I’m still smarting over how poorly I predicted the 2020 presidential cycle. So, I keep looking for reasons why my current personal conventional wisdom of us slipping peacefully into autocracy (with a high risk of civil war) could possibly be wrong.
Right now, the only thing I got is WW3.
WW3, which would be a series of major non-nuclear regional wars (Russia – Ukraine, China-Taiwan) happening at the same time, would be the only thing that could potentially give Biden the ooph necessary to get across the finish line fair and square. All other options have either Steve K. Bannon stealing the 2024 election successfully, we simply vote for autocracy with our eyes wide open or we have a civil war.
I’m not saying I want WW3 — it could too easily turn into The Day After type situation — but it is, in fact, one way our democracy might live to fight for at least another four years.
While I’m not predicting that people will stop dying of COVID should there be a major war between Russia and Ukraine, I am suggesting that our perception of COVID19 will change dramatically.
But one big caveat — I don’t think there’s going to be a war between the Russians and Ukrainians. Or, at least, not a big one. All of this is just another very expensive power play on Putin’s part to get a summit with Biden. He’s getting that summit on Tuesday and so, lulz, everything should calm down after that.
And, yet, let’s imagine that didn’t happen.
Let’s imagine that a huge war breaks out between Russia and Ukraine. We need to appreciate that it’s possible that COVID19 would go from being seeing a unique pandemic to a regular part of life — or endemic. A lot of this would depend on how big the war was, how long it lasted and what it’s endgame turned out to be.
But there is a finite amount of media attention. If the eyes of the world are on a big chunk of Ukraine being eaten by Russia, it’s inevitable that the sexxy COVID19 pandemic would be seen as simply endemic and something we have to put up with from here on out.
The only way this would change in the future would be if a REALLY BAD new variant of COVID popped out and we were talking about millions, not thousands dying from it at any particular moment.
I guess the whole point of this is — a major regional war in Europe would jiggle everything in a big way. Everything from the January 6th insurrection investigation to all of the other Trump crimes we’re looking into to the COVID19 pandemic would be pushed off the front page in favor of a huge war.
But none of that has happened yet. We’ll have to wait and see if it does.
I was astonished to see the footage tonight of the fascist paramilitary group the Patriot Front swooping into D.C. then leaving as quickly as they came. This is very disturbing for a number of reason, among them being that usually when a democracy is in its death spiral, paramilitary groups like the Patriot Front begin to pop up.
The fascist, white supremacist group Patriot Front is marching on the national mall in Washington, DC, right now. pic.twitter.com/UDeKdQfXA5
— Read Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire (@JoshuaPotash) December 4, 2021
So, my general belief that we’ll in the beginning stages of a very bumpy few years is beginning to hold water. If hundreds of far Right nut jobs can spirit themselves into the capital without anyone knowing about it, then this is a dry run for something far more nefarious.
Because it takes an extensive infrastructure and logistical command to pull of such a thing. You don’t just get that many people into a hostile center-Left Blue city in broad day light just for the lulz of taking some tourist pictures.
These guys are plotting long-term.
But, what?
There are any number of things that they could be up to. I think they’re going through their paces in the lead up to something Really Big at some point as we grow closer to the potentially very turbulent 2024 – 2025 timeframe. When they feel they can make a difference in the control of the government, they strike. But they know they have a few years where they can do dry run after dry run after run in preparation of that.
Or, put another way, this is another macro metric that is difficult for us to understand the context of. Is the Patriot Front doing shit like this a ping from a dark future, or is it value free? Or is it both? I honestly don’t know. But it doesn’t exactly make me feel any better.
One theory floating around Twitter is Putin is about to engage in a massive, risky war against Ukraine because he wants to stop the country from joining NATO.
I struggle to imagine this being true, for a lot of reasons.
The biggest is — if all Putin wants to do is ensure that Ukraine doesn’t join NATO, all he has to do is a modest smash-and-grab operation connecting Donbass to Odessa. Have enough of a lingering “frozen conflict” endgame to it that NATO just doesn’t want to risk letting Ukraine join.
And all of the other metrics presented to me can be swatted away. Putin is old, they say. And I say, so what. Putin is an autocrat and all autocrats think they’re going to live forever. The list goes on.
You can’t escape some cold hard facts. It’s sexy to think of a big war between Ukraine and Russia, but you can’t escape how small Russia’s economy is. You can’t escape the stress such a huge, potentially long-term, war against Ukraine that has a fair sized population would have on Russia’s economy and overall stability.
The point is — what metrics is Putin using that would cause him to believe a general war against Ukraine would be a good idea? What the hell is he thinking? Because it would make a lot more sense if this was all just a very expensive bit of saber rattling meant to get a face-to-face sit down IRL with Biden.
And he can do that because he’s an autocrat. So, for the time being, that’s what I think is happening. When something changes, I’ll revise my assessment.
