by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I have been called, at different times, “hysterical” about the prospect of a Second American War and someone who peddles “doom shit” about our future. At the moment, everything is very abstract when it comes to such things. But let’s go through my current reasoning as to why, at the moment, I just don’t know if we’re going to have a civil war or simply slip peacefully into autocracy.
The first metric is that I’m simply listening to the other side and taking them seriously. They’re telling people like me on Twitter: you’re forcing me to radicalize and one day I’m going to strike back with violence. They say it all the time like an abusive husband tells a wife, “I wouldn’t hit you if you didn’t make me.” It’s my fault that they’re snowflakes who get think of violence when they don’t get their way. Uh huh.
So, we have a very public glorification of political violence happening in broad daylight. I suppose the retort to this on the part of people who think I’m full of shit is it’s all talk. They don’t really mean it. It’s like all the autocratic talk that Trump did for four years — just ignore it. And, this reasoning goes, by not ignoring it, I’m simply a fool.
My response is, I think some of this is the people who think I’m “hysterical” are “normal” and have no vision. They barely function in the abstract world and they only react when a crisis has grown so dire that they absolutely have to do something about it. Then it’s too late.
Or, put another way, there are all these abstract macro trends tearing the country apart in subtle ways that all seem to be coming to a head either in January 2023 or January 2025. Either you see it, or you don’t. Either you’re alarmed at the prospect of organized political violence in the United States, or you’re not.
A far less abstract element of our potential doom is Donald Trump. I’ve long believed that what’s most likely to happen is the United States is going to slip peacefully into autocracy. In fact, at some point in early 2025, one of the big debates in the United States could be, “Does this mean we’re an autocracy now?”
Conservatives will ridicule people like me for being hysterical, even as President DeSantis begins to methodically purge the media, weaponize ICE generally consolidate power. It won’t be until it’s personal or our new autocrat somehow bungles the transition that instead of talking about autocracy, we’re talking about civil war.
Which gets us back to Donald Trump — Donald Trump is an incompetent idiot. I’ve been told, when I bring up the idea that Trump will run again that, “No he won’t.” And we all know that because of negative polarization and an extensive permission structure that the very conservatives who think “no he won’t” will vote for Trump AGAIN despite the Jan. 6th insurrection because they simply can not, will not, form a united front with liberals for the specific purpose of stopping Trump from becoming POTUS again. (Or at least the nominee.)
Given how abjectly stupid and incompetent Trump is, it’s very easy to see Trump single handedly doing something so stupid between late 2024 and early 2025 that drives us collectively into the arms of organized political violence. I don’t know what it would be, but Trump is so stupid and, yet, so attune to the MAGA volk that it’s easy to imagine a situation where he leans into political violence in an effort to nullify any Biden win, he misjudges the situation when it comes to everyone else — like he always does — and boom, we have a fucking civil war.
Part of why norms think I’m “hysterical” about all of this is they simply don’t think in the terms that I do. They can’t make the cognitive leap of looking at abstract macro trends and saying, “Oh boy. Something’s gotta give.”
But it has not happened yet. It’s possible that either we slip peacefully into autocracy that not everyone even acknowledges has happened or, I dunno, we kind of continue in an anti-democratic trend until we don’t even realize we had something that is now gone.
Yet, again — keep an eye on what Trump does.
If he runs, the chance of us having a civil war grows significantly.
