by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls
When the only thing standing between your nation and tyranny is the gates of insanity, you got a problem. The reason why I just don’t see any practical way out of this situation is the systemic issues that caused Trump’s rise in the first place aren’t going anywhere. And the ideological rot at the core of the Republican Party is so extensive that the two sides are now playing entirely two different games.
Democrats think they’re playing chess. Republicans just plopped an AR-15 on the table. So, in a sense, there are literally only two things preventing Trump from finally doing away with any pretense of caring about the Constitution –he’s rapidly cracking under the strain of looming impeachment and I just don’t see the U.S. Military following any order on his part to arrest the Democratic members of Congress. That may still happen, but not in a way that I can easily predict.
In a sense, in the short term, we have only one scenario whereby we’re given a limited repreve from a Putin style “managed democracy” — a President Pelosi. But that would be a very short term solution to an existential problem. The Republican Party no longer believes in anything other than power for power’s sake. You notice this the most at the edges. I mean, come on Brit Hume, what’s going on? Hume is actively working on messaging for MAGA under the cloak of some sort of pretend objectivity.
Really, the true tragedy is we’re careening towards a situation where only a massive, horrific event that can be directly pinned on Trump in a clear, unambiguous manner would give us any sort of national absolution. I definitely don’t want that, so we’re much more likely to have either a Trump “win” or such a muddled resolution to this crisis that Trump’s legacy wins, if not Trump himself.
When half a dozen people around the president are all acting like G. Gordon Liddy, then, well, obviously the Democrats have to respond accordingly. I have repeatedly suggested a political radicalization of the so-called “resistance.” Only some sort of Radical Resistance might, just might, confront MAGA on its own terms.
But Democrats now represent such a broad spectrum of people, the necessary political radicalization is unlikely to happen in time. And, sadly, if it does, it will happen in the darkness. The Resistance will be less an effete liberal talking point and more a literal French Resistance type of thing. That the military is likely to sit this one out, no matter what goes both ways. Should Trump not be convicted in the Senate, then, well, he simply conspires to throw the election again — on any number of levels — and flips the switch on weaponizing the ICE camp infrastructure.
I would like to note something — The Atlantic has proposed that MAGA’s strategy is to make impeachment carry such enormous costs that it doesn’t happen in some way. Well, I find such a position unnecessarily defeatist. It’s similar to the slogan, “Wayward sisters, part in peace,” the days between Lincoln’s election and the firing on Fort Sumter. It’s inherently cowardly. Either someone, somewhere is politically brave enough to stand up to Trump and the fascist MAGA hordes, to take a risk for once by showing some courage, or we are no better than the Weimar Republic.
Maybe it’s too late. Maybe the center-Left simply doesn’t have it in it to save the Republic. But, as I keep saying, Trump’s a galactic brain self-own artist, so he’s likely to do something — yet again — that is not exactly in his “political genius” best interest.
Only time will tell. Only time will tell.
