Top Russia expert Fiona Hill said recently that, essentially, Russia’s present may be America’s future. I totally agree with her on that. And, yet, I would like to make some observations about what she said. Because, she’s right, it’s just there are some reasons why we may not slip peacefully into autocracy.
The Guns Of Red October The thing that Ms. Hill may be underestimating is how much the MAGA New Right wants political violence. How much they want even the barest excuse to run around, murdering people like me in cold blood for political reasons. As such, the thing that would otherwise happen –we slip peacefully into autocracy — doesn’t happen because the MAGA New Right is so wrapped up in the glory of violence that they feel liberals are “forcing” them to commit, that they totally miss that they could get everything they want peacefully if they’re just patient.
Trumplandia Part Duh Another quibble I have with her prediction is it doesn’t take into account what an abject, complete and total fucking idiot Trump is. He always says the quiet part out loud. He also takes the most stupid, lazy path to get what he wants and, as such, it’s easy to imagine that through sheer idiotic incompetence, Trump is personally responsible for a Second American Civil War.
American Self-Perception There’s a chance that when Steve Bannon gets what he wants, Steve Bannon gets what he wants. In other words, there’s a risk that the moment Bannon strangles American democracy with his “20,000 shock troops,” that is the moment the average non-MAGA person in the United States is so startled at what he’s managed to pull off that the country buckles and we have a civil war.
So, yes, Ms. Hill is right. But the verdict is out as to how peaceful everything will be.
Fuck Steve K. Bannon. That piece of shit. Having said that, I have to respect him for actively organizing in the real world the destruction of American democracy at its weakest link; the local level.
As I’ve written before, the thing about Bannon is, the jury is still out if he’s just an avatar for how fucked up the United State is — like Trump — or if he’s a potential Great Man who actually puts his own will on the course of history. I’m leaning towards him just being an avatar because even though he’s putting in the hard work in the real world that Twitter liberals refuse to do, it’s still pretty easy work.
Steve K. Bannon
He’s able to do it in broad daylight and there are plenty of crazed MAGA New Right cocksuckers who are primed and ready to go — all they need is a bit of direction at Bannon’s behest.
So, I dunno.
Bannon and I are a lot alike in our ability to take abstract concepts and make them concrete. We’re at exact opposite ends of the political spectrum, however. And I’m not nearly the suck-my-own-cock-ideolog that Bannon is. So, I feel as though he’s so wrapped up in his dream of being a modern day Lenin that he is missing some key problems with his plan.
What Bannon wants to do is a replay of 2000. He wants to steal the 2022 and 2024 elections in broad daylight, but in such a way that the very thing he thinks is so evil — the liberal press media narrative — will cause a collective shrug from the population when it all happens. He’s betting that the can smother democracy in broad daylight and because the neoliberal shills of corporate media have a vested interest in keeping everyone placid he’ll get away with it.
By January 2025, the administration of elections in the United States will be so corrupted by Bannon’s “shock troops” that it will be taken for granted that we’re no longer a democracy and, lulz, why did we even care in the first place. And, I have to Bannon credit, at the moment, I think he’s probably going to pull it off.
The MAGA New Right will gently transition us from liberal democracy to autocratic managed democracy and within a generation CNN will be owned by FOX and singing the praises of our system which is just like the perfect system found in Russia.
And, yet.
This has not happened yet. This is also a possibility that everything will be going fine for Bannon until he gets what he wants. Then, instead of everyone just shrugging and letting him get away with it, there’s a massive fucking freak out and the country descends into an actual hot, fighting civil war.
But it’s one of those things that you can’t predict. The entire system is designed to keep Americans believing they live in a democracy and that there’s no need to turn to violence should that no longer be the case. So, at the moment, Bannon’s totally logical to think he can pull of a stunt like I just described.
