by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
America’s Second Republic is collapsing before our very eyes. We live in an era of political lawlessness, where Trump and his acolytes are above the law and free to think up continuing mischief.
I continue to read a book about the rise of Hitler and I’m struck by how the United States now is very much like the Weimar Republic of the 1920s. We’ve had our beerhall putsch and now we’re waiting to see if Trump (or some other autocrat) wins the presidency in 2024.
And, really, the key issue is we have to face is no one is going to save us. The United States is collapsing on a political basis. The question is, collapsing into what? We have three options — civil war, autocracy or military junta. And, at the moment, I just don’t know which of the three will be the final endgame. The most obvious is we simply slip peacefully into autocracy. That definitely seems the most logical outcome.
Yet, I can’t dismiss the idea that we may have a civil war and bomb ourselves into the Stone Age. That is a very real possibility. And, I would say, the thing that might prevent such a civil war is the total lack of Blue leadership. So, if there was a sudden rush out of the Union by Blue States after a stolen 2024 election, we would see some rather dramatic arrival of Blue leadership simply out of history’s desperate needs at the moment.
But it would be a really big shock.
The third option is a military junta. That’s very possible, too. I could see the United States come to the brink of civil war and there be a military junta formed specifically so we might have a Constitutional Convention that would fix the systemic issues the United States face at the moment. We might see a President James Mattis in that particular situation.
That seems unlikely, however. I continue to vacillate widely between thinking it’s obvious that we’re going to have a civil war to it being obvious that we’re going to slip peacefully into autocracy.
I just don’t know which one is going to happen at the moment.
