Is the US ripe for a coup?

[Gawdzilla Sama]

In August of 1945, after the two atomic bombs, after the soviet union attacked and after the Emperor had decided to surrender, staff officers of the Imperial Guard division, stationed in Tokyo at the Imperial Palace, tried to stage a coup to prevent the broadcast of the surrender recording.  Those who knew what was going on led their troops into the palace itself and the troops followed the orders of their commanders.  The rallying cry was roughly "we have to rescue the emperor from the evil men who have advised him to surrender."

The coup was crushed when troops who were not involved were summoned.

Soldiers obey orders.

It is important to point out certain relevant cultural background.   The imperial Japanese army, despite its popular image in the west as a fanatically obedient force, actually held insubordination and mutiny to be a hallowed tradition.  

There is even a special word for it in the army field manual - gekokujo.  It means the rule of the subordinate over his superior.    The Japanese army, and culture, held that it is honorable for a subordinate to disobey orders, or to act in such a way as to force the hand of his superiors, if his intention was to ensure the goal which one’s superiors ought to be pursuing is better achieved.

From the 1920 onwards, gekokujo by field grade officers of the Japanese army shaped Japanese foreign policy, was behind multiple coups in Tokyo, started wars with China, was behind the humiliating Japanese defeat in the hands of the soviet army and the soon to be famous Georgy Zhukov in huge but little known in the west border conflict at Nomenhan in Mongolia in 1939, directly influenced the choice to attack the US in Pearl Harbor rather than the USSR again in Siberia, the conduct of the Japanese army in Malaysia.

Bushido says while a subordinate should carry out acts of gekokujo, he should also demonstrate the honorable ness of his intention by committing suicide afterwards.   But in reality during WWII, in the Japanese army, insubordinagd or mutinous officers who acted this way rarely committed suicide or were punished.  Often they were given a slap on the wrist, temporally reassigned for appearance sake, and then promoted.   Even officers who assassinated the cabinet ministers, and who for sake of appearances were condeamned to death by courts martial, remain honored in the roll call of the units in which they served.

And gekokujo was honorable if it advanced the cause of Japan, adhering to Yamato.

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While all that is true in this case the soldiers did obey even with the insane rationale that they were "rescuing" the emperor from his own advisors.

It wasn't insane for the enlisted men, they got their information from the officers. The was idea that the surrender faction had given the Emperor false information and had to be extracted from that faction.