three cases of auto-coups-d’etat, including the case of King Aleksandar of Yugoslavia, who “unilaterally abrogated his country’s constitution and assumed full dictatorial powers” – on January 6, 1929. After building a Gödel-esque case, Guerra-Pujol asks: Was the king’s decree itself an unconstitutional act, or did it “create a new constitutional order, one that ‘legalized’ his self-coup ex post?”

Use of executive orders (decrees by another name and a mechanism that finds scant traction in the US Constitution), has become increasingly common in face of the legislative paralysis over the past three presidencies, and could be even worse in the next.

Surely this is a case of …

Gopnik, A. (2021, November 26). Kurt Gödel’s Loophole and Donald Trump’s Defiance. Daily Comment for The New Yorker. Retrieved from https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/kurt-godels-loophole-and-donald-trumps-defiance

Guerra-Pujol, F. E. (2013). Gödel's Loophole. Capital University Law Review, 41(3), 637-673. https://ssrn.com/abstract_id=2010183

Guerra-Pujol, F. E. (2014, September). Gödel's Interbellum. SSRN eLibrary. Retrieved from https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2489673

Pitkin, H. F. (2023). The Concept of Representation. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Rockmore, D. (2018, August 6). Is There a Logical Inconsistency in the Constitution? contribution to Slate.com. Retrieved from https://slate.com/technology/2018/08/is-there-a-logical-inconsistency-in-the-constitution.html

Runciman, D. (2007). The Paradox of Political Representation. Journal of Political Philosophy, 15(1), 93-114. doi:https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9760.2007.00266.x