by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
As I’ve written before, the American electoral system hides a pretty shocking fact about what’s going on right now. If we had, say, a parliamentary system like the Weimar Republic, it would be very clear that we are in the twilight of our barely functioning democracy.
Instead of two parties, we have the fascist Republican Party and the center-Left alliance of minor parties that fall under the rubric of the Democratic Party. The fascist Republican Party is seething with rage and once they inevitable get power again, they’re unlikely to ever peacefully relinquish it.
There won’t be any sort of a civil war, but rather the fascists will quickly consolidate power. I estimate at least a million center-Left people will flee the the United States starting in late 2024 when it becomes clear that the fascists are going to seize power once an for all. There will be a real counter-revolution in the United States that will see a wide range of very unpopular fascist policies become law. NATO will be destroyed. The United States will form some sort of alliance with the autocrats of Russia, Hungary and Turkey.
And that will be that.
That will be the “new normal” for the rest of my life. In fact, I’m probably spend the rest of my life trying to avid being round up by America’s Putin (which ever Republican ends up winning that prize) and maybe I’ll just end up with an ICE bullet in the back of my head when they finally catch up with me.
From everything I see in the United States, such a dystopian hellscape is a pretty safe bet.
What’s interesting is, I talk to my far more conservative relatives and all they talk about is how they thing the “woke cancel culture mob” is going to figure out essentially same thing to THEM. For my Traditionalist relatives, the idea of having their lives ruined “just for being conservative” is something that continues to be at the forefront of their minds. That’s all they talk about.
And that brings up another interesting issue — relative to their echo chamber, they’ve been scared into thinking it’s the center-Left, not the center-Right that will turn the United States into an autocracy. No amount of me talking about the difference between soft power and hard power will change their minds. They no longer believe in democracy and they crave a situation where Democrats can never hold power in any meaningful way.
They believe that only then will they no longer have to go to the sensitive training forced upon them by their “woke” corporate overlords. What’s worse, everything is very muddled in the United States at the moment. The center-Left does it self no favors by fixating on some really, really unpopular ideas ranging from “Defund The Police ” to, yes, extreme trans right. I like to think I’m pretty empathic to trans rights, but I also know that there’s a reason why the Republican Party won’t shut the fuck up about the dangers of that very same thing — it plays really well with Traditionalist conservatives who otherwise are queasy about elements of MAGA.
The United States is a lot like the Titanic just after the iceburg hit. We all know something has gone wrong, but not everyone realizes the ship is going to sink. So, you have a lot very, very clueless Blue Check liberals who think the system still works or that somehow Trump will magically be held accountable for all his many, many crimes.
And, like I said, we all know Blue Check liberals are cowards who will bounce from the United States once it’s clear that all their earnest, angry Twitter threads failed to stop the rise of autocratic America.
Things are very dark in the United States, and we’re going to lurch even closer to a true Russian-style autocracy in January 2023 when the fascist Republican Party takes control again. Republicans will then brazenly steal the 2024 election, even though they probably don’t even have to and that’s it — American autocracy.
We’re fucked. Totally and completely. There’s no going back. When ever election a democracy has is existential, then you’re not even a democracy anymore, you’re an anocracy.
I will be flabbergasted if we have a civil war. The center-Left just doesn’t have it in it to risk their lives and careers to challenge the fascist Republican Party anywhere by Twitter.
