by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I find myself thinking about the French Revolution a lot these days. It seems as though while Neo-Confederate MAGA-Qanon cocksuckers are so busy thinking about masturbating to a Second American Civil War, they’re totally oblivious to the possibility of a Second American Revolution.
Or, to put it another way, Trump sliced the seal on Pandora’s Box and it seems as though the question is how bad things are going to get. Now, before I continue, the counter argument is that the Trump Era in itself was something of a Cold Civil War. And, while there’s no going back after that particular clusterfuck, in the end, a new equilibrium of sorts will be established and we’ll gradually drift into the New Normal of post-Trumpian politics.
But we WILL remain in the realm of politics.
In all honesty, that’s definitely what I want to have happen.
And, yet, it’s very easy to imagine a future historian describing the fall of the First American Republic, then revolution then civil war and then the founding of a Second Republic. This would not happen in a vacuum, of course. In all likelihood, there would be a World War 3 because of that particular chain of events.
But what, exactly, would happen and why? There are simply too many variables for me to begin to predict. And, yet, I could see Trump going transactional on Twitter which would incite the violence he needed to invoke the Insurrection Act and hunker down to stay in office the rest of his life. Then the military gets involved — maybe even implodes itself — and initially there’s Balkanization of the United States into different major polities (Texas, California, maybe Florida) and isolated incidents of Revolutionary governments being established in, say, places like New York City and the Deep South.
The whole post-World War 2 liberal order would be destroyed and something new created from the ashes. I mean, if big chunks of the globe are a post-apocalyptic hellscape because Sectreary of State Mike Pompeo thought he could “force” Jesus to return, then, well, things might be a bit different going forward.
As is usual with my worse case scenarios, it’s not like I can predict the future. And even if I did, it’s likely whatever happened would occur within a spectrum. The point is — either things snap back to a New Normal, or everything burns to the ground and it’s every man for himself.
The scary thing is, at this point, I honestly don’t know which one it’s going to be.
