Tag: Autocrats Never Lose

What If You Held An American MAGA Autocracy And 40% Of The Electorate Supported It?


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The sense I get is my prediction that America in late 2024 to early 2025 will face the existential choice of civil war or autocracy is holding up. There’s a chance the Cyber Ninjas “proving” Trump “won” in Arizona or Speaker Trump might force the issue earlier, but, in general 2024-2025 seems to be it.

I’m so involved in my own center-Left echo chamber that it’s easy for me to forget that there are people who actually support Trump’s bullshit. They’ve become a lot more self-conscious about it, but they still support him. Not everyone, obviously, New Right talking head Jesse Kelly is all in on “Trumpism without Trump” and whenever you call him on some racist or asshole thing this would entail he just shrugs and says, “Welcome to the New Right!”

Anyway, this leads me to think a lot about what the endgame of an autocracy would be if we pick that option instead of civil war. What’s going to happen is Twitter and people like Norm Ornstein will grow apoplectic that our democracy has finally died. Meanwhile, MAGA New Right people will become quite smug.

Just as with Putin’s United Russia Party (I think that’s it name) the Republican Party will be the infrastructure for the autocracy and that’s it. At first, nothing will change. But then, in fits and starts the vice grip of autocracy will follow its function and the media will be purged. It will grow so difficult to vote that voting rates plunge.

There will be the occasional mass protest here or there that is promptly ignored. And, all my rhetorical quips about people — like me! — being pushed out of windows by ICE will be a pretty cold, hard realty.

And it will be taken for granted as just “life in America” like gratuitous gun violence. At some point, wealth liberal job creators will have seen enough and they will leave the country entirely. Until, of course, President Pompeo gets mad and makes it almost impossible to either get a passport our get out of the country.

Form. Follows. Function.

I guess what I’m trying to say is — when autocracy comes to America it’s going to be surprisingly popular. At least with those who still identify as Republican. That’s what they want, they want an autocracy. The only time they will grow unhappy with this new arrangement is when it becomes personal. Then they will get upset — in private — and regret what they allowed to happen.

Too late, shit for brains.

I have to accept that given what a loud mouth I am, that once I don’t have the luxury of living in a liberal democracy I’m going to run afoul of our new autocracy rules. I joke a lot about getting pushed out a window, but, sadly, that could very well be my fate if we have a President Pompeo or Cotton or Hawley or even DeSantis.

All the people who thought I was hysterical about that possibility over the years will shrug and say I had it coming.

Texas, California & A Second American Civil War


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Holy shit.

I saw this on Twitter and had to comment. Sometimes, I feel like I’m just talking into the aether when it comes to my fears that at some point between now and January 2025 the United States is going to face the existential choice of civil war or autocracy.

So, when I read the above imagine on Twitter I almost gasped — this is just the type of talk that one would expect from a modern antebellum America. On a basic level, I just don’t know what exactly California is doing to Texas that is so bad to warrant bloodshed on a mass scale.

All things being equal, the United States — Texas and California included — is a stable and prosperous nation. There’s no need for the individual states of the United States to be at each other’s throats. Also, as I have mentioned repeatedly on this blog, there’s a big difference between being in peace afforded the luxury of being a latte sipping soyboy and having to put your blood on the line to defend your personal freedom.

As such, at the moment, it’s easy to see why a ding-bat Texas nationalist might think California would collapse like a “rotten door” as Hitler might say. I would suggest that if the United States actually buckled AND California felt it was in its self-interest to fight the good fight against seditionist Red States that we would all be very impressed with how well they will fight.

A lot of what the MAGA New Right thinks about places like California is complete self-serving bullshit that once put to a test is going to come back bite them. In other words — California has a huge population and economy that could easily be converted to a deadly weapon of war should it be put on a (civil) war footing.

And, yet I doubt anything can stop the momentum, the dead hand of history, that is hurdling us towards civil war or autocracy.