And, yet, if Bannon get what he wants, well, he might just get what he wants. It could be that the moment it becomes clear that his effort at nullifying any Democratic win at the local level has been successful, the average non-MAGA person may grow so enraged that, well, some pretty dark shit happens.
Or, to put it another way, the moment Bannon succeeds, may be the moment he fails. Political historical events like the type Bannon is plotting don’t happen in a vacuum. There would be some sort of consequence and potentially a lot of unintended consequences.
In honor of Qanon cocksuckers thinking something magical is going to happen as a part of “Red October,” I’ve decided to spam their searches for the term by using it gratuitously in my post titles until I don’t feel like it anymore.
America has a very 9/10 vibe to it right now. It feels like Something Big is going to happen at any moment, which will totally change the media narrative. I have no idea what it is, but something.
But let’s talk about the endgame to all of this — what’s going to happen to United States?
Well, there are a number of different scenarios. Let’s go through a few of the more interesting ones.
Balkanization In this scenario, the United States ends not with a bang, but with a whimper. There’s a lot of talk about a civil war, but in the end, we just don’t have it in us and as part of the Election Crisis of 2024 – 2025, three major states, California, Texas and Florida peacefully leave the Union. Then, the rest of the United States buckles and you have a significantly weaker — and poorer — rump USA. In a sense, this might be seen as the Soviet Union Endgame.
Civil War (Blue State Victory) In this scenario, there’s a civil war, we bomb ourselves into oblivian, but in the end, Blue States win and we enter a New Age of a stronger, more powerful and more united country. We will look back at what happened around this time as the American Crisis of The 21 Century. There will be an entirely new world order because of the numerous limited nuclear exchanges that took place while we were using WMD on ourselves. But there’s a chance that Humanity might have seen how close it came to its own destruction and realizes it needs to unite going forward. Civil War (Red State Victory) In this scenario, the opposite happens. Red States, win a Second Civil War because Blue States are simply too weak willed. Also, the Red States are willing to use WMD to make up for their smaller economies and populations that they win through sheer bloodthirstiness. Military Junta With this one, we have a very bad, very brief crisis where the US military steps in for a few months or even years while organize a Constitutional Convention. It’s a very scary, for unstable time, but we’re able to rework the Constitutional enough to placate both sides for a few more decades. This would be similar to a number of Constitutional amendments that were frantically proposed around the beginning of the first Civil War in an effort to prevent it from breaking out. Autocracy With this, we gently — and peacefully — slip into autocracy in such a way that not everyone even realizes we’re not longer a democracy. Gradually, over a decade or more, however, the United States and Russia begin to grow identical in their politics to the point that they’re often compared as being clones of each other. Center-Left leave the United States in the millions and the country begins to retreat into itself just as China is growing in strength. The Age of Democracy will be replaced with The Age of Autocracy and we all slowly cook alive because nationalism grows to be the most powerful thing in the world.
American Taliban This is the darkest ending. We have a civil war and because of the extensive use of WMD, something akin to an American Taliban springs up out of the chaos — specifically in the old Deep South. They’re extreme and they murder in cold blood en masse anyone they disagree with. Their existence will be the central political problem of North America for at least a generation.
I love to run scenarios, so here goes: what if the long-feared La Palma Mega Tsunami crashed into the American East Coast? What would be the practical political implications for the United States?
Of all the ways that the United States might collapse into chaos, the extremely unlikely occurance of a La Palma Mega Tsunami is actually something that would do it. If you pretty much destroyed a huge swath of the American East Coast, the ensuing chaos would be so staggering that all those fucking idiotic cocksucker MAGA would finally get the MAGA-themed “revolution” they seem to think is going to happen at any moment.
The government would be so overwhelmed by the catastrophe that there would be a huge power vacuum across a massive portion of the country. All the macro problems that are drifting towards some sort of existential resolution in the 2025 timeframe would happen all at once RIGHT NOW.
But, hopefully, this is never going to happen — or won’t happen anytime soon — and we won’t have to worry about such a horrible thing happening.
