They didn’t come in jackbooted, but the shut down by an extremist faction of Republican Party thugs is/was basically a coup. The apparent trigger point was this frothy-mouthed obsession to defund the Affordable Care Act. The GOP did well at the polls in 2010, but voters gave Obama a second term and left the Democrats in control of the senate, thus dashing reality-based hopes of repealing the Affordable Care Act.
Given this turn of events the thugs went back to the huddle and decided they couldn’t wait until 2016 to bury the black guy and the Affordable Care Act. So they decided to violate the core democratic principle of majority rule, nullify the previous presidential election, and court economic disaster with a manufactured crisis.
Rather than being some off the cuff improvisation, it is traceable to a meeting reported by the New York Times and headed up by Ed Meese, a former Reagan administration attorney and right wing operative, with a loose knit cabal of conservative activists, many with substantial oil and gas holdings. They decided the only way to defund the Affordable Care Act was to shut down the government this fall. On purpose.
In essence this gang of thugs doesn’t fit within the normal spectrum of American politics; bear in mind Obama was elected nationally, twice. By temperament, outlook, and practice these folks are authoritarian, male supremacist, racist, xenophobic and misogynistic. They despise labor and are committed to the restoration of a high tech, low profile version of the old Antebellum planter aristocracy wherein all the wealth, all the power, and all reasonable access to both lies concentrated in the hands of a privileged few at the top. They consider their opponents, in essence we the people, illegitimate, un-American, and they ramp up paranoia and panic to the extreme with a willingness to pursue politics via anti-democratic and unconstitutional means.
Take a look at the 25 or so states where Reich-wing Republican governments rule and you will find a secessionist mentality and an utter loathing for every gain and right secured over the course of the 20th century.