Our Democracy’s Death By A Million Norms


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’ve read the book “How Democracy’s Die,” it seems as though the authors think one of the ways for a democracy to survive once it reaches a historic death spiral is for the pro-democratic forces to make a point of staying within norms.

Oh boy.

For the United States, at least, doing this would be a very dumb idea.

The entire Republican Party wants to destroy American democracy and establish permanent white, autocratic Christian minority rule. Currently, Democrats follow democratic norms and the Republicans don’t. We’re beyond the event horizon for this happening in the United States, so I think we should just say fuck it and fight fire with fire.

We have the choice of autocracy or civil war before us and I’d rather go down fighting. Now, obviously, I can’t predict the future. So, the case could be made that if you “went down fighting” against the autocratic Republicans that you would be making a civil war inevitable when it might, not, in fact happen.

I don’t know, America just feels like it has an undead democracy already. I would just rather show some guts on a political level than just let Republicans walk all over pro-democratic forces.

The DeSantis Paradox


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The thing about Ron DeSantis is he’s very VERY popular with bedrock conservatives who remain leery of Trump as a person. As such, it’s easy to imagine DeSantis drafting off of Trump’s popularity to win the Republican nomination in 2024.

Given that the entire Republican Party is now anti-democratic and craves an autocratic white ethno state, even DeSantis would end up being an American Putin before it’s over with.

But there’s a huge roadblock to this fate: Trump.

Trump wants to be president again NOW. And it’s very possible to imagine him becoming Speaker of the House in 2023, impeaching Biden and Harris and getting them pushed out of office when he threatens Senate Democrats with a civil war if they don’t do his bidding.

Though, to be fair, I’m probably giving Trump a huge amount more guile than he actually has. He’s just playing himself. He’s gotten a great deal of success by not doing any hard work and just being himself. As such, he feels he has no need to do any hard work that would allow him to actually become the tyrannical idiot that he so obviously craves becoming.

Anyway, back to DeSantis.

If he can get past Trump — which is a huge if — then a lot of the conservative Republicans who hate Trump and say Trump only became president because of all the free publicity he got from evil liberals are going to be in something of a pickle.

Is the liberal media all powerful king makers or are they not.

Are they a reason to burn the entire country down because of their power, or are they not? If they can’t stop DeSantis (which they won’t be able to ) then that definitely will go against the liberal-media-as-all-powerful that a lot of conservatives have come up with.

But, honestly, why am I spending so much mental energy on this. The entire conservative movement is based on recursive arguments and negative polarization. Even if DeSantis becomes president, they will just hand wave their previous arguments about how they helped Trump win the presidency with all their free publicity.

All they will care about is “secure borders” and a strong economy and making sure the “Marxists” of BLM don’t turn their children into America hating-Leftists through Critical Race Theory. Of course, when DeSantis takes things into the realm of the autocratic because, lulz, there’s nothing to stop him, they will become Good Germans and tell people like me who were right all along to shut up if I know what’s good for me.

Good times!

The U.S. Military Is The Wildcard When America Faces Its Existential Choice Of Autocracy Or Civil War


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

While ostensibly Trump’s soft, chaotic coup attempt after election night 2020 was as close as we’ve ever come to a real coup in our nation’s history, it could have been far, far worse. The thing about Trump is, people like me constantly give him a level of guile and willingness to do basic autocratic things that he obviously doesn’t have.

In short, with just the barest amount of autocratic work Trump could have easily stolen the 2020 election. It was his to take. But what he didn’t do was far more astonishing than the idiotic things he did do. He never invoked the Insurrection Act, even though he wanted to and his followers came to believe it was magic coup pixie dust — which it isn’t.

He didn’t think up some reason to arrest Hunter of Joe Biden at any number of critical moments in 2020. He ranted about a lot autocratic moves all throughout 2020 and early 2021, but for the large part he sat on his hands and let the natural democratic momentum associated with an American election to do its thing.

The failsafe during Trump’s rhetorical and half hearted coup attempt in late 2020 and early 2021 was, of course, the U.S. Military. Two things are absolute about the U.S. Military — it’s apolitical to a fault and it won’t follow an illegal order. Those two things, given how obvious and ham-handed Trump was post election night 2020 made the endgame to Trump’s long term soft coup a forgone conclusion — failure.

