by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Don’t put me on blast Kurt Schlichter! Or, as Briar Rabbit would say, “Please don’t throw me in that briar patch.”
The reason why people like me grow “hysterical” with our “doom shit” is once you slip into autocracy, the entire dynamic of your politics changes. Suddenly, there is no longer any ebb-and-flow to it. The government becomes unmoored from any sort of influence from the populace because, well, it’s an autocracy.
You can move policy on the edges, but, in general, if you live in an autocracy, whatever the autocrat wants is what you get. And because autocracy is EXTREMELY POPULAR with the MAGA New Right base, it’s easy to imagine once it becomes clear that the United States is no longer a traditional Western democracy that things might swerve into a pretty dark direction pretty quick.
Now, there are some aspects to all of this that have to be addressed.
There’s a good chance that once the United States is considered an autocracy….that huge swaths of the American electorate will deny this is, in fact, the case. Nothing will change for them, so fuck you, lib. And as long as things, in general, stay the same — and the new autocratic regime behaves itself — people like me will continue to be “hysterical.”
But there are about 50 years of bent up rage on the part of the MAGA New Right and it’s very, very easy to imagine that at some point in, say, 2025 President DeSantis or Cotton or Hawley begins to rant about how we absolutely HAVE to have a Constitutional Convention “to pass a balance budget amendment.”
And, because we’re now an autocracy, such a convention will be convened and it will transform the United States into something a lot more like Russia. And then that’s it.
It will be over. And people like me who can’t or won’t get the hint about the New Order will get pushed out a window or throw into a Trumplandia re-education camp. I will have been right all along and the only price I get will be a bullet in the back of the head by a an ICE agent.
Now, the conservative I know would say at this point “that’s not going to happen.” When I ask them how they know this, they will say, “it just won’t.” In other words, they are resting all their assumptions on the “hope” that our new autocratic rulers will abide by the much maligned democratic “norms” that conservative have been attacking for a decade or so now.
And, of course, in the end, it won’t be until things get personal that the conservatives I know will have a “come to Jesus” moment. Then it will be too late. Then we’re living in autocratic America and I’m dead in a ditch somewhere — still very right, though!
But, how likely is it that our new autocratic overlords would abuse their unlimited power? Isn’t it possible that while Republicans will have a lock on power for the foreseeable future that they will be sure to stay within a spectrum of actions that would not rile up the “Good Germans” that would be the bedrock of their power.
This is a very good question. I suppose it’s possible that what might happen is that, yes, we’ll become a white Christian ethno state, but President Hawley will have the good graces not to purge the media. He’ll let Twitter liberals vent all they like, but because they’re so fucking powerless, from his point of view, it’s all a lulz.
I guess the difference between myself and the conservatives in my life is I would rather not have to trust insane MAGA New Right cocksuckers being gracious enough to not kill me because I absolutely won’t fucking shut up about what a piece of shit President Hawley is. They shoot writers, don’t they?