It’s very easy for Twitter liberals to get really worked up and to place on the blame America’s impending political clusterfuck solely on the shoulders of this or that person, as if we could somehow magically get rid of them then all of our problems would be solved.
This is so dumb because everyone from Trump to Bannon to DeJoy isn’t the problem, but, rather a symptom of our problems.
That someone like Trump could become president with the help of someone like Bannon is simply the practical application of severe macro problems in our politics. A prime example of what I’m talking about is what happened post-election day in 2020.
All these people who popped up to help Trump’s slow moving attempt to illegally stay in power were simply opportunists. Someone, somewhere, was going to pop up to do the very same thing. Who did it specifically did not really matter.
But let’s talk about Steve K. Bannon.
Steve K. Bannon
He likes to see himself as Lord Zod, destroyer of the administrative state. I think, in fact, he may have even compared himself to Lenin. Such suck-your-own-cock self-aggrandizement is pushing it, but not by much. Here’s what happened last time, with John Eastman trying to end our democracy.
While it’s highly like that someone like Bannon would have sprung up as we careened towards the Fourth Turning, the verdict is still out if he is A Great Man like Lenin who not just was a part of history, but MADE history. But even Lenin needed the conditions for him to strike.
This is the point in this post when I point out that I know myself well enough to know that if we really did have something as horrific as a civil war that *I* might just find myself in a historic situation. That sounds really fucking delusional — and it is. But I know myself well enough to know that either I’m going to die the first day of any civil war or I’m going to somehow weasel myself into some kind of leadership position in Blue State forces…somewhere. It may not be much, but would be a shit ton more than what I’m doing with my life right now.
But that is really fucking delusional thing for me to say at the moment.
The reason Bannon is so dangerous is he is attacking the very fiber of our liberal democracy. He’s attack it at the local level where it is its weakest because the requirements for participation are so low. These are usually filled with just average people off the street who believe in civil society and want to help out.
Bannon, meanwhile, wants to do to these otherwise pretty mundane offices what Trump has done to SCOTUS — fil it with a bunch of MAGA New Right ideologs who will come through for Trump (or DeSantis, or whomever) when the time comes in the 2024 – 2025 time frame (or the 2022 mid-terms.)
And, yet, the best laid plans of mice and human tumors often go awry. Bannon is probably going to be successful in destroying our democracy, but he also might be successful in destroying our democracy. There will come a moment at some point between now and January 2025 when Bannon’s plot will just about to succeed and, yet, it will not have totally succeeded. Here’s why we migtht have a civil war instead.
Republicans have come to glorify political violence Something you see a lot these days within the bullshit echo chamber of the MAGA New Right is the belief that because “liberals won’t leave us alone” that they are being “driven” to extremism. There’s a lot of leading not-so-vague talk as to what all this would ultimately mean. But it’s clear that for a number of “thought leaders” within the MAGA New Right that they have accepted that at some point in the future, they’re going to have to resort to violence to get what they want.
Republicans no longer believe in democracy It is now clear that like any good fascists, Republicans no longer believe in democracy unless it’s for the specific purpose of gaining and keeping power. This view of the system they’re supposed to a part of leads them do extremely distablizing things that help push the country to the brink.
Trump 2024 Just Trump being the 2024 nominee would, in itself, be enough to cause a civil war at some point in late 2024 – early 2025. He just has a special knack for “owning the libs” in such a way that if he stole in 2024 election and said the “quiet part outloud” that Blue States would grow so enraged that it would be they, not Red States, that left the Union and caused a Second Civil War. But Ron DeSantis is polling exceptionally well at the moment, so either Trump politically shivs him at some point, or he co-ops him, making him his VP, opening the door to DeSantis becoming America’s Putin at some point down the road a little bit.