But we may not be as lucky next time. Whenever the next MAGA New Right POTUS is elected, he or she is likely to make sure that their actions are “legal” and, as such, the military won’t have anything to worry about.

Where things grow frightening is is a MAGA New Right POTUS bungles that transition — or Trump himself jumps the gun and tries to turn us into autocracy. So, you have one scenario where the U.S. Military at last steps in sometime around January 2025 because the country implodes on a political level because MAGA controls Congress and refuses to certify a Joe Biden win. (Yes, there is the throw-the-election-into-the House gambit that MAGA might try to keep things legal, but let’s say they don’t manage to pull that off.)

The other scenario is we have a nullification crisis that turns into a secession crisis after Cyber Ninjas “prove” Trump “won” Arizona. Then it would be the Biden Administration having to put down a MAGA New Right insurrection. In a sense, if it’s inevitable that we have a civil war, I’d rather it happen sooner rather than later so at least the U.S. Military will be under the control of democratic forces.

But what the U.S. Military ultimately decides to do when we’re faced with the existential choice of autocracy or civil war may be it — it may be the even that transitions us into something different than we’re used to. If the American military has to step in and we no longer enjoy civilian rule (acting President James Mattis, anyone?) then the United States really will be just another country, just another republic that has transitioned to its final form of empire.

The Abstract Paranoia Over ‘Cancel Culture’ & ‘Critical Race Theory’ As The MAGA New Right’s Rearguard Action In The Culture Wars


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

By all accounts, the MAGA New Right has lost the culture wars. America is browning. The Republican Party’s policies are extremely unpopular and it refuses to have any sort of re-calibration. And there’s an entire media bullshit infrastructure design to protect the Republican Party from any sort of introspection.

So, it was inevitable that the MAGA New Right would circle the drain down to the crack hit that is simple abstract fears on the part of white Christians about “cancel culture” or Critical Race Theory.

Let’s take Cancel Culture. Here’s my best attempt at some sort of definition, from the point of view of Republicans — “Cancel Culture:’ The ruining of a conservative’s life for being conservative, usually associated with a public event or comment being recorded by smartphone that goes viral.”

Ironically, the definition has drifted considerably from what it might have been around the time of #MeToo. During that era, a lot of very powerful men — usually white — were being “canceled” for legitimately doing shitty things. There was the occasional odd excess as the revolution made its way through culture and different industries — Aziz Ansari being a prime example — but, over all, bad men did bad things and they got “canceled.”

But here we are in the post #MeTo Era and Republicans have latched on Cancel Culture because just its invocation is enough to strike terror in the hearts of evangelical white Christian women in the suburbs. From my experience, people in that particular demo live in existential terror of themselves doing something “conservative” that evil liberals record and it proceeds to go viral. They will lose their jobs and be publicly shamed just for being conservative.

Another, similar, thing that really bugs the conservatives I know is “woke” corporate culture. I think what is really going on is the MAGA New Right has lost the culture wars and, as such, corporate trainers are doing a mop up operation — shooting the survivors, if you will. But if you’re a bed rock conservative whose self-perception is “I don’t see race” (read: systemic racism) if you have to go through any type of sensitivity training you get really, really, upset.

In fact “woke” corporate culture is probably the main source of the rage against Big Tech. While I have a lot of concrete, fact-based fears about MAGA New Right POTUS Mike Pompeo throwing me in an ICE camp, my conservative relatives have abstract fears that one day Google will listen to their conversations via their phone and turn them in to the evil libtards of the Deep State.

The specific instance of someone being “canceled” that comes to mind is the police officer in the Hampton Roads are of Virginia who lost his job after an online leak of a Kyle Rittenhouse’s donation effort reveled he had contributed $20 to his defense fund.

