MAGA Republicans & The Threat of a Second American Civil War


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

One of the many alarming things about American politics right now is how the American Right has been completely consumed by the cancer that is MAGA. This has been a long-coming process, but it is finally complete. Now, the only Republican who doesn’t believe Trump’s Big Lie is a Democrat.

Or, put another another way, things within the Republican Party have gotten so bad that for all the talk about Liz Chaney will potentially run for president, in reality, the only way she might do so would be as a modern day “War Democrat” if things got really, really bad.

The COVID19 pandemic laid bare how bonkers the modern conservative movement is in the sense they could not see the pandemic as a health crisis, but only as a political football to be managed. They hate science and it is now MAGA orthodoxy that Dr. Fauci was, I don’t know…out to make ready cash from COVID19 via the Wuhan lab and….was in cahoots with liberals to bring down Trump with it?

My personal theory about why Republicans love this Big Lie about Dr. Fauci is they hate science so much that once he became a political lightening rod, they keep wondering, “What’s in it for him?” So they pull the idea that he, personally, was making money off the Wuhan lab in an effort to understand this mystery. (Not that it’s even been proven that the Wuhan lab had anything to do with the outbreak.)

But it’s that kind of reliance on Big Lies that are now at the heart of the modern GOP. I often say that conspiracy theories are the last refuge of the intellectually dishonest and Republicans are a prime example of this. Because of macro trends in the American political system, they’re very, very angry and anything that doesn’t fit their FOX News-Qanon-OANN media narrative must be some sort of conspiracy designed to allow the globalist cucks to take over and take their guns.

So, the thing we need to appreciate is the Republican Party isn’t imploding, isn’t getting weaker and isn’t going to do anything but get closer to Donald Trump until, say, they have an unusually bad mid-terms in 2022. Pinning your hopes on this happening is danger for two reasons: 1) November 2022 is a long time and any number of batshit insane things could happen by that point 2)Mid-term elections usually are about getting the base to the polls and it’s very easy to imagine a scenario where center-Left people lulz voting and when Republicans take control of the House and Senate again, Trump gets the credit and he’s well on his way to becoming the nominee in 2024.

The people who take such glee from what they believe are indications the Republican Party is dying should slow their roll. What’s more likely to happen is the Republican Party will fight dirty and nullify any election of a Democrat if it has the power to do so.

Or there’s a civil war.

These two choices are on something of a continuum. In a way, tragically, it could be only a civil war that will at least give us the possibility of saving our liberal democracy by destroying the Republican Party once an for all. But I really don’t like that option. I’m a man of peace, a man of ideas. I just am taking autocratic threat posed by the Republican Party seriously.

As I’ve written before, there’s a greater-than-zero-sum-chance that the Cyber Ninjas recount in Arizona will “prove” that Trump “won” the state and that, in turn will cause Trump to run around saying we have to “nullify the Biden Administration.”

That, in turn, will cause a secession crisis when MAGA legislatures take Trump both seriously and literally.

The ironic thing about such a scenario is if we’re going to have a civil war, better to have it now than in the 2024-2025 timeframe. But again, I don’t want a civil war now and I don’t want a civil war later.

Anyway, the point is — we have to take the threat of the anti-democratic Republican Party seriously. They are going to come roaring back at some point and the sooner we get ready for that, the better.

Author: Shelton Bumgarner

I am the Editor & Publisher of The Trumplandia Report

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