As I’ve repeatedly said — I got Trump wrong. But I was not alone. In fact, the people who voted for Trump in 2016 got him wrong too. And that’s the thing people like me going into the 2020 election totally misjudged — we thought Trump was an autocrat when he was just a fucking idiot.
The biggest mistake that Trump made was he did not strike when any other would be autocrat would have struck — in the summer of 2020. This is where Trump’s innate stupidity and laziness comes in. This is where him being nothing more than a vessel for white rage, rather than him being a Great Man comes in.
The moment that Trump let the election be called for Biden, was the moment he not only lost in the traditional political sense, but also when he started to panic. So, from that point in November to January 6th, Trump and his goons thrashed around, looking for some way to stage a self-coup, or autogolpe. The plan was something along the lines of, Trump would incite the insurrection and either that would be enough to browbeat Pence into not doing his job, or somehow something would go wrong in a big enough manner that Trump could literally stage the first autogolpe in American history. (In a very ham-handed manner.)
But everything — thankfully — went wrong for them on the day of. Pence, weirdly enough, did the right thing. And there were no counter-protesters to at the Capitol to give Trump a cause belli when it came to overthrowing the government via calling a “National Security Emergency.”
The key issue is what are we going to going forward?
When Trump’s autogolpe failed, the United States entered a very strange era where we’re an autocracy without an autocrat. We’re living in Weimar America. The failure of the January 6th autogolpe radicalized the Republican Party and set the stage for us to either slip peacefully into autocracy in four years or to have a civil war.
And, at the moment, it really could go either way. For the time being, I think we’re going to become an autocracy. But there is a small chance that things will get out of control and one side or the other will begin to leave the Union and we’re going to bomb ourselves into the Stone Age.
I wish there was something I could do on a personal basis to help prevent either one of those outcomes, but there isn’t. There’s no democracy defending organization to counter The Patriot Front. We need one, but it doesn’t exist. And, at the moment, our best bet is there’s something akin to a WW3 that so jiggles our domestic dynamic that Democrats can survive in power long enough for some severe structural problems in the United States to be fixed.
The American center-Left has to go beyond angry Twitter rants and move into the more difficult stage of figuring out what the fuck we’re going to do in the real world. The first thing we have to do is do triage. Things aren’t great.
American democracy is in its twilight.
Not only is autocracy very, very popular with huge swaths of the American body politic, you have Steve Bannon actively working on an “administrative coup.” So, it’s very possible that Trump is going to win fair and square without the aid of Bannon’s shenanigans.
So, what does that mean for people who believe in Lincoln’s dream?
We’re fucked.
If there isn’t a civil war, then I would suggest if you can to leave the country. Everyone who doesn’t believe in autocracy is going to leave the country gradually anyway, so lulz. For a lot of people, autocracy is an abstract that is difficult to understand in real terms. That is, of course, until ICE or The Patriot Front starts knocking heads and then, suddenly, the difference between autocracy and democracy becomes a lot more clear.
So, if we slip peacefully into autocracy, we simply gradually become identical politically to Russia and that’s it. In a generation President DeSantis will be eying a chunk of Canada in an effort to secretly have some sort of defense against a warming earth. (Or something.) Form follows function.
Now, we come to the other, more horrific possibility — civil war.
I still don’t think we’re going to have a civil war. And, yet, Trump IS a lazy idiot and the MAGA New Right IS rather bloodthirsty. So, it’s possible to imagine a scenario where the fascists self-own and Blue States are forced to deal with the existential. If that happens, then you have a lot of concrete things to address.
A lot of the excesses of the identity politics, or cancel culture, or whatever the fuck you want to consider will burn off pretty quick when you’re too busy bombing yourself into the stone age through seized WMD to think about your pronouns.
The same dynamic of the first Civil War or WW2 will be at play. Every able bodied person will have to contribute to the war effort. Everything will be thrown up in the air and everything will be up for grabs. There could be a race war in the South. New York City could declare itself a free state. The United States could have a civil war and there not be any sort of clear endgame.
We could just break up into a number of waring states with various shifting alliances and there won’t be any re-uniting of the nation. A lot would depend what California decides to do. If it just leaves the Union because it can then, we’re really fucked. But if it stays and fights, then it can be the Blue State arsenal of democracy.
Things would get a lot more radical. During the civil war, the two sides would grow more radical. In Blue States, especially, suddenly politics would start to work with a big bang because there are a lot — a lot — of popular policies that Blue States want to enact but haven’t been able to because of Republicans.
