by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls
When the final history of the American Republic is written — and fear it will be a lot sooner than we would like — the end first came the night Richard Hatch won the first season of Survivor. Everyone was in shock. But it also marked the beginning of modern reality TV. Trump was the greatest beneficiary of that night, in hindsight.
Trump is the culmination of several macro trends in American political history. On one had you have the rise of Fox News. On the other you have how detached the average media person is from the practical lives of the average person in a flyover state. This is a side effect of income inequality caused by the Reagan Revolution. You also have the rise of social media. The massive flaw of social media is not only do the most extreme positions of any issue set the tone of debate, but it’s very, very easy for it be weaponized by an outside, hostile force.
Mix all this together and you find yourself where we are now. Fox News and income inequality in tandem caused a lot of Red State people to feel not only disenfranchised, but alienated from the media narrative that Blue State people were seeing. All of this accelerated in Obama’s second term as the lingering damage of the Great Recession began to sink in. Add to this just plain old racism being for political gain by — you guessed it, Donald Trump — and you end up in the situation we’re in.
In 2016, roughly half the electorate was primed for someone like Trump. This is when social media and the Russians kicked in.
So we find ourselves in a situation where many Red State voters actually are quite happy with the prospect of authoritarian rule. They can’t even grasp what the benefits of liberal democracy would be in the first place. And, so, here we are. It definitely appears as though there’s a good chance that impeachment in itself will be the final death blow to the American Republic. But I don’t say this as some sort of indictment of the process that may bring House Trump down politically.
What I mean, rather, is we’re finally seeing the fruits of a decades-long agenda on the part of Republicans. Even if Trump is politically vanquished, the Republican Party is now finally so radicalized that Pence could very well simply do exactly what Trump was going to do but with a more theocratic spin to it. And don’t get your hopes up if there’s a Pelosi presidency. Even that would be a delay to this process.
There are half a dozen would-be Trump successor on deck in the Republican Party ranks, from Kris Kobach to Tom Cotton to The Kooch. It’s a bit surreal to someone in LA or NYC the lengths that Republicans will to defend someone as demonstrably bonkers and corrupt as Trump. But that says more about the rot at the heart of our political system than anything else.
So, buckle up. My prediction is very soon we’ll have some sort of theocratic fascist “manage democracy”in the United States that will last at least 20 years. At some point at the moment when the youngest of the Baby Boomers begin to croke and the browning of America kicks in, there may be some sort of shift in politics. But for the foreseeable future, Trump’s American Carnage is definitely on track to become a hold hard reality.
I could imagine a few scenarios where this doesn’t happen quite the way I imagine. If Republicans really, really, REALLY overplayed their hand during the impeachment process and there was mass violence by people opposed to impeachment, then I think we might get enough of a delay in the march towards fascism for the browning of America to kick in. But that’s such a remote possibility that I just don’t see that being applicable. Even then, there’s a chance that Republicans would use the very violence THEY INCITED to do the very things I propose they want to do in the first place. So, in a sense, we’re in a no-win situation.
No one is going to save us. We’re on our own.