Steve K Bannon. Bannon and his toadies are actively working to destroy the framework that we use to administer free and fair elections. So, it’s very easy to imagine a situation where this gambit works in ways that Trump himself is too idiotic to pull off personally and it will be so egregious that, again, Blue States leave the Union and we have a Second American Civil War.
Extreme negative polarization We’re in for a bump four or so years, no matter what, because negative polarization, on a systemic level, has reached a critical mass. When one of your political parties is fascist and would rather crash the global economy instead of even appear to work for the good of the nation — you got a problem.
A lack of shared values As the big blow up on Twitter in the last 24 hours about a Stephen Colbert song and dance gag about getting vaccinated proves — we can’t even agree on what’s funny. A combination of this and negative polarization is leading to the United States being two nations, one Red, one Blue and when we get around to attempting to elect the next president, the system simply won’t be prepared for the passions it will stir up.
A potentially historic miscalculation on the part of Republicans It’s possible that, much like European powers in the lead up to WW1, when the time comes and Republicans have a choice between peacefully transitioning us into autocracy or fucking with us all so we want to take up arms, they will choose the latter not because they have to, but because they want to. It’s possible that by the 2024 — 2025 period, Republicans will see a civil war as their only choice to consolidate power, even if it’s clear that they could get everything they ever wanted within the system they so obviously loath.
There will be one last death struggle for our democracy and either, like in 1861, we manage to crawl ourselves back from being dominated by Slave Power or, lulz, we don’t and Bannon is named reichsfuhrer.
One thing that is key to understand about Bannon. He is doing the one thing that so many so-called “Resistors” on Twitter can not or will not do — he’s doing real shit in the real world. He’s doing the hard work of effectuating his personal vision in the real world.
The popularity of people asking the Internet about the possibility of an impending civil war in the United States says a lot about modern America. I say this because it’s easy to bandy about the abstract of a “civil war” in the most powerful, ostensibly most stable nation in the world without really thinking about what it means.
It seems as though America, collectively, has begun to worry about its fate on an existential level.
In the immediate future, there are two points in the future when a civil car is a possibility. In the near term, something to do with the 2022 mid-terms might be enough to push us over the edge. If, say, Steve K. Bannon’s plot to corrupt election boards is successful in 2022 to the point that one side or the other makes a major political miscalculation, it’s possible the country would begin to split between Blue and Red.
The time, of course, is the 2024 presidential cycle.
This is what the book The Fourth Turning would have us believe. And it makes sense. Republicans are, on a systemic level, autocratic and anti-democratic to the point that if they have it within their power to deny Biden re-election in 2024, they will. And, in fact, things are so bad that Biden could lose fair and square and we could still have a Second Civil War.
But I still think around late 2024 — early 2025, the United States will face three existential choices — autocracy, civil war or military junta.
At the moment, I still don’t know which one of those three choices we will pick. Usually, if history is any guide, when things grow existential, the actual path of history is selected because of very specific tactical events that no one can predict in advance. That’s why Foundation-like “psychohistory” is so difficult to do in any practical form.
But, yes, I would say the United States at the moment is, in fact, careening towards a situation where a civil war is a very real possibility. All the macro metrics, at least, are pointing in that direction. Here are the reasons:
Republicans have come to glorify political violence Something you see a lot these days within the bullshit echo chamber of the MAGA New Right is the belief that because “liberals won’t leave us alone” that they are being “driven” to extremism. There’s a lot of leading not-so-vague talk as to what all this would ultimately mean. But it’s clear that for a number of “thought leaders” within the MAGA New Right that they have accepted that at some point in the future, they’re going to have to resort to violence to get what they want.
Republicans no longer believe in democracy It is now clear that like any good fascists, Republicans no longer believe in democracy unless it’s for the specific purpose of gaining and keeping power. This view of the system they’re supposed to a part of leads them do extremely distablizing things that help push the country to the brink.
