by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I hate to break it to all the earnest, well meaning “Resistance” people on Twitter who seem to be forever stuck in January 2017, but: getting angry on Twitter doesn’t mean jack shit.
Or, to put it another way, a strongly worded Twitter thread is not a law passed or a SCOTUS ruling handed down.
Everything on a macro level continues to point to America having the existential choice of autocracy or civil war starting in late 2024, early 2025. At the moment, I definitely think we’re going to just slip into autocracy. Trump, or some other Republican thug, will seize then consolidate power and that will be that.
If we’re lucky, we’ll stay somewhere around Hungary or Turkey. If we’re not lucky, we’ll become a political clone of Russia or Nazi Germany. People like me will just vanish and that will be that, while at least 1 million liberals will flee the country.
Or we have a civil war when Blue States leave the Union en mass.
And it’s not just one person we have to stop to prevent this dystopian hellscape from happening — it’s an entire party. What’s worse, Trump has served his political and historical purpose. The Republican Party now fully understands how weak our democratic norms are and they will be able to establish white minority rule in the US without much trouble.
All along, of course, “Resisters” will rant on Twitter, thinking if they can just “destroy” the autocrat one more time on Twitter that everything will be fixed and we’ll be saved.
I would prefer not to leave the country because the US has become an autocracy. I would prefer, in such a situation, to stand and fight. And it’s possible that because I’m a broke ass motherfucker that I won’t have any option but to do just that.
All I know is, we are currently in the twilight of America’s 250 year experiment with democratic self-governance. Either we renew it as part of a Second American Civil War where we blow ourselves up and the Good Guys win, or we just give up and become an autocracy.
There is no middle ground.