I don’t want a civil war. But there comes a point, much like 1860 – 1861, when history makes that choice for you. We have to do everything in our power to prevent and avoid a civil war.
But we also need to begin to game out what we’re going to do should one start at some point between Election Day 2024 and Certification Day 2025.
Saying this over and over again is growing tiresome — Trump is above the law. We just don’t have the political will to do anything about the fucker. We know what he was up to in the lead up to January 6th Insurrection and it’s a lulz.
The man was actively attempting to destroy American democracy and was only thwarted through a combination of how pell-mell the execution of the self-coup was and Pence simply not going along with the plan at the last moment.
And now Trump, like an face-hugging xenomorph from Alien, is hell bent on turning the Republican Party into a shiv to murder American democracy once and for all no later than, say, January 2025. Remember, Trump is so popular that he probably will win the 2024 election fair and square — no cheating needed.
Yet, of course, none of this has happened yet.
The thing that “hysterical” people like me get dinged for is we make arguments that make sense, then don’t come to fruition for this or that unexpected event or historical miscalculation. I mean, how could I have known in the fall of 2019 that a pandemic would throw everything up in the air? How could I have known that, in the end, Trump was too lazy and stupid to do even the most basic of autocratic moves going into the 2020 election?
So, he lost.
And, honestly, this time around, it’s very possible that something similar could happen. I mean, if Trump doesn’t run, then the likelihood that we’ll simply slip peacefully into autocracy grows. And there are plenty of people who will shrug if we become an autocracy and won’t event acknowledge the transition until it affects them on a personal level.
Then, of course, it will be way, way, way too late for people like me who simply will never fucking shut up about, say, what a piece of shit President Mike Pompeo is. Fucking cocksucker.
A little lite reading.
Anyway, while all the signs point to something akin to a Fourth Turning / Great Reset in roughly the 2024 – 2025 timeframe, it hasn’t happened yet. But all the metrics are pointing to such a thing happening. All the lights are flashing red. Get ready.
Man, oh, man, am I nobody. I got a bum ankle, warm laptop and Internet access. That’s all I got at the moment. But I do have something else — I’m good at scenarios. So, I’m rather alarmed with the recent shenanigans of the fucking paramilitary group The Patriot Front and want to game out what their long term goals may be.
The Patriot Party Flag
I’m not an expert, but I do know enough from what I can see with my own two eyes to figure out some sense of what their danger is. Here’s what we know about them. They are well organized. They work in the shadows and with stealth. They have an infrastructure built out enough to swoop into a hostile Blue city like DC or Philadelphia and get out safely before they get their asses beat.
So, where does that leave us?
It seems as though they are plotting the ability to do some sort of attack in a major city in the Eastern Corridor at the time and place of their choosing. What might trigger such an attack is anyone’s guess. But probably it would be done in the context of the country descending into mass chaos. Although, you make the case that The Patriot Front is auditioning for something akin to the SS, should we become a true autocracy which would find a modern SS quite handy.
Anyway, I’m probably going to write a lot more about this in the future. Stay tuned.
Any discussion of the rise and rise of Trump has to be done in the context of America’s receding empire. Unlike ’30s German, America isn’t aggrieved, we’re just struck with a severe bout of existential malaise. In a sense, 9/11 marked the beginning of the end of America’s empire because we were to find ourselves in Mesopotamia and Afghanistan before it was over with.
By 2016, a huge segment of the American electorate was growing tired with empire — and with the liberal-progressive social changes of Obama’s second term — and the time was ripe for an autocrat.
And everyone assumed it would be ding-dong Trump who would ascend to power, turn the United States into an autocracy and that would be that. But ultimately, Trump was just an empty suit. He did have one specific autocratic ability, despite his laziness: once you got into his personality death cult, there was no going back.
But this leads to the question, why?
The answer on an individual basis for the whole clusterfuck can be found in the personal instance of Dr. Ronny “Feel Good” Jackson. All he had to do is lie and say Trump was not over 300 lbs, and therefore obese, and he would find himself with a nice, cushy — an safe — Republican seat in Texas delegation to Congress.
Just take that amount of power that Jackson got for selling his soul and expanded upon the broader US government, and you have a recipe for a seriously fucked up situation. By the time Trump got impeached the first time, the US government was totally off the rails. It was being run like TrumpOrg, which is, not very well. Everything was ad hoc and a lot of idiots who otherwise would never have any direct link to power were meeting with POTUS on a pretty regular basis.