Trump 2024 Just Trump being the 2024 nominee would, in itself, be enough to cause a civil war at some point in late 2024 – early 2025. He just has a special knack for “owning the libs” in such a way that if he stole in 2024 election and said the “quiet part outloud” that Blue States would grow so enraged that it would be they, not Red States, that left the Union and caused a Second Civil War. But Ron DeSantis is polling exceptionally well at the moment, so either Trump politically shivs him at some point, or he co-ops him, making him his VP, opening the door to DeSantis becoming America’s Putin at some point down the road a little bit.
Steve K Bannon. Bannon and his toadies are actively working to destroy the framework that we use to administer free and fair elections. So, it’s very easy to imagine a situation where this gambit works in ways that Trump himself is too idiotic to pull off personally and it will be so egregious that, again, Blue States leave the Union and we have a Second American Civil War.
Extreme negative polarization We’re in for a bump four or so years, no matter what, because negative polarization, on a systemic level, has reached a critical mass. When one of your political parties is fascist and would rather crash the global economy instead of even appear to work for the good of the nation — you got a problem.
A lack of shared values As the big blow up on Twitter in the last 24 hours about a Stephen Colbert song and dance gag about getting vaccinated proves — we can’t even agree on what’s funny. A combination of this and negative polarization is leading to the United States being two nations, one Red, one Blue and when we get around to attempting to elect the next president, the system simply won’t be prepared for the passions it will stir up.
A potentially historic miscalculation on the part of Republicans It’s possible that, much like European powers in the lead up to WW1, when the time comes and Republicans have a choice between peacefully transitioning us into autocracy or fucking with us all so we want to take up arms, they will choose the latter not because they have to, but because they want to. It’s possible that by the 2024 — 2025 period, Republicans will see a civil war as their only choice to consolidate power, even if it’s clear that they could get everything they ever wanted within the system they so obviously loath.
And, yet, it’s also possible that we’ll slip peacefully into a Russian-style autocracy and only a few more “woke” people like me will scream at the top of our lungs that we’re no longer a democracy.
But because for the average person nothing will have changed — at least in the near term — it will all be a lulz and it won’t be until 20 years of uninterrupted MAGA New Right rule that growing numbers of people might notice that something, at some point, changed.
Jesus H. Christ. This Website gets, at most, about 100 unique views in one day. Ever since I posted about fucking “Red October” about 20% of my hits have been from fucking cocksucker idiot Qanon fucktards apparently giddy at the prospect of….what?
There is something deeply wrong with American politics if that many people all over the country actually believe some sort of Qanon bullshit about a “Red October” happening. And all because of a confusion over why the White House was bathed in red light!
You just can’t make this bullshit up.
And, yet, here we are. There is a small, but passionate, group of people who apparently think some sort of bonkers Qanon prophecy about Red October has now come to pass and, I don’t know…it’s just so much bullshit that my poor old globalist cuck mind can’t process it.
One way of looking at it is Qanon is the type of secret society bullshit that a nation on the cusp of civil war or revolution usually experiences. But oh my God would a civil war suck. It would be truly horrific.
I continue to grow more and more impressed with how passionate and articulate the #NeverTrump members are. They’re not perfect. In fact, some of those associated with The Lincoln Project have done some pretty sketchy things.
But, the thing about the prominent #NeverTrumpers is they have principles and guts. And a lot of them are born leaders who will definitely rise to the occasion should the dead hand of history decides to give them the opportunity to do so.
They could very well save the Union.
Now, given the radical forces — both Leftist and fascist — that any actual civil war would unleash, the fact that rock solid conservatives would be in charge of saving the Union (or at least the Blue State part of it) will probably lead to some pretty surreal political events.
So, in a sense, it would be if instead of Lincoln during the Civil War, it was a War Democrat.
Anyway, for #NeverTrumpers to be given the opportunity to lead Blue States, things would have gotten pretty fucking bad. The most logical way this would happen would be Blue States leave the Union when Red States simply nullify a Biden re-election in Congress and the country buckles.
