by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
It’s easy for Twitter liberals to dismiss Trump as political has been and fool. But once you stop looking at him on a personal level and begin to understand that he’s seen as something of a political totem for alarmed white middle-class conservative Christians, you begin to realize how dangerous he remains.
These white middle class conservative Christians see Trump as a flawed fighter for “real America.” They’re worried, on an abstract level, about the browning of America and how fast America is changing on a social level. Of course, they just look at people like me when I point out that they’re really afraid of losing power. They don’t look at it in those terms. They just know how Trump makes them feel and everything else is rationalization.
But wait, it gets worse.
Now that Trump has shown the way, the Republican Party on a systemic level now has wrapped itself not just with the flag, the Bible and the Constitution, but Trump himself. MAGA has metastasized within the Republican Party to the point that Trump is the Republican Party and the Republican Party is Trump. This has happen to the point that Trump has done his job. Even if we magically ended his political career somehow, there are literally a dozen other would-be Republican autocrats waiting in the wings to finish the job Trump started.
Each of them has their personality quirks, but their goal would be the same — to ensure white conservative Christian rule for generations to come.
And, to be honest, given how the Democratic Establishment and the MSM are not taking any of this all that seriously, I think in the end our liberal democracy will die not with a bang but with a whimper — it will simply become conventional wisdom that the only way a Democrat can become POTUS is if Democrats also control Congress.
Given that Republicans are actively suppressing the vote and gerrymandering, this type of synchronicity will grow increasingly difficult to accomplish. People will grow disillusion with voting altogether. In the end, the media with be purged and Republicans will demand a Constitutional Convention to “pass a balanced budget amendment.” This reasoning will be a ruse, of course, and they will enshrine MAGA into the Constitution.
Given what I have to work with at the moment, this definitely seems the ultimate endgame for the United States. We will find our Putin and he will serve for decades. There will be the occasional protest, but nothing will come of it. The existing ICE infrastructure will be weaponized and people like me will start to get pushed out of windows because we refuse to fucking shut up.
But this hasn’t happen yet. The case could be made that there is a 50/50 chance that during the final transition to autocracy, a lot of people on the center-Left who are oblivious to all of this will suddenly get woke. This is when we come to our other possible scenario: civil war.
I’m growing to believe this is far less likely than I once did. For there to be a civil war, one of two things would have to happen. One, MAGA would need to strike too early. This might happen if Trump got his “win” in Arizona via Cyber Ninjas sham recount and he was able to force MAGA state legislatures to attempt to “nullify” the Biden Administration. The other way would be an unexpected “Great Man (or Woman)” who would step in a just the right moment to defend our dying liberal democracy and help us fight back the cold, dark waters of tyranny. Call this the Lincoln Option.
I just don’t see either one of those happening. We’re going to gradually, then all at once, turn into a white Christian ethno state. At first, things won’t really change that much and we’ll still have the trappings of a liberal democracy but as the years grind on form will follow function and in about 20 years we’ll wake up in Trumplandia.
Prove me wrong.
