by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
We’re doomed. Because of a number of very specific situations — the pandemic and Trump being a total ding-dong — the United States dodged a catastrophe in 2020. We won’t be as lucky in 2024. There is going to be severe political instability in the winter of 2024-2025. And either there’s a rolling political violence across the country that descends into something akin to a second civil war or we finally fall into Republican minority rule for the next 50 years or more. Here’s why.
FOX Fired Its Election Night State Caller
One of the subtle things that saved our asses was FOX News Election Desk called Arizona. That was a tipping point for the night. This will not happen in 2024. If Trump — or someone like Trump — is anywhere near winning on Election Night the crucial FOX News is going to be on the side of the bad guys, no questions asked. So it could be possible that the Right will never accept a Democrat winning, no matter what. So, either the 2024 election is stolen and we become an autocracy, or the country implodes.
The Macro Problems of the Last 40 Years Are Still There
The deep seated rot within the bowels of the American political system are still there. Republicans are hell bent on turning the United States into a white ethno state where white Christians tell everyone else what to do because they have no policies and all their political views are based on fear. So, in a sense, if it’s not 2024, it will be 2028 and so on. There is going to be a point when these different macro trends are going to come to a head one way or another. Either it will be a civil war or our zombie liberal democracy will finally just be dead.
The Republican Party Is A Fascist Party
Liberal democracy is simply a means to an end for the modern Republican Party. They see it as either a way to take power or keep power. Any form of compromise is weakness. A huge chunk of the Republican Party has slipped directly into such thuggishness that they’re willing to embrace the traditional fascist playbook to achieve their ends. So, once they take over Congress in 2022, that will be the setup a very brazen theft of the 2024 election one way or another. And, really, the issue is do the fascist Republicans bungle the strangling of our zombie liberal democracy and start a civil war or do they get away with it clean?
Known Unknowns
There are a number of things that may come out of the blue to change things so much in the next four years that what is obvious — that on a macro level the United States is fucked — doesn’t happen.
Elon Musk
Four years is a long time. It’s at least possible that on the technological front someone like Elon Musk might pull a rabbit out of a hat that throws everything up in the air. There are 3 million high paying blue collar jobs at risk should Musk perfect the automated semis he’s working on. It’s at least possible in the 2024 presidential cycle that something will happen whereby the far Right and the far Left merge into a new party that is opposed to “soft singularity” technology like automation. But that would be a lot more sooner than I would expect.
North Korea
This is an existential threat to the United States that if it flares up in the next four years could make a lot what I’m worried about very moot. If we have a major regional war the scares the shit out of us, then it’s possible the Biden – Harris Administration will quite easily win a second term.
The Inevitable
Neither Biden nor Trump is immortal and it’s at least possible that one — or both of them — may pull a Justice Scalia on us. If it’s Trump, then that opens up the flood gates for a number of young would-be autocrats to do a lot of shit that Trump wanted to do but was too big an idiot to pull off. If it’s, God forbit, Biden, then it’s possible a President Harris might have the spunk necessary to fight the macro forces that I think have us doomed at the moment.