This is really bonkers. But it’s entertaining to mull this possibility, so here we go. We all know how much Trump loves to suck Putin’s cock, so it would make a lot of sense if those two guys continue to chat like school girls. And we know that Trump never met a quid pro quo that he didn’t like.
So, what if Putin told Trump — hey, it’s not the House flipping you have to slow walk January 6th things in the courts to, it’s a point this December.
Trump wouldn’t know when, exactly, but he would know that the eyes of the world would turn rather abruptly to Ukraine soon. So much so, that we would wake up in six months and look at each other, shocked that Congress’ January 6th investigation has mysteriously faded into nothingness.
Now, obviously, this kooky idea falls part after this because the Republican Party could very well collapse into two waring camps if Putin misjudges the willingness of Ukrainians to fight for their nation. The longer the war lasts, the more Putin-loving Trump will begin to tear away from the rest of the Republican Party.
But Trump, obviously, doesn’t have the mental ability to do that second and third level political thinking — he’s more of a grunt kind of guy –so, it’s possible this informal quid pro quo might happen.
Or not. I have no proof and it sounds kind of bonkers even to me.
I note that The Washington Post is reporting that evidence suggests that Russia may attack Ukraine early next year with 175,000 troops.
So, if there is any discussion between TrumpWorld and Putin that would mean the there are any number of other, less nefarious explanations for why they’re slow walking everything — that’s just Trump people do. The whole Russia thing could very well be happening totally independent of what’s going on in the States with Trump and January 6th.
But the war starts early, like, say between now and Dec. 16, then, that would be really spook, because December 16th is the date TrumpWorld lawyer Jeff Clark pushed his Congressional testimony to.
This blog exists in oblivion. Outside of the odd, seemingly random scraping of it by the Internet Archive and some site in Iowa using Microsoft Azure, the only traffic I really get is people who are worried about a Second American Civil War.
I’ve kind of said my peace for the time being on the matter, but given the steady flow of people interested in a 2ACW, I thought I’d pontificate some more.
The key thing to remember when talking about a 2ACW is it’s at one end of a wide spectrum of possible outcomes in the next three to four years. At the moment, all signs point to the United States slipping peacefully into some sort of ever-tightening autocracy. A 2ACW is just potentially too far away in time for me to be able to say for sure one might happen or not.
Or, put another way — all the conditions are there for the United States to transition peacefully into autocracy no later than January 2025. I think MAGA is popular enough that they won’t even have to cheat. They will cheat anyway, but by January 2025, the United States will be on the path to becoming a political clone of Russia.
And that would be that but for one thing — Trump.
Or, to put it another way, the combination of Trump being a chaos agent and the bloodthirsty nature of the MAGA New Right could very well be a set up to the Right self-owning in a pretty astonishing fashion by starting a 2ACW that they could very well lose.
It is telling that so many people are low-grade freaking out about the potential for a 2ACW that they’re goosing my website’s traffic. But, again, at the moment I don’t think we have anything to worry about. Autocracy is just too popular.
One metric that I’m keeping an eye on is how insane Republicans when they regain the House and Senate. If they put bonkers people in their caucus in positions of power, then, well, that’s a pretty good indication that in the 2024 – 2025 time frame Republicans are going to push us to the political limit.
There are plenty of reasons to think that our political system will ultimately bend, not break, but, lulz, we still have time to fuck things up.
So, do I REALLY think we are going to have a 2ACW? Maybe. Ask me again in a few years.
Any discussion of the rise and rise of Trump has to be done in the context of America’s receding empire. Unlike ’30s German, America isn’t aggrieved, we’re just struck with a severe bout of existential malaise. In a sense, 9/11 marked the beginning of the end of America’s empire because we were to find ourselves in Mesopotamia and Afghanistan before it was over with.
By 2016, a huge segment of the American electorate was growing tired with empire — and with the liberal-progressive social changes of Obama’s second term — and the time was ripe for an autocrat.
And everyone assumed it would be ding-dong Trump who would ascend to power, turn the United States into an autocracy and that would be that. But ultimately, Trump was just an empty suit. He did have one specific autocratic ability, despite his laziness: once you got into his personality death cult, there was no going back.
But this leads to the question, why?
The answer on an individual basis for the whole clusterfuck can be found in the personal instance of Dr. Ronny “Feel Good” Jackson. All he had to do is lie and say Trump was not over 300 lbs, and therefore obese, and he would find himself with a nice, cushy — an safe — Republican seat in Texas delegation to Congress.
Just take that amount of power that Jackson got for selling his soul and expanded upon the broader US government, and you have a recipe for a seriously fucked up situation. By the time Trump got impeached the first time, the US government was totally off the rails. It was being run like TrumpOrg, which is, not very well. Everything was ad hoc and a lot of idiots who otherwise would never have any direct link to power were meeting with POTUS on a pretty regular basis.
