Life During Cold Civil War Time

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

When I was a young man, I was completely obsessed with the Reagan Era Iran-contra scandal and I think there’s a real chance that the clusterfuck that is the Trump Administration will go that way,

In fact, I will go so far as to say that unless some outside force happens that we can’t really predict at this point, all this talk about impeaching Trump is going to fade into talk about if he is able to preserve his “legacy” in 2024. I just don’t see any endgame at this point, but whenever I struggle to see one, the least likely scenario is one where Trump is actually removed from office.

I would go so far as to say that unless No Deal Brexit really does cause a historic global economic slowdown, there is literally nothing politically a this point that will prevent him from leaving office Jan. 20th, 2025. I say this because the only historical political event I can equate modern America to (or at least the center-Right part of it) is Vichy France.

What I mean by this is Vichy France was a really strange situation where otherwise honorable people hated their political opponents so much that they acted in a really weird way. And, I think if you keep that in the back of your head along with what happened with Iran-contra, the idea that Trump will never face any real political consequences makes a lot of sense.

It seems pretty clear to me that unless No Deal Brexit crashes the global economy in some meaningful way AND we manage to get Trump’s impeachment into the Senate by August 2019, Trump’s going to be on the campaign trail in 2024 for whatever young, passionate, competent ideologically-based would-be tyrant he manages to pick to succeed him.

In general, I have no faith in the American political system to correct itself in any meaningful way and sketching out the next 20 years, I would say that not only is it unlikely a center-Left presidential candidate will win, if they do it will likely be a fluke AND there will be, by that time, a real MAGA deep state that will do everything in its power to undercut them.

That doesn’t even begin to address the fact that we’re long overdue for a real crisis, as opposed to the long string of self-owns that the Trump Administration seems to generate.

It seems as though the only thing standing between America and a pretty dark dystopia is Trump is old and incompetent along with the general unpredictability of the macro “dead hand of history.” Clinton winning in 1992 was a fluke if you look at general trends. It seems as though it takes 8 years for the opposition party to develop an effective leader to have a real chance of flipping the White House. And that only works because the seat is open.

America is no longer either a “republic” or a “constitutional democratic republic.” It is a plutocracy that only doesn’t slide into a Roman Empire situation because of the general temperament of its populace. I’ve come to believe that there’s a real possibility that Gen. Mattis might have to step in at some point to resort order during a period of unprecedented instability in American government.

I say this because the American Military is not only so well respected but is also the sole institution existing that has an absolute belief in the traditional American concept of the rule of law. As such, if there happened to be any real crisis as to who was running the country, I could see a consensus developing for Gen. Mattis to act as something of a caretaker while things got sorted out.

And that’s one of the happier scenarios.

The United States is zooming towards a Second American Civil War for no other reason than the Right’s rhetoric is so surreal that there might come a point where they believe if they lose the presidency for any reason that that, in itself, is enough reason to attack the center-Left is a violent manner. At that point, I would again note that the American Military probably would have to step in until civian rule could again be established.

The American constitutional system is so rotting and corrupt that there are some existential issues that it simply can’t address. These massive issues put together are, in my view, equal to slavery in the 19th Century.

I have no easy answers, folks. This is all going to go down within the next 20 years, if not much, much sooner. In fact, the argument could be made that Trump, by definition, is preventing the Right from killing people in the streets. Or not. I don’t know. I’m just nervous.

Author: Shelton Bumgarner

I am the Editor & Publisher of The Trumplandia Report

Leave a Reply