by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
First, to directly answer the question in the subject — I don’t know. But what I can tell you is there are two pretty obvious endgames to the American democratic birthright. One thing to make clear is, according to political scientists, after January 6th, the United States isn’t even a democracy anymore — it’s an “anocracy.”
This is when a country is either transitioning to autocracy or transitioning towards democracy. And its in this state of transition that a country is most likely to have a civil war.
As such, while I don’t know what’s going to happen to our democracy, I can give you two possible outcomes — they are civil war or autocracy.
All things being equal, the most obvious answer is we’re going to slide into autocracy when someone like Ron DeSantis becomes president. To be a Republican is to not believe in democracy in the first place and to want autocracy, so any Republican who becomes president will end what’s left of our struggling democracy. We’ll become an autocracy without putting up any struggle at all and 20 years from now we’ll all wonder why DeSantis — or whichever Republican gets the job — is still POTUS.
That on paper, is what the most logical endgame to what’s going on. We can’t simply “hope” that a Republican won’t become POTUS anytime soon so there is time for them to have a come-to-Jesus moment about democracy. That simply is not going to happen. We in an asymmetrical war against autocracy at the moment — Republicans just have to win once to end American democracy.
In a sense, it definitely feels like we’ve collectively just given up.
Then there is Trump.
Trump, unto himself, could start a civil war in a variety of ways. He could start one sooner by telling Red States to leave the Union NOW in an effort to protect himself personally. He could start one later by, say, having such a radical second term that Blue States begin to leave the Union as early as just after Election Day 2024 to as late as spring 2025.
I would suggest you keep an eye on wealthy liberals. If they begin to leave the country en mass then you know Something Big is just about to happen. I estimate as many as 1 million wealthy liberals will flee the country whenever we either start to have a civil war or begin the final transition into autocracy.
All I can say is — figure out what you believe in, what you’re willing to risk life and limb for in the real world. Having such clarity is something you’re really going to need, no matter what happens.
