by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
No one in late 2019 could have predicted that a combination of a global pandemic and Joe Biden being the Democratic nominee would be enough to fell Trump. Also, people like me in late 2019 totally overestimated Trump’s willingness to use some pretty basic autocratic measures to steal the 2020 election.
Trump is so fucking lazy that he waited until the very, very, very last moment to try to steal the election, rather than, say, indict Joe Biden in the summer of 2020.
Anyway. All of this leads me to wonder if there is a similar “Third Way” possible in 2024 that doesn’t involve a transition into MAGA autocracy or some sort of descent into civil war / revolution.
Whatever the thing that evokes a “Third Way” is, it’s going to be stunning. It is going to have to be VERY BIG and totally unpredictable. There are two main scenarios I can think of.
The first one is that Trump loses and despite all his ranting about the need for National Divorce, no one listens to him and he, in fits and starts, drifts into political obscurity. Then we all wait another four years for MAGA fascists to try AGAIN to turn us into a white Christian ethnostate.
The other, far darker possible set of scenarios is Something Bad happens to either Biden or Trump which totally throws all of our basic assumptions about the 20204 race out the window. I don’t even like to think about what that Something Bad scenario might be, but both men are old as fuck and Trump, in particular, is a fat fuck.
Any type of dark scenario like that would so change the basic assumptions we have about the 2024 race that all my dystopian hellscapes for 2024 – 2025 would be very moot.
All I want is to live in a traditional liberal democracy. That shouldn’t be too much to ask.