So, in a sense, there was a direct link between Trump’s management style and him getting impeached the first time. When it began to sink in with people who knew better that Trump was treating the US government like TrumpOrg, he got impeached. He got impeached the second time because he his failings as an autocrat were put on display when he put all his chips on Mike Pence “doing the right thing,” (at least relative to Trump.)
This was all happening in the context of a derogation of democratic norms, institutions and beliefs within the broader society. So, next time, I think Trump is going to win fair and square (-ish) and the autocracy will be established quite peacefully.
But there is always a chance that, lulz, we have a civil war.
First, let me be clear, I’m only even continuing to talk about this because I’m smarting over being so wrong over 2020. It seemed a political absolute in the fall of 2019 that Trump was going to win re-election through hook or through crook. When he didn’t I was in shock and struggled to figure out how I could have possibly gotten things so wrong.
But I’m being too hard on myself — no one could have predicted that a combination of Trump being a lazy idiot, the COVID19 pandemic and Biden being a lucky, good candidate would happen all in quick succession.
As such, I scramble for what could make me look like a fool again. What could possibly stop Trump and MAGA from wining in 2022 and 2024 outright because autocracy is popular? Well, it seems as though at the moment, Trump’s love of Russia might be it.
It could be that both Putin miscalculates and Trump miscalculates and not only does any war between Russia and Ukraine escalate, but the war lingers and captures the imagination of American public such that two factions would be established.
Trump’s pro-Russia MAGA faction and everyone else.
But a LOT would have to go wrong for both Trump and Putin for things to get that bad. More likely, everything will be very muddled and, lulz, the United States will become an autocracy as predicted on schedule.
The big miscalculation everyone made about Trump in 2016 was he was an autocrat. Everyone — on both sides — thought Trump was going to be a real, honest-to-God autocrat. In fact, I came to tell who would listen to me that Trump was going to “not lose” the 2020 election because “autocrats never lose.”
Well, surprise, both sides were wrong.
All Trump turned out to be was an empty suit. And dumb and lazy one at that. So, he was all talk. This led both the people who voted for him and the people who opposed him to make huge misjudgments about what to expect from Trump going forward.
This tendency for Trump to be a lazy idiot that came out in full force around January 6th. He knew what he wanted — to stay in power via a coup — but he was just too lazy and stupid to pull it off. So, virtually anyone else in his position could have stolen the 2020 election in broad day light and gotten away with it.
But he was too much of an addled lazy fool to put even the most barest of work necessary to do it.
Anyway, now I think we’re doing it again with Trump. Now, everyone is freaking out about how Trump is going to steal the 2024 election via Bannon’s “administrative coup.” Meanwhile, everyone on the Right is gearing up to steal the 2022 and 2024 elections in a pretty brazen manner.
Everything I see, however, indicates that this is all going to be a lulz. Autocracy is so popular in the United States at the moment that we’re an autocracy without an autocracy.
For all the hard work on both sides, in the end, Trump is likely to win fair and square. Then, of course, the huge battle will be on who will play Putin to his Yelstin. And about a dozen would be American Putins within the Republican Party know that right now and there’s a huge amount of political bloodlust within the different Republicans who want the chance to grow both amazingly powerful and wealthy like Putin.
And all I’m saying is, in the end, our transition to autocracy will likely to be peaceful and something of a dud. But as I keep writing, it ain’t happened yet. There is, I guess, a greater than zero chance of a civil war
We’re too far out, however, for me to know for sure one way or another. I definitely am leaning in favor of the United States simply slipping peacefully into autocracy.
If we actually did have a civil war, then you have WW3 on your hands and a “Great Reset” not seen since the end of WW2.
I’ve grown fascinated with the dynamic at work now between Putin, Ukraine and Trump. The reason is — ostensibly, it would make no sense for Putin to wait until AFTER Trump was out of office to invade Ukraine in a big way. In fact, one might say that leans into the Republican narrative Trump’s love of Russia is just a big “hoax” given this fact.
Then Trump opened his big mouth about where he stands on Ukraine and it all made a lot more sense to me.
Trump being in office in the United States — unless it was after a Constitutional Convention that made him a true autocrat — babbling about how great Putin was in the middle of a war between Ukraine and Russia would prove that the TrumpRussia scandal was real. That it wasn’t a hoax.
What’s more, Putin also has to deal with the possibility that there would be a Republican Civil War between a pro-Trump, pro-Russia faction and a anti-Russia faction. This, in turn, would potentially be a political bodyblow to the Russia-loving MAGA movement for at least an election cycle.
As such, it would make a lot of sense for Putin — if he’s going to do it — to make his move on Ukraine sooner rather than later. The reason — if Putin is going to attack Ukraine, it may be doing so under the assumption that he’s going to do something of a smash and grab operation.
The whole war would be so brief that by the time the 2022 and 2024 American elections rolled around, it would be like the Russo-Ukrainian Winter War was a long, long time ago.
But, as of the moment, it appears as though Putin may not even attack Ukraine in the first place. We’ll see.
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