by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I’m reading the new history of Watergate and it’s really, really good. I hope to learn how Watergate is different from the modern post-accountability era of Trumplandia that we currently live in.
Nixon, in the end, at least had, like, shame and shit. But Trump and his ilk are post-shame and because the people who brought Nixon down — the people I call conservative “Traditionalists” are totally co-oped by the fascists MAGA…lulz. We’re fucked. We’re totally, completely fucked.
Instead of seeing the traditional arc of a Washington scandal that started with Watergate, with Trumplandia we see the system has failed us. No one is going to save us, no matter how often some Blue Check liberal writes a long, breathless Twitter thread meant to leave us with the idea that the system is going to work.
It’s not. The system isn’t working. There’s no hope. No one and no thing is going to save us. We have to accept that we’re either going to have a fucking civil war or we’re going to slip into autocracy without putting up any struggle at all.
Anyone with any “hope” of the system working — as it allegedly did with Nixon — is a fucking fool and I struggle to understand how you look at yourself in the mirror in the morning. You should hang your head in shame.
The system didn’t REALLY work with Nixon because he quit before it could. Had he let the system work and allowed himself to be impeached and convicted, I think, in the end, we would have been a lot better off. The crazy thing is the absolute worst elements of the Nixon Whitehouse are now tame compared to how fucking bonkers the modern GQP is now.
There are a dozen people — men and women — who want to be Trump’s autocratic successor. And we’re not going to do a damn thing to stop them. I don’t want a civil war — hell, I hate conflict of any sort — but it’s rather embarrassing that we won’t even put up a struggle at all when our democracy (which is now an anocracy) is finally snuffed out.
Anyway. I haven’t gotten very far in the Watergate history. But I am moving quite quickly. It’s really well written.
