by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
The thing we saw after election night 2020 is, once history begins to have a certain momentum, someone, somewhere is going to pop up to take advantage of it. As such, the talk of recounts popping up here and there across the country is very, very dangerous because all we need is one (1) fraudulent “victory” on the part of Trump and the dead hand of history may take to some pretty dark places — like a secession crisis.
It’s very easy to imagine that initially we have some sort of “nullification” crisis in which Trump runs around the country having rallies where he demands the results of the 2020 election be nullified because he “won.” Because that’s a very dumb, batshit idea that is impossible to do, MAGA state legislatures will YOLO it and start to have secession conventions.
And, yet, it could be this is all a bunch of nothing. Trump talks a good game, but he’s way too lazy to actually do the hard work necessary to start a civil war in 2021. Really, that’s kind of the rub — it wouldn’t be Trump who did it. It would be us. We would do it to ourselves.
The issue is, does this crisis happen this year because of fucking Cyber Ninjas (and others) or does it happen in 2024-2025 because a MAGA controlled Congress tells us all to fuck off and nullifies any Electoral College result it doesn’t approve of. That, no matter what, would be the real moment of truth. Either it becomes conventional wisdom that the only way a Democrat can become president is if Democrats control Congress, or we have a civil war and answer the question of what America is supposed to be, that way.
I honestly don’t what which will happen right now. It’s one of those things where a lot of metrics are flashing red…and it could be that we manage to drift through this particular crisis and nothing really bad happens. Or, if Republicans do again take power — which the ebb and flow of history says they inevitable will — that instead of freaking out and turning us into Trumplandia, we come to some sort of an agreement whereby hard power for generations will be in Republican minority white hands, while soft power will remain in liberal hands via the infotainment industrial complex.
That, I’m afraid, is a very, very sanguine take on our prospects.
More likely we’re pretty much just going to face autocracy or civil war. That’s it — no middle ground any more. But, we’ll see. I’m often wrong.