So, in a sense, there was a direct link between Trump’s management style and him getting impeached the first time. When it began to sink in with people who knew better that Trump was treating the US government like TrumpOrg, he got impeached. He got impeached the second time because he his failings as an autocrat were put on display when he put all his chips on Mike Pence “doing the right thing,” (at least relative to Trump.)
This was all happening in the context of a derogation of democratic norms, institutions and beliefs within the broader society. So, next time, I think Trump is going to win fair and square (-ish) and the autocracy will be established quite peacefully.
But there is always a chance that, lulz, we have a civil war.
The big miscalculation everyone made about Trump in 2016 was he was an autocrat. Everyone — on both sides — thought Trump was going to be a real, honest-to-God autocrat. In fact, I came to tell who would listen to me that Trump was going to “not lose” the 2020 election because “autocrats never lose.”
Well, surprise, both sides were wrong.
All Trump turned out to be was an empty suit. And dumb and lazy one at that. So, he was all talk. This led both the people who voted for him and the people who opposed him to make huge misjudgments about what to expect from Trump going forward.
This tendency for Trump to be a lazy idiot that came out in full force around January 6th. He knew what he wanted — to stay in power via a coup — but he was just too lazy and stupid to pull it off. So, virtually anyone else in his position could have stolen the 2020 election in broad day light and gotten away with it.
But he was too much of an addled lazy fool to put even the most barest of work necessary to do it.
Anyway, now I think we’re doing it again with Trump. Now, everyone is freaking out about how Trump is going to steal the 2024 election via Bannon’s “administrative coup.” Meanwhile, everyone on the Right is gearing up to steal the 2022 and 2024 elections in a pretty brazen manner.
Everything I see, however, indicates that this is all going to be a lulz. Autocracy is so popular in the United States at the moment that we’re an autocracy without an autocracy.
For all the hard work on both sides, in the end, Trump is likely to win fair and square. Then, of course, the huge battle will be on who will play Putin to his Yelstin. And about a dozen would be American Putins within the Republican Party know that right now and there’s a huge amount of political bloodlust within the different Republicans who want the chance to grow both amazingly powerful and wealthy like Putin.
And all I’m saying is, in the end, our transition to autocracy will likely to be peaceful and something of a dud. But as I keep writing, it ain’t happened yet. There is, I guess, a greater than zero chance of a civil war
We’re too far out, however, for me to know for sure one way or another. I definitely am leaning in favor of the United States simply slipping peacefully into autocracy.
If we actually did have a civil war, then you have WW3 on your hands and a “Great Reset” not seen since the end of WW2.
I’m a strong believer in the idea that we’ve passed the tyrannical event horizon. In other words, we’re fucked. We’re going to slip peacefully in the tyranny of autocracy no later than January 2025 — the Fourth Turning, if you will.
There is, of course, a greater-than-zero chance that the most powerful nation in human history could very well have a civil war and bomb itself into the Stone Age of its own volition.
But, for the moment, the Second American Civil War option isn’t really something I think is going to happen, but for how Trump himself is such a fucking lazy, stupid chaos agent that he might cause one by saying “the quiet part out loud” to the point that Blue States grow enraged and leave the Union.
One bit of context I don’t know yet as we lurch towards autocracy is what Mike Pence is ultimately going to do. There is a minor chance that Pence, in his craven desperation to become president, will turn on Trump and become MAGA’s John Dean.
As the 2024 presidential election cycle begins to approach, Pence might see turning on Trump has his last gasp Hail Mary option. The thinking would be, with Trump out of the way, the natural pitched battle between various would-be Republican autocrats can take place.
Because, if you think about it, Pence is the one person with the means, motive and opportunity to do some “front stabbing” as The Mooch might say. All he has to do is lay out everything he saw happen in the Trump White House up close and personal. There a tiny chance that Pence could do just by ending his long-term status as a Trump sycophant more political damage than two impeachments and a special council ever did.
Yet, this is very, very doubtful.
Pence is far more likely to sit on his hands if Trump really does run again. Then the likelihood of a 2ACW becomes far, far greater because Trump is so fucking lazy and stupid that he self-owns by pushing us into an avoidable civil war.
Autocracy is popular in the United States. Fascism is ascendant. So, I dunno. Which would you rather do, slip peacefully into an autocratic state or go through the high risk, high reward trauma of a 2ACW?
