by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
On paper, the United States is doomed in 2024. As of right now, there simply is no way that at that point we don’t either become a MAGA managed-democracy autocracy or descend into civil war.
Among the reasons why this is now-nearly a law of nature is it’s almost a certainty that both houses of Congress will flip in 2022 and remain Republican in 2024. As such, the actual vote outcome in 2024 won’t matter. The MAGA Republicans will refuse to certify Biden’s re-election no matter what. Or they’ll do whatever necessary at the state level so his re-election doesn’t even get that far. But the point is — 2024 will be the crossroads.
Will the average American lulz the idea that literally their vote doesn’t count if it isn’t for a Republican or will they take up arms at the injustice. I guess it’s possible Republicans might be the ones taking up arms if THEY don’t get their way, but given how Republicans are becoming bloodthirsty fascists I don’t see how it would come to that. In other words, they will control the process such in 2024 that if they take up arms it will be in the context to reacting to the center-Left doing so rather than taking up arms themselves. Their political goal is to take power before the center-Left knows what hit them.
We long ago established that no matter how many votes you win by, if you lose by one vote in a strategic state you lose the presidency. As such, the next logical step is for us to lulz Congress using its “legal” right to engage in certification nullification. It simply won’t do what it’s otherwise supposed to do because it doesn’t like the outcome.
But, again, that’s where the fork in the road happens.
A lot would depend on if Republicans lost control of the political narrative in some way and people got woke to what was going on. That inability to strike before the narrative was established was Trump’s biggest screw up. If he had gone full autocrat anytime during the summer of 2020 he would still be president right now.
Or even if he had struck in some major way between election night and when the election was called for Biden, he would still be president. He was simple too lazy, too much of a ding-dong to do the hard work of being an autocrat. He thought he could simply rant about it and get what he wanted. The next autocrat in waiting won’t be so dumb.
Anyway, it’s very easy to imagine a situation where Republicans make a major power grab at both the state level and, if that fails them, Congress. They simply refuse to accept the election of a Democrat. Period. Full stop. They might dress this up in a bunch of legal bullshit but the end result would be the same — we would have Republicans in power in Washington for decades to come.
And that’s where I just don’t know. I don’t know the reaction of average Americans. Maybe as long as the economy was going well and freedom of speech wasn’t really touched that much that there might be something of a stalemate at this point. Republicans have “hard” power of making policy and passing laws, while Democrats would have the “soft” power of the media. The only way anything would ever change is when Republicans did something so totally, absolutely indefensible that they were shamed into doing the right thing. Though, of course, Republicans have no shame so that would only work occasionally.
The other option is a civil war. And here’s the thing — under the conditions of war, Blue States are in a far better position to win than Red States. Red States have massive — and growing — political power for various reasons but the moment you shift your metrics from power politics to geopolitical realpolitik then everything changes.
Blue States have biggest populations and economies. They wouldn’t have to worry about a race war. Not only are their economies bigger, but they’re more smaller and more concentrated. But there are a lot of known unknowns. Would would be the leaders of Red and Blue? Who uses stolen WMD, where and why?
Remember, this clusterfuck would not happen in a vacuum. It’s very likely that WW3 would happen in conjunction. A number of limited nuclear exchanges would happen around the world as the United States fell into chaos. What’s more, it’s even possible that a state like the DPRK might lob a few nukes our way just for shits and giggles.
I have no idea if we will chose civil war or autocracy. That’s just too far out into the future for me to know. But I do know that MAGA is so fucking dumb to want a civil war. Very, very dumb. They can get everything they want by at least pretending to work within the confines of liberal democracy.
