Nothing happened openly in that era. It couldn't; there was no "open" in any sense we'd recognize here today on HN. You, as a normal citizen, might here about the highlights of political actions a couple of days later, you certainly couldn't hear about the details, and you lacked any effective method of connecting with hundreds or thousands of other people in any reasonable period of time to do anything about it if you did. And media was hardly unbiased, with documented instances of wars all but created from whole cloth by media personalities.

All that has happened is that it turns out that merely shining a bit of light on these practices didn't make them go away. The constraint now is people's bandwidth rather than raw ability to get them information, but that didn't turn out to be so much larger than the info conduit was in the first place.

Even if you are inclined to call what Bush did a "coup" (which I am not, but I'll take it for a moment), consider the implications of the fact that not only did the word "coup" already exist, it is in fact centuries old, and still far newer than the phenomena is describes.