by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Whenever Dr. Fauci testifies in front of Congress, my heart sinks. It feels like the montage in the movie because the inciting when the Bad Thing happens that begins the story happens. It’s when American Senators who should know better babble about this or that anti-Fauci conspiracy simply to get a clip on FOX “News” that it really hits home how bleak America’s future is.
I don’t know what the “bad thing” is going to be — autocracy or civil war — but something’s gotta give. The United States can’t keep being such an unstable anocracy. We have to make up our collective minds one way or another. But whatever that decision is, it’s going to be a catastrophe.
I say this because the Republican Party is now fascist on a systemic level. Their entire point is to obtain power again and then never let it go. Trump’s Big Lie is now what the Republican Party is on an existential level. I just don’t see them peacefully ever giving up power again. As such, either we shrug a succumb to autocracy or we have a civil war and bomb ourselves into oblivion.
The thing that people who believe I’m peddling “hysterical doom shit” ignore is traditional American politics no longer exists. It’s become impossible to talk to someone about policy with someone you disagree with. It all descends into a screaming match.
It makes you wonder. I mean, Dr. Fauci is 80 years old. Who is going to replace him? Seems to me, either no one does until Republicans came name some MAGA toady, or we have to wait until Blue States win a civil war to get around to doing it. America is about as taunt as it can possibly be. All that has to happen for severe political violence up and including civil war to happen is there be just a little bit of added pressure on the system.
At the moment, it seems to me that The Bad Thing that is going to happen is we slip peacefully into autocracy. Nothing will change at first, but gradually because form follows function the United States will become politically identical to Russia with the twist of white minority rule. Wealthy, well-educated center-Left people will flee the country and the United States will grow inward looking, poor and unstable.
I mention this to my Traditionalists relatives and it doesn’t register that center-Left people leaving the country en mass would be bad for the country — they’re too wrapped up thinking that somehow I’m looking down on center-Right people. It’s kind of surreal. When your first reaction to millions of your fellow Americans voting with their feet is to think the person who suggests this as a possibility is being snooty…is unique.
It’s not a matter of center-Left people being more economically productive than center-Right people, it’s about the destruction of the United States because tyranny has descended upon the land. But, I guess, if you’re a center-Right Traditionalists, you don’t like the idea that YOU could be the bad guys.
I don’t know what to tell you. Things are dark and going to get darker.
