by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
A lot of macro political trends are careening towards coming to a head around January 2025 when Congress is set to certify the vote of the next presidential election. That I have to worry this much about what happen at that point is pretty deep because it indicates that we’ve reached the point where each Federal election is existential.
If Republicans gain power again, that’s all she wrote — we’re well on our way to becoming an autocratic managed democracy like Russia.
But I struggle to understand what, in concrete terms, MAGA wants. Whenever I talk to my conservative relatives, they give me a lot of abstract fears and that’s it. They want to end Cancel Culture. They want a secure border. They don’t want children to experience the horrors of Critical Race Theory. But what does any of that actually mean?
Republicans are such fucking fascists now that we have to stop hoping this or that thing is going to save us. No one is going to save us. We have to save ourselves. Republicans, on an existential, institutional basis no longer believe in democracy and want the very thing I fear — autocracy.
They want minority political rule and an end to the natural ebb and flow of a liberal democracy. They want a one party state where THEY are “just left alone” but dem dar libtards are sent to Trump branded ICE re-education camps or push out a window.
I also still struggle to understand what, exactly, is fucking with our politics. Is it just race? Is that it? Or is it also the sense among bed rock conservatives that since about 2012 America’s society has been changing at an alarming rate and their poor little conservative brains can’t process it? Whatever it is, the disconnect between the center-Left echo chamber and the center-Right echo chamber is pushing us to the brink.
The United States is now two nations — Red, rural America and Blue urban America — who hate and misunderstand each other. The Republican Party is now an anti-democratic fascists party that will stop at nothing to transform the country into a white Christian ethno state.
And so, again, it seems as though at some point between now and January 2025 we’re going to face the existential choice of autocracy or civil war. If we choose autocracy, what will happen is people like me will scream at the top of our lungs that we’re no longer a democracy, while Republicans will snicker that we’re “a constitutional republic.”
The conservatives in my family will either freak out whenever I mention that we’re now an autocracy or they’ll simply shrug and say so what, what does that even mean. They will say this, of course, until ICE comes after ME and then they will want me to shut up.
Which I will not do.
So, lulz, who knows.