To me, the guy got what he deserved — Rittenhouse is a deranged triple murderer. I don’t care if we found out because of a leak — if you’re on a police force, you shouldn’t be contributing any money to Rittenhouse’s defense. But that’s not how my conservative relative saw the situation. He was upset that the police officer got in trouble because of a leak. And he was upset that it was just $20.

The fact that Rittenhouse went WAY out of his way to murder people for political reasons was a lulz.

The point of all of this is the reason why Republican’s attempts to keep the base enraged by screaming hysterically about “cancel culture” or “Critical Race Theory” are so successful is the center-Right and center-Left now rarely actually ever interact with each other. In 2016, I often got into it with MAGA people about Trump. Now, this almost never happens. As such, the two sides have an exaggerated sense of what the other believes.

At the core of all of this, of course, are the some pretty potent macro trends. In general, the nation is growing browner, more secular and more open minded about more “modern” sexual mores. All these changes are happening at an alarming rate — at least for conservatives — but they don’t even really know what, exactly, bothers them so much.

FOX News, OAN and NewsMax know this on an existential level, so they give conservatives a media narrative that helps them make sense of their general unease.

All of this is very corrosive, of course. But there are no easy answers. It definitely seems, at least to me, that as I keep saying, that all of these abstract fears will cause a very concrete choice to face America soon: autocracy or civil war.

At Least The New Right Makes Sense


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Jesus H. Christ do I fucking hate the MAGA New Right. I hate MAGA, specifically, because not only do they deny reality in service of their idiot ding-dong leader, but they both hate liberals and crave their validation. Meanwhile, the New Right at least is more forthright about what their intentions are.

They’re fucking fascists.

So, in that sense, that’s something I can work with in my mind. I call them “boring” because there’s no struggle to figure out how someone could possibly believe what they believe. There’s no mystery: they’re fucking racist misogynist fascists. There’s no quibbling about if their racists or misogynists or whatever because they refuse to even acknowledge that any fact that doesn’t help them exists.

Or, put another way, the New Right is Trumpism without Trump. It’s based more on a fascist ideology that you can game out rather than an irrational need to own the libs. With the New Right, there’s no confusion over what they believe or what they’re aims are.

They’re fucking American Nazis.

The New Right isn’t a pure 1-to-1 with the Nazis, of course, because their not expansionist and, to date at least, they’re not anti-Semitic. (But that’s coming, of course.)

All I can hope is eventually history will do with the New Right what it did to the Nazis. It’s going to fucking suck getting rid of them, of course, but in the end hopefully we can move on to a new and brighter future.

The Dead Hand Of History & America’s Ultimate Near-Term Fate


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The conditions are there, at least, for the United States to experience something akin to a second civil war between now and at around January 2025. And, yet, I struggle to figure out if I’m just being hysterical or if there is, in fact, some reason to be honestly worried.

I just can’t game things out.

Every metric that I would use to say, “Oh, of course we’ll have a civil war,” at this point could also be used to for, “Oh, of course we’re going to turn into an autocracy.” So, I dunno. MAGA and the New Right are, in fact, actively destroying our democracy in hopes of establishing some sort of race-based, permanent autocratic minority rule.

And, as of the moment, I would say they’re going to peacefully get away with it. It’s theirs to lose, if you will. In fact, I would go so far as to say if they can just control themselves once they get what they want, the MAGA New Right can run the nation (into the ground) for generations to come. The United States will become Fortress America, China will gradually rise in power and by the end of the century the idea of a “free” America will be looked back upon as quaint.

But form follows function.

Once President Pompeo (or whomever) rewrites the Constitution via a MAGA dominated Constitutional Convention, purges the media and weaponizes the existing ICE infrastructure, it’s very easy to imagine some pretty bad shit happening. The excesses of the newly unbound MAGA New Right regime might grow so severe that there is something akin to a popular uprising and we finally drive a stake through the heart of the MAGA New Right vampires.

The counter argument is, of course, Russia.

They have huge protests all the time and jack shit happens.

So, again, I don’t know which direction the country will take once we finally are forced to decide autocracy or civil war. I do know, however, that if the MAGA New Right gets the civil war they apparently crave, shit is going to get real really quick.

