by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Something happened to the Right when Obama won a second term. I don’t know if it was because of the rise of smart phones that made radicalization easier or if they just could not process that they had lost the culture wars and as such they freaked the fuck out.
But, whatever happened after starting in 2013, it was the origin of the counter revolution that we’re now living through. As I keep telling my Traditionalist relatives to no avail, for all the soft power of the woke cancel culture mob demanding everyone turn gay at the earliest age possible, in the end the Right has that sweet, sweet hard power.
And, I don’t know about you, but if push came to shove, I sure would rather have hard power, the ability to pass laws than I would the soft power of “canceling” people.
But things have gotten so fucking bad with my Traditionalist relatives — who I love dearly — that they simply can not, will not process that their side is politically ascendant and they’re getting everything they want. Or, put another way, they will get everything they want they just have to be patient. At some point after 2025, the GQP will use its hard power to, at last, vanquish the woke cancel culture mob and all its soft power.
My Traditionalist relatives get really worked up about the soft power of the woke cancel culture mob. So much so, that they conflate MAGA’s hard power with the soft power of the cancel culture mob. They just can’t process that MAGA is winning and, in the end, autocracy will be established and the culture war counter-revolution will be successful.
Now, for me, the issue is my Traditionalist relatives at the moment are nothing more than Good Germans without an autocrat to support. When that changes in 2025, we’re going to zoom towards the final “red line” –ME. And, just like I have no doubt my Traditionalist relatives would get their daughter or granddaughter an abortion if necessary at some point in the future, I also know that when ICE comes for me at some point in the next 20 odd years that they will first beg me to shut up “for the sake of the family.”
Then, when I won’t shut and I find myself in an ICE camp, they’re going to do what they can to get me out. It’s going to suck. A lot. If they had only made common cause with me on a practical basis when it mattered, maybe things would not have gotten that bad.
All of that obviously hasn’t happened yet. And it may never. But the rise of autocracy in the United States is not the abstract that it is to a lot of people. I’ve had the luxury of being a drunk crank in a Western democracy my entire life and once I no longer live in a Western democracy…well, all bets are off.