It’s very easy for Twitter liberals to get really worked up and to place on the blame America’s impending political clusterfuck solely on the shoulders of this or that person, as if we could somehow magically get rid of them then all of our problems would be solved.
This is so dumb because everyone from Trump to Bannon to DeJoy isn’t the problem, but, rather a symptom of our problems.
That someone like Trump could become president with the help of someone like Bannon is simply the practical application of severe macro problems in our politics. A prime example of what I’m talking about is what happened post-election day in 2020.
All these people who popped up to help Trump’s slow moving attempt to illegally stay in power were simply opportunists. Someone, somewhere, was going to pop up to do the very same thing. Who did it specifically did not really matter.
But let’s talk about Steve K. Bannon.
Steve K. Bannon
He likes to see himself as Lord Zod, destroyer of the administrative state. I think, in fact, he may have even compared himself to Lenin. Such suck-your-own-cock self-aggrandizement is pushing it, but not by much. Here’s what happened last time, with John Eastman trying to end our democracy.
While it’s highly like that someone like Bannon would have sprung up as we careened towards the Fourth Turning, the verdict is still out if he is A Great Man like Lenin who not just was a part of history, but MADE history. But even Lenin needed the conditions for him to strike.
This is the point in this post when I point out that I know myself well enough to know that if we really did have something as horrific as a civil war that *I* might just find myself in a historic situation. That sounds really fucking delusional — and it is. But I know myself well enough to know that either I’m going to die the first day of any civil war or I’m going to somehow weasel myself into some kind of leadership position in Blue State forces…somewhere. It may not be much, but would be a shit ton more than what I’m doing with my life right now.
But that is really fucking delusional thing for me to say at the moment.
The reason Bannon is so dangerous is he is attacking the very fiber of our liberal democracy. He’s attack it at the local level where it is its weakest because the requirements for participation are so low. These are usually filled with just average people off the street who believe in civil society and want to help out.
Bannon, meanwhile, wants to do to these otherwise pretty mundane offices what Trump has done to SCOTUS — fil it with a bunch of MAGA New Right ideologs who will come through for Trump (or DeSantis, or whomever) when the time comes in the 2024 – 2025 time frame (or the 2022 mid-terms.)
And, yet, the best laid plans of mice and human tumors often go awry. Bannon is probably going to be successful in destroying our democracy, but he also might be successful in destroying our democracy. There will come a moment at some point between now and January 2025 when Bannon’s plot will just about to succeed and, yet, it will not have totally succeeded. Here’s why we migtht have a civil war instead.
Republicans have come to glorify political violence Something you see a lot these days within the bullshit echo chamber of the MAGA New Right is the belief that because “liberals won’t leave us alone” that they are being “driven” to extremism. There’s a lot of leading not-so-vague talk as to what all this would ultimately mean. But it’s clear that for a number of “thought leaders” within the MAGA New Right that they have accepted that at some point in the future, they’re going to have to resort to violence to get what they want.
Republicans no longer believe in democracy It is now clear that like any good fascists, Republicans no longer believe in democracy unless it’s for the specific purpose of gaining and keeping power. This view of the system they’re supposed to a part of leads them do extremely distablizing things that help push the country to the brink.
Trump 2024 Just Trump being the 2024 nominee would, in itself, be enough to cause a civil war at some point in late 2024 – early 2025. He just has a special knack for “owning the libs” in such a way that if he stole in 2024 election and said the “quiet part outloud” that Blue States would grow so enraged that it would be they, not Red States, that left the Union and caused a Second Civil War. But Ron DeSantis is polling exceptionally well at the moment, so either Trump politically shivs him at some point, or he co-ops him, making him his VP, opening the door to DeSantis becoming America’s Putin at some point down the road a little bit.
Steve K Bannon. Bannon and his toadies are actively working to destroy the framework that we use to administer free and fair elections. So, it’s very easy to imagine a situation where this gambit works in ways that Trump himself is too idiotic to pull off personally and it will be so egregious that, again, Blue States leave the Union and we have a Second American Civil War.
Extreme negative polarization We’re in for a bump four or so years, no matter what, because negative polarization, on a systemic level, has reached a critical mass. When one of your political parties is fascist and would rather crash the global economy instead of even appear to work for the good of the nation — you got a problem.
A lack of shared values As the big blow up on Twitter in the last 24 hours about a Stephen Colbert song and dance gag about getting vaccinated proves — we can’t even agree on what’s funny. A combination of this and negative polarization is leading to the United States being two nations, one Red, one Blue and when we get around to attempting to elect the next president, the system simply won’t be prepared for the passions it will stir up.