If the last civil war America had is any indication, once the establishment of the United States gets woke on such matters, there is an element of institutional radicalization that doesn’t happen very often. Once it’s impossible for, say, the chatty Cathy’s of Morning Joe to avoid that we’re in the middle of a civil war, they’re likely to take what seem as rather radical political stances virtually over night.

Having to deal with an existential threat does tend to do that to even the most establishment moderate.

Know Your Right Wing Cocksuckers: MAGA Vs. The New Right


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Do you find yourself confused as to the difference between MAGA and the New Right? Well, let me break down what (I think) the difference is.

MAGA
MAGA is a violent personality cult that revolves around a bonkers idiot who is an avatar for the rot within the American political system. Trump is “playing himself,” if you will. He’s lazy. He’s stupid. He’s willfully ignorant and generally latches on the whatever the most destructive possible thing someone could do in his position is. MAGA both hates liberals and cares, deeply, about what they think. Since there’s no overall ideology to MAGA because it’s leader is a racist, misogynistic ding-dong they vacillate widely as to the specifics of what they believe at any particular moment.

The New Right.
Now, let me say up front that any idea I may have as to what the New Right is gleaned from hate reading Jesse Kelly’s Twitter feed. But, just from looking at what he has written, it SEEMS as though the New Right has some sort of ideology. And, surprise, that ideology is fascism. They — or at least Mr. Kelly — are very forthright in how they live in an idyllic mental state because they no longer give a shit what liberals think, even if it’s fact base and true. They are very coy about the whole fascism thing, saying that while they’re not fascist NOW, liberals are driving them to fascism and liberals will have only themselves to blame when that transformation finally happens. The New Right, apparently, is populated with people who have cogent, logical reasons for why they’re fascists. So, in that way, they’re very much like smart Nazis. You know, the ones that helped put the Untied States on the moon. They’re college educated, often lawyers. And they fully embrace autocracy and racist minority rule. That’s their jam.

Anyway, fuck both MAGA and the very boring New Right.

Will There Be A MAGA New Right American Revolution In 2021?


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Ok, let’s think about this seriously for a moment. Liberals want to cancel you and your family just for being conservative. They want to use Critical Race Theory to indoctrinate your children so they hate America.

And guess what?

No, there isn’t going to be a MAGA New Right revolution in America, you fucking cocksucker piece of shit. What is happening is a systematic attempt on the part of MAGA and the New Right to use gesture politics to cause their idiotic believers to no longer trust or believe in any American intuition.

A lot of this is just bad faith MAGA New Right grift. It’s like how someone who has a porn addiction grows so numb to porn that they have to watch more and more graphic versions of it to get off. So, too, does the MAGA New Right have to think up even more fucking bonkers conspiracy theories to give the base the hit it needs.

The downside to this idiotic behavior is, of course, that the goal posts keep getting moved. People in Alabama and Arkansas doing pot and drinking Miller Lite on the back porch of their cabin do a Google search for “MAGA revolution 2021?” and end up at this site where I get drunk and tell them what a piece of shit they are for being MAGA New Right in the first place.

But, to answer the question — the MAGA New Right definitely THINKS some sort of popular Right wing uprising is going to happen very, very soon. Or, put another way, they are doing everything in their power to have the base of the movement on edge that at any moment Trump will go transactional and some sort of fucking MAGA New Right revolution will happen and, at last, they will “just be left alone.”

The surreal part of all of this is a portion of the electorate is now primed for unprecedented political violence should something put unexpected pressure on our political system. So, I guess, in a sense, yes, it is within the realm of possibility that there might be a “MAGA New Right revolution” in 2021.

But something pretty huge would have to happen. Something that was the catalyst. Off the top of my head, I guess it’s possible that Cyber Ninjas “proving” Trump “won” Arizona MIGHT be the type of thing to do it. But there a few darker scenarios involving people shuffling off this mortal coil that I think would actually be the thing to cause any punitive fascist “revolution.”