by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Something about Obama’s second term galvanized and radicalized the Republican Party to such an extent that Trump was given a springboard to the presidency.
If Trump wins a second term — which I think he will because he’s going to lie, cheat and steal his way into it — it’s easy to imagine a situation where the Democrat Party will experience a similar radicalization. And, yet, these are not ordinary times. What’s more likely to happen is Trump will purge the media in his second term and make all traditional notions of civil society and liberal democracy in the United States moot.
Also, remember, a lot — A LOT — of otherwise well-respect, intelligent people have completely invested themselves in MAGA-Qanon. So much so, that they have said some pretty bonkers things in his defense. Things are simply are nearly impossible to defend if he’s not in power and they have to criticize the sitting president.
The list goes on. But the point is — the United States is careening towards a historic fork in the road. Either we turn into a fascist state or we have a civil war. We can not go this far down the road to tyranny without slipping into it directly or solving this particular debate about the soul of the nation on some sort of battlefield.
Now, let me put all of this into context. I’m a man of peace. A man of ideas. But I am also taking seriously the batshit insane rhetoric now found among a lot of prominent Rightwing “thought leaders.”
As such, everything indicates that even if it’s just rhetoric for them, that someone, somewhere is going to take is seriously and blow something up. This may happen no matter what for no other reason than in their organsmic love for Trump, they want to give him an excuse to seize “total power” as Roger Stone would have it.
I have written at great length that, really, the last defense of what’s left of our liberal democracy is nothing more than our self-perception as Americans. Nothing has indicated to me that even that will matter in the end, but for one thing — House Trump is a bunch of self-own artists.
They are well on their way to cruising into “total power,” but they’re such morons that they could very well do the very thing that all the point scoring on Twitter by Blue Check Liberals has never done to date — make people care.
When the average person looks up and realizes some basic freedoms they assume they would have as part of their American Birthright are gone in a rather abrupt fashion, then it’s possible we’re all going to need to bone up on our Lincoln.
