by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Fascism is here. The United States is an autocratic managed democracy. We are Russia. Russia is us.
The only thing that may give us a momentary pause in this state is Trump himself. Every macro trend, every metric indicates not only will there not be a free and fair election in November, but if somehow Biden overcomes the odds and is actually legally sworn in, that will be the beginning of something akin to a civil war.
I say this because MAGA-Qanon no longer believes in liberal democracy. In fact, they don’t even believe in politics at all. They only believe in power and how to keep it. They somehow they can’t keep power using the thin veneer of politics, then they’ll just start murdering anyone who gets in the way.
The surreal element to all of this is given how weak the center-Left is in the United States, MAGAQ could pretty much get everything they wanted long-term and there wouldn’t, in real terms, be that much resistance to it. They go even go so far as to allow a free-and-fair election, lose and then turn around and get power again to finish the job.
But they’re greedy and inpatient.
They have become so overcome with their own overwrought rhetoric, that if they don’t get what they want as quickly as possible, they’re willing to burn the country to the ground in the hopes that they can get it anyway. The issue with this is, there are lot of conservative-but-not-MAGAQ who might, finally, distance themselves from MAGAQ if this happened. That the entire fate of 240 years of American democracy rests on this possibility doesn’t exactly make me feel great.
Every day, it definitely seems as though Trump is either going to win outright on Election Night, or soon there after. Then what already exists — America as an autocratic managed democracy — will become more and more difficult for Twitter liberals to deny.
As such, all my nightmare scenarios will come true gradually over the next four years, to such an extent that the election of 2024 — if it happens — will have an identical dynamic to any election in Putin’s Russia.
This is our future. I simply don’t see any possible way it is not.
The media will be purged one way or another. People will be snatched off the street across the country. Notable critics of House Trump will be pushed out of windows. Without a press to report any of this, how are we going to know?
Again, really, it’s Trump’s own craven stupidity that might pause our current fascist, autocratic managed democracy, but it’s not going to end it. I hate to say this, but, really, in a sense, the absolute worst case scenario — actual civil war — is, in a way, the only way we MIGHT get past any of this.
I don’t want a civil war. I’m a man of peace and ideas.
All I’m saying is, if both sides stop believing in politics, then Blue States are in a far stronger position than they might realize. MAGAQ has the advantage right now because they’re using the broken American political system to consolidate power. But if the average American has to do a gut check about what they believe in, if they’re FORCED to pay attention to current events for no other reason than tanks are rolling down their street, there’s a chance, maybe that the “good guys” might win in the end.
But, really, that’s an extremely sad state of affairs when out of desperation you look around and see a civil war as the only way to…eventually…put the country back together.
I really don’t expect that to happen. And don’t want it.
What’s going to happen is we’re going to be under the yoke of tyranny for about 40 years. Then the dead hand of demographics is going to make the MAGAQ regime’s hold on the nation a least a little bit less absolute.
It’s over. America is no more. We’re simply a vassal state of Russia and will continue to be so, probably, for the rest of my life.