If something like that happened, then be prepared for some pretty dramatic, and radical, events to take place in the United States very, very quickly. The moment the inevitable happens and WMD are used domestically, ooooh by.
If we slip peacefully into autocracy, then all the #NeverTrumpers will gradually be exiled, imprisoned or worse. Far Worse.
I’ve talked a lot about the existential choice of autocracy or civil war that America faces around 2025 as part of the so-called “Fourth Turning.” But there is a third option — military junta.
In a sense, this option makes a lot more sense than either autocracy or civil war because it could be just the temporary fix to our problems. The scenario I’m thinking of is rather than what the Reds want, which is autocracy or what the Blues might want out of desperation, which is civil war, we would simply turn the reigns of power over to the military.
Once we did that, it’s easy to imagine the whole point of the exercise would be a convening of a Constitutional Convention that would address the concerns of both sides. This would be a way to take the existential issues of 2025 out of the hands of our undead politics and turn it over to a hopefully objective existential body that would help us become a more perfect Union.
There, unfortunately, so many problems with this on-paper ideal solution that it’s highly unlikely it would happen. What’s more likely to happen is either we slip peacefully into a MAGA New Right autocracy or Blue States grow so enraged that they leave the Union and all hell breaks loose.
The biggest problem is, of course, the U.S. Military on a systemic basis will do everything in its power to avoid this very solution, even to the point that the whole country collapses into anarchy. This would happen when the military simply refuses to pick a side when Trump fucks everything up like he always does and we just don’t know who the “real” POTUS is and Blue and Red States go for each others throats.
Another problem might be, that the not even the military will be able to withstand the forces tearing the country apart and the largely MAGA enlisted men pick the opposite side as the brass. So, instead of a unified military being able to step in for a few crucial months, everything collapses in on itself and we bomb ourselves into oblivion using illicitly seized caches of WMD.
If MAGA gets its way and we turn into an autocracy then, well, lulz.
The point of all of this is we need to start preparing ourselves for some pretty astonishing choices in the 2024 -2025 timeframe. And it’s going to suck so, so bad. It’s going to be horrible.
But the current autocracy without an autocrat status quo can not stand. We have a short-term solution to a long-term problem.
In just the last few days, I’ve sensed that things have changed America. I don’t quite know what’s going on, but it’s there. It seems as though we are now, after much delay, officially in the Biden Era and, as such, it seems the MAGA New Right has become re-invigorated.
Now, let me put that in context.
The Republican Establishment is ready to move on from Trump himself. They got everything they could possibly ever imagine because of his chaos and, in a sense, they’re sated. They’re ready to find a Trump Without Trump who will do the same thing but without all the headaches.
Now what.
As such, there is tension between the MAGA New Right base that remains all-in with Trump and the Establishment that really, really would rather DeSantis be the nominee in 2024. That’s why DeSantis is beginning to rise so rapidly within Republican circles — he is a viable candidate that a lot of traditional conservatives can support without the embarrassing extensive permission structure required with Trump.
The only problem is, Trump wants to be the next Trump and screwing up the best laid plans of the Republican Establishment is his thing. So Trump in the next year or so will have to make a decision — co-op DeSantis by making him is veep or destroy him. Trump is so difficult to predict at times that at the moment I can’t tell you which one he’s going to do.
But I do know that the shift I’m feeling probably has something to do with the beginning of the extended 2022 mid-term cycle. That cycle will officially be kicked off the moment we know who Virginia’s next governor is. I would go so far as to say it’s possible that if Republican Glenn Youngkin wins (which I think he has a fair chance of doing) that is will we will lurch into a real New Era because we’re all going to be thinking about what that means for the 2022 mid-terms themselves.
All I can say is, batten down the hatches because things are dark in the United States an only going to get worse as the months and years progress. We’re going to be facing more and more existential situations as we careen towards a massive, historic clusterfuck in 2024 – 2025.
You must be logged in to post a comment.