A potentially historic miscalculation on the part of Republicans It’s possible that, much like European powers in the lead up to WW1, when the time comes and Republicans have a choice between peacefully transitioning us into autocracy or fucking with us all so we want to take up arms, they will choose the latter not because they have to, but because they want to. It’s possible that by the 2024 — 2025 period, Republicans will see a civil war as their only choice to consolidate power, even if it’s clear that they could get everything they ever wanted within the system they so obviously loath.
There will be one last death struggle for our democracy and either, like in 1861, we manage to crawl ourselves back from being dominated by Slave Power or, lulz, we don’t and Bannon is named reichsfuhrer.
One thing that is key to understand about Bannon. He is doing the one thing that so many so-called “Resistors” on Twitter can not or will not do — he’s doing real shit in the real world. He’s doing the hard work of effectuating his personal vision in the real world.
Let me indulge myself in some of my usual “hysterical doom shit.” Tonight, a lot of the usual Twitter liberal suspects are all excited that the January 6th Commission has subpoena a clutch of Trump associated who were involved in the January 6th Insurrection.
To me, this is no boom. It’s a lulz.
Steve Bannon, among those who are going to ignore Congress.
History has shown that all the people that Congress has subpoenaed will either ignore it or fight it in the courts. There is only one way they will show up — and even then they will invoke the 5th — and that’s if House Democrats used Congress’ “inherent contempt” powers.
The only way we would get to the “I plead the 5th point” would be if they got fined and stuck in the tiny Capitol brig for a few weeks until they broke. We’re not exactly dealing with people who give a shit about allowing the public find out the truth about their nefarious January 6th plans.
The reason why House Democrats won’t do what they should do, is they know the moment they break the modern seal on the use of inherent contempt, that’s the moment that House Republicans will use it when they inevitable begin to impeach Biden and Harris in January 2023.
Republicans are so radicalized on an institutional level, that they’re just biding their time until they have power again. Once they do — and they inevitable will get power again — that’s it. The end of the Republic. That’s hysterical doom shit, but the only reason why that might not be the case is at first things won’t seem to change much.
Because traditional “personal responsibility” Republicans don’t notice anything has changed, it could be years before they sit up and taken notice that, “Hey, this kind of sucks.”
But by that point, it will be too late — or we’ll have had a civil war, bombed ourselves into the stone age and there will be some sort of massive political “reset” where we get back to the usual non-existential ebb-and-flow of a traditional liberal democracy.
Anyway, the point is — we’re fucked. Get your affairs in the real world. Decide what’s important to you and how much you’re willing to suffer for what you believe in. Bannon isn’t going anywhere and in the end, either we peacefully slip into some form of a “Very American Autocracy” or we have a fucking civil war.
But good luck on getting anyone around Trump to talk unless you’re willing to use inherent contempt.
I listened to Steve Bannon’s recent interview with the would-be architect of Trump’s overthrow of the results of the 2020 election and found it very interesting for a number of reasons.
Steve Bannon
One reason was I got the sense Eastman was sweating things a little bit. Since he would never allow himself to be interviewed by someone who was an actual journalist, he turned to his (literal) partner in crime Steve Bannon. Eastman did what anyone with his background would do given the situation: he took a very lawyerly take on what was being said about him.
And he knew there would be absolutely no pushback to whatever bullshit he pulled out of his lawyerly butt, so he pushed the conflation of events as far as he could. He said that it was all a big misunderstanding and he felt if only the full memo he wrote was in the spotlight like the scary six point memo he wrote, then, lulz, we can all smoke a cigar, bang a hot chick and get back to making sure American peacefully transitions into a white Christian ethno state. (Those may not be his exact words, wink.)
But the fact remains that he did, in fact, plot with Bannon and others to overthrow the free and fair 2020 election. Eastman contended that there was all this proof that illegal votes were cast and, as such, what he proposed was all above board.
This, my gentle reader, is bullshit.
Eastman, for all his bona fides was “yadda yadda yadda-ing” what was really going on, which is much like how the actual six point memo itself reads.
So, while the interview was interesting, it was not exactly newsbreaking. We’re still careening towards the existential choice of autocracy or civil war in January 2025 and there still isn’t going to be any accountability for anything Bannon — or anyone else — has done in the service of Donald Fucking Trump.